Monday, July 10, 2006

Pourquoi? I broke down and decided to watch the World Cup championship game yesterday. I never felt more American than when I found myself bored to tears. Now I have respect for soccer players -- it's a grueling sport that takes a lifetime of practice and talent to excel -- but it ranks just above golf in terms of excitement as a spectator sport.

From what I observed yesterday and from snippets I've seen in other games, nothing really happens outside of penalty kicks and corner kicks. And the ridiculous rules only encourage this. If you brush up against a player in the "box", that results in a penalty kick, which is essentially a free goal. That's no biggie, except that a 1-0 match is a high-scoring game.

Nothing else is allowed to happen during regular play. If at any point a player gets the ball with a clear shot on the goal, he'll be called offsides. This has got to be the dumbest rule in sports. To prevent a player from scoring, all the defense has to do is stop running and let the player continue offsides.

And while I would never say this to any soccer player face-to-face, the constant diving, whining, and crying in attempts to draw fouls gets tiresome. I'll hand it to the players, though. They are better actors than those in the NBA. But they looked like a bunch of princesses out there. Be a man, for God's sake.

Hell, the coolest part of the game was when that French guy head-butted that Italian guy. Looks like instant replay is alive and well in soccer, despite what the official rules say. Oh well, at least the Italians won the game, although we could have saved two hours and just decided the game through penalty kicks.

But now what's really sad is I realize that we're in the summer doldrums when the only sport on TV is baseball, our national pastime, which I can't bother paying attention to until it gets close to the playoffs. The games just aren't meaningful this early in the season.

We have to wait a few months until we'll be able to watch real football again. There, head-butting is not only legal, it's necessary.