The World's Game

I just got back from Los Angeles, where the women are beautiful and the weather is perfect (some guy in the hotel elevator actually responded to my “what’s up?” with “nothing…just trying to deal with this heat” on a day that had a high in the 80s and no humidity). I stayed at the Embassy Suites in Downey, and they offer free drinks from 5:30-7:30 – some of you may recall my appreciation of open bars. So upon drinking my fill of Jack-and-Cokes and watching 2 hours of ESPNews, I started to realize how much of the sports world about which I’ve neglected to comment and started taking mental notes, which soon turned into written notes. I’m now going through my 18 pages of “Embassy Suites” notepads of scribblings and figured deciphering them and transforming them into a blog would make a good Sunday afternoon task.

The World Cup

Sorry this article turned into such a marathon, but I’ve a lot to say. To start, a co-worker forwarded me an article from the Quad City Times titled “We’ll Never be Good at Soccer.” The article and my responded comment can be found at:

http://www.qctimes.net/articles/2006/06/27/sports/doc44a0c8d6538a9517348897.txt

Most of this article is ridiculous (which is why I posted a comment) but the end is actually kind of fun to think about…if America’s best athletes played soccer. I especially like the thought of Kevin Garnett at Goal Keeper.

The truth is, (men’s) soccer in this country has a long way to go before we can be serious contenders for The Cup. But that’s a far cry from saying we will “never be good.” Our showing in 2002 was quite good. Since then, we climbed to 5^th in the FIFA rankings. And although very little good can be drawn from this Cup, we did tie the champs…and please don’t say “yeah, but it was an ‘own goal’ by Italy” unless you watched it. Had the Italian not hit it, McBride would have scored. More importantly in that game than the own goal is that we that played the entire second half with 9 players to Italy’s 10.

As for The Cup in general, I think there are some major issues that need to be evaluated.

The flopping was absurd. At some points I half expected some smoke and pyrotechnics and some pro-wrestlers to run onto the field and flop around with the rest of them. I once had a discussion trying to answer the question: Which athletes would you least like to fight (wrestlers, boxers, hockey players, football players, etc.)? Well after watching this Cup, it’s pretty obvious which athletes I would most like to fight: you don’t even have to touch an international soccer player and he’ll end up rolling on the ground screaming. I say “international” because I never once saw a US player flop. Now I don’t really blame the players for this, but rather the referees. A flop should never be rewarded. A ref should only call a foul if he actually SAW a player foul another. That doesn’t happen in a flop, so I don’t understand how fouls were consistently called when untouched players go down screaming. It also seemed like the refs also would never call a foul if the player fouled didn’t go down. If he kept his feet, then they would let play resume, which only encourages players to go-a-flailing at the first hint of contact. The worst is when a player goes down screaming AND makes sure to grab the ball on the way down so the ref is forced to call a foul or a handball, which almost always results in a foul. I feel a flop should be an automatic yellow card. A flop in “the box” should be an automatic red card.

This Cup has been well publicized for its excessive cards. I’m not Mr. Soccer, so I’m always kind of learning as I watch. But after watching a ton of the games, I still don’t really have a good answer for: What determines if a hard foul should get a yellow card, red card or, the more unpopular option in this Cup, no card? It’s obviously discretionary, but to my amateur eye, it could be a lot more consistent with at least a somewhat clear criteria. During some matches I watched (USA-Italy specifically), it truly felt like the ref had some kind of bipolarity with the fouls he gave cards to, and the much more excessive fouls he didn’t. In my opinion, a yellow card should be reserved for the absolute worst/most dangerous fouls that happen in the play of the game and red cards should be reserved for Zidane-esque incidents.

I absolutely hate watching penalty kicks. I say that because in my very limited playing of soccer, I was put at goal keeper (can’t we just say goalie?) 90% of the time. The penalty kicks are just completely unfair to the goalie. He has no chance, except to be lucky and guess right. I especially hate when a player gets fouled in the box with no real chance to score, and is then essentially awarded a free goal through the penalty kick (i.e. USA-Ghana). I think after a foul occurs in the box, the ball should be placed at the point of the foul…just like it is after a penalty anywhere else. The only difference would be that no players may be between the shooter and the goalie. I also think they should do away with the penalty kicks deciding a match in the elimination round. If it gets to 90 minutes and the game is tied, then they should just keep playing until someone scores. I felt that in the Championship, Italy wasn’t even trying for a goal, but was instead just trying to stall until the pk’s. The game should never be set up to encourage teams to stall. I also felt that if they had played the game out until one team scored, France would have won, even without Zidane.

Ok, so about Zidane. I’m still stunned when I think about that head butt. It’s not the fact that it was about the cheapest of cheap shots – which could have had a much more serious result. Or the fact that the game was on the line (most likely the biggest game of his life). Or that a reaction like that to any spoken word is simply bizarre and never justified. It’s the fact that the audience of the game is over 1 Billion people (more than 10 times the audience of Super Bowl XL). If there was ever a time to keep your cool, that would be it! As for those who argue or even suggest that his response was justified based on any family insult or “ethnic slur” that Materazzi said, I eloquently respond with: ETHNIC SLUR MY ASS! I seriously challenge anyone to come up with an insult or “ethnic slur” which would cause ME to do something that outrageous in front of a billion people during the biggest night of my life. I actually feel grateful Zidane was exposed in front of the entire world for exactly what he is: a douchebag.

That’s pretty much it for The World Cup. I actually wrote notes about almost every sport, but this took more time than and turned into a larger article than I intended, so I’ll just leave it at that for now.