World Cup Fever

I get. I really finally get it.

Soccer that is. And for the rest of this blog I will refer to it by its more proper name of football (I would spell it futball but that's too overly pretentious even for me), because it is a lot more "foot" than our stupid American sport. When you think about it, American football should be called something like "passball" or "catchball" or "big-stupid-Neanderthal-fatass-ball."

My friend Joe wrote a good little piece about trying to watch the World Cup but just being bored by it. I can appreciate that notion about football, but I really disagree.

Back during the football Cup in 1998 my buddy Jose tried to get me to get into it. I admit I tried to watch the championship game between France and whoever, but ended up falling asleep in the middle of the match. Granted, this may have had something to do with the fact I was lying on my couch drinking beer and smoking "stuff" while trying to follow what the hell was going on.

So I didn't get it then. But a few years later, after I moved from Seattle to Chicago, my friend Amy took me to a football game at Soldier Field (before they re-did it to look like a toilet bowl) for the local team called the Fire. It was seeing it live that made me finally get into football. I don't know if it was the almost all-immigrant crowd singing that ole' ole' ole'-o song or what, but I just loved it. There is something both relaxing and exciting about football. There is a poetic flow to the whole thing that is just mesmerizing. I'm definitely a convert.

As for the whole "boring" charge, I just don't understand that. People in America say it's because of the low scoring and the ties (and I'll admit I still think of the Simpson's going to the game when I watch. Where Homer yells "boring" and Ken Brockman calling the game in the bored way as he says "holds it, holds it, holds it.."), but that's a crock.

First of all, the high scoring American sports are artificially that way. Regular football would be almost as high scoring as American football if they gave seven points for each goal too. And what the hell is with the field goal? That's exciting, watching a failed football (soccer) player kick a weird shaped ball through a couple of upright sticks? And what a pussy thing for a "manly" sport. "Awww, poor baby couldn't score the real way. Here, why don't you kick this though these poles and we'll give you...oh I don't know...three points. Just for getting kind of close."

Fuck that man. During the World Cup, if you don't score a goal...well then you don't fucking score. Nobody is there to make it easier for you.

And speaking of easier, how the hell does all the scoring in basketball make it more exciting? Doesn't seem to me that anybody has to work at it. Run down the court, dunk. Run to the other end, dunk. Repeat. About a hundred times. Yea, real fuckin' exciting.

You know why the scores are so low in football? Because it's fucking hard man! And I don't mean artificially hard like that stupid sport hockey. If you make the net that small and give the goalkeeper so much padding that he can cover the whole opening, then of course it's hard to get it through. Have you seen how big the net is in football? It's goddamn huge, and it still takes a lot of work to get it in.

Boring? I don't think so. Anybody who says it's boring didn't watch that amazing match between Germany and Poland the other day. A constant back and forth match with no goals scored after ninety minutes. In the last ten minutes the Polish goalkeeper repelled attack after attack in mind-blowing deflections and it appeared to be heading toward a tie. But then suddenly Germany got one through in extra time. It was a breathtaking 90 minutes.

And that's another thing, the clock seems to actually mean something in football. In American football a sixty minute game clock takes 3+ hours to click away. A ninety minute football game in the Cup takes less than two hours including halftime and adding on extra time for substitutions and injuries (but not because it's tied). The clock stops for nothing. I love that. And the constant action makes it a hell of a lot more exciting than American football's 30 seconds of playing followed by four minutes of players standing around with hand motions by refs and moving chains and bringing in the punting team and then calling a timeout and then reviewing a play on the TV, and then finally a commercial break.

No commercials during the matches may very well be the best thing about it.

And I know ties are one of the complaints as well. But I saw an over-matched Trinidad and Tobago team, in their first World Cup as well as the smallest country to ever make the tournament, play Sweden to a tie and you would have sworn they just won the whole thing, they were so ecstatic.

The excitement comes in the game itself, not just what the scoreboard says after it's over. I mean, if it's not fun to watch while it's happening, why would the final score matter anyway? An exciting tie game is a lot more fun to watch than a boring blowout with a winner at the end.

But I suppose that's not very American.

I've watched about half the matches so far this World Cup and I'm just loving it. I also see nothing but pure sportsmanship during the matches. Players get knocked down and the opposing guy helps him up with a smile and a pat on the head. Haven't seen a single fight yet. There has certainly been no equivalent of plunking a player in retaliation like there is in baseball. The crazy fans/hooligans may go at each other, but players during this tournament, from what I've seen, compete with class.

I still don't understand every little rule and nuance about the sport, but nothing beats the drama of the World Cup.

I should have listened to Jose years ago.

It is pure poetry in motion. I finally get it.