Category Archive 'Soccer'
28 Nov 2022

The Most Boring Game

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Ann Coulter, a few years back, told the world what she really thought of soccer.

I’ve held off on writing about soccer for a decade — or about the length of the average soccer game — so as not to offend anyone. But enough is enough. Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.

• Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls — all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they’re standing alone at the plate. But there’s also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks.

In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child’s fragile self-esteem is bruised. There’s a reason perpetually alarmed women are called “soccer moms,” not “football moms.”

Do they even have MVPs in soccer? Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in. That’s when we’re supposed to go wild. I’m already asleep.

• Liberal moms like soccer because it’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is co-ed, even at the kindergarten level.

• No other “sport” ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer. This was an actual marquee sign by the freeway in Long Beach, California, about a World Cup game last week: “2nd period, 11 minutes left, score: 0:0.” Two hours later, another World Cup game was on the same screen: “1st period, 8 minutes left, score: 0:0.” If Michael Jackson had treated his chronic insomnia with a tape of Argentina vs. Brazil instead of Propofol, he’d still be alive, although bored. …

• You can’t use your hands in soccer. (Thus eliminating the danger of having to catch a fly ball.) What sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs. Our hands can hold things. Here’s a great idea: Let’s create a game where you’re not allowed to use them!

• I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is “catching on” is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating.

I note that we don’t have to be endlessly told how exciting football is.

• It’s foreign. In fact, that’s the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not “catching on” at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it.

• Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren’t committing mass murder by guillotine.

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Christian Schneider adds further arguments against it.

Myriad reasons are given for America’s lack of interest in the most popular game in the world. The lack of scoring makes for a boring game. The U.S. men’s team isn’t very good at it, and Americans only want to watch sports in which we dominate. FIFA, the international soccer governing body, is a snake pit of corruption. (It is.) …

[M]ore than anything, soccer offends Americans’ sense of fairness. Soccer is unjust.

In few other sports can a team completely dominate a game for 88 percent of the game and still go home a loser. Because of the paucity of scoring, a team that outplays its opposition (like the U.S., which possessed the ball for nearly 60 percent of the game against Wales) is always in danger of having nothing to show for it.

And this injustice is further intensified when a game hinges on an overly punitive penalty call based on where a player is standing on the field. Had Bale been standing ten yards closer to midfield, the only penalty the U.S. would have had to pay is to have a Welsh player kick the ball back into live play. But because Bale was too close to the goal, he was granted an automatic score equalizer. (About 78 percent of penalty kicks are made — for a superstar like Bale, it is almost automatic.)

In American sports terms, this would be like granting 10 points to a team if one of its wide receivers is held by the defense within 20 yards of the end zone. Or giving a basketball team the chance to shoot a 10-point free throw if a player is fouled in the lane.

This injustice is further intensified by the role that diving plays in soccer. In American sports, one’s toughness is determined by how big of a hit a player can take and remain on his or her feet. In soccer, a team’s most valuable player may be one who can react to being tapped on the ankle by dropping to the ground as if he had been hit by a sniper on the stadium roof. …

Soccer fans acquit the sport of the charge of being boring, noting that the lack of scoring doesn’t mean there is a lack of excitement. The fact that goals are so hard to come by makes each shot, counterattack, and corner kick even more important. For hard-core fans, soccer is the jazz of athletics — like the notes that aren’t played, it’s the goals that aren’t scored that provide the true drama.

But the lack of scoring does drive the inequity of outcomes. In soccer, one foul in the penalty box equates to 80 minutes of dominance on the pitch. In American sports, teams almost always have the chance to make up for a bad call — when football teams score 30 points and basketball teams score over 100, the team that dominates always wins. Prolonged excellence leads to large leads, which leads to victories.

Not so in soccer, where a 2-0 win is basically a blowout.

This does not conform to the American value of equal opportunity. We even make our schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the flag because it stands for “justice for all.”

In America, we promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will come out ahead. Losing a soccer game because a guy fell to the ground is like having to close the business you spent your life building because a guy pretended to slip and fall on an ice patch outside your hardware store. Both perpetrators are deserving of equal enmity.

26 Nov 2022

The Simpsons Take On Soccer

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30 Nov 2021

Good Story (Almost Certainly Untrue)

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Via Vanderleun:

He’d hunted big game for years all over the United States. Hunting was a way of life to him. But, in all those years, he’d never shot a buffalo. He’d put his name in for the lottery that gave out yearly licenses to shoot buffalo, but year after year the winning number had eluded him. As he failed, again and again, his need to add a buffalo, an American bison, to his life bag grew to obsessive proportions. Finally, he could stand it no longer. He determined that he would buy a couple of young buffalo, raise them, and then shoot them. It seemed like a plan.

When the buffalo purchase was completed the question arose about where these buffalo were to be raised. He wasn’t a rich man and the cost to two baby buffalo maxed out his credit cards. The only viable option was to raise them on his front lawn in Moab, Utah. Accordingly, the buffalo were delivered and put out to pasture, or “out to lawn” as the case may be.

Besides grass the lawn also contained, courtesy of his kids, a couple of soccer balls. Shortly after the buffalo became his lawn ornaments, he was out walking among them when one of them discovered a soccer ball and butted it over to him with its nose. Without thinking he kicked it back towards the other buffalo, who passed it to the first buffalo who butted it back to him. An hour or so of passing and kicking the soccer ball between man and buffalo ensued.

When he went out on his lawn the next morning, they were waiting for him. One seemed to be playing midlawn while the other hung back by the water trough which had become some sort of goal. The forward buffalo butted the ball towards him. Without thinking he returned the kick over the head of the forward. No good. With a speed belying its bulk, the defensive buffalo moved quickly and butted it through his legs to the porch. When it bounced off the barbecue, they seemed to do a brief victory prance. The game was afoot.

Day after day, week after week, the strange lawn ritual with the soccer ball went on and on. In truth, he had long since pulled far ahead of the buffalo in goals, but what do buffalo know about keeping score?

In time, however, the hunting season came around. He looked out of his house on the first morning and saw the buffalo waiting for him, the soccer ball in front of the forward, the defensive buffalo pacing slowly back and forth by the water trough. It came to him then that he could never shoot them. It would spoil the season — and the soccer season, in the deserts of Utah, is never really over.

On a hot afternoon soon after, he looked out his window and discovered, much to his delight and his neighbors’ shock, that the two buffalo on his lawn were indeed male and female.

Now it is two years later and he has four buffalo on his lawn. He doesn’t hunt anything anymore. Says he’s lost the taste for it. His old hunting buddies come by every so often and razz him about the buffalo.

“You started with two and couldn’t shoot them,” one said. “Now you got four, and next year you’re gonna have five. What are you going to do then?”

He went to his garage and came back with a basketball.

I hate to quarrel with a great story, but…

1) No serious hunter would consider shooting domestically-raised game animals as a satisfactory form of sport.

2) Buffalo are really really strong, and really really disposed to wander. You couldn’t possible keep two buffalo on your lawn without fencing on a scale adequate to stop a tank.

I don’t have a problem with picturing buffalo playing with a soccer ball. I’ve seen horses playing with balls.

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UPDATE: Gerard van der Leun writes to tell me that he took the above photo himself and got the story from the horse’s mouth. I’ll be….

25 Apr 2019

Three Japanese Professional Soccer Players Take on One Hundred Children

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18 Jun 2018

World Cup

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08 Jan 2018

Better Than the NFL

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Elizabeth Lambert of the University of New Mexico Lobos (despite being suspended) has won a lot of fans nationally with her hard-hitting style of soccer, seen here against the Brigham Young Cougars.

09 Jun 2017

Saudis Quickly Apologized For Soccer Team’s Behavior

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The Australia team link arms on the halfway line as the minute’s silence begins. The Saudi team stood at their respective positions on the field, not participating in honoring the victims.

The Telegraph explains what happened.

The Saudi Arabian football team were booed by Australian supporters after they failed to properly line up for a minute’s silence in honour of the victims of the London Bridge terror attacks.

Saudi Arabia were preparing to play Australia in a World Cup qualifier at the Adelaide Oval when the stadium announcer called for a minute’s silence to begin.

The Australia team linked arms in a line on the centre circle while the Saudi Arabia team stood in random formation as the silence began.

According to Adam Peacock, who works as a presenter for Fox Sports in Australia, the Asian Football Confederation approved the minute’s silence against the wishes of Saudi Arabia.

The Football Federation of Australia were then unable to persuade Saudi Arabian officials to agree to participate in the tribute.

A number of Saudi Arabian players stood still with their arms behind their back while others appeared to continue their warm up.

RTWT

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The Wall Street Journal reports that an official apology was quickly forthcoming.

Saudi Arabia’s Football Federation apologized on behalf of the country’s national soccer team for failing to observe a minute’s silence for victims of a recent London terrorist attack ahead of a World Cup qualifying match against Australia.

The incident prompted a furious response in Australia, with the crowd jeering the Saudi team, which instead of lining up moved into positions for the coming match on Thursday as Australia’s players linked arms to pay silent respects to victims. While many of the Saudi players stood still, others including the team captain, Osama Hawsawi, continued warm-ups and stretches.

Eight people died in Saturday’s attack in London, among them two Australians.

The Saudi Federation said Friday it condemned “all acts of terrorism,” adding that it “deeply regrets and unreservedly apologies for any offense caused by the failure of some members of the representative team of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to formally observe the one minute’s silence in memory of the victims of the London terrorist attack.”

“The players did not intend any disrespect to the memories of the victims or to cause upset to their families, friends or any individual affected by the atrocity.”

RTWT

02 Jan 2016

English Soccer Chants

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Racist, insulting, off-key, obscene, but also often witty and self-deprecating, the English lower orders at their best.

10 Jul 2014

Mocking Soccer Dramatics

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Hat tip to Anne Tiffin Taylor.

08 Jul 2014

America’s Favorite Pastime: Hating Soccer

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AntiSoccer3

Ann Coulter celebrates the World Cup with a red-blooded, all-American anti-soccer rant.

Liberal moms like soccer because it’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is co-ed, even at the kindergarten level. …

I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is “catching on” is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating.

I note that we don’t have to be endlessly told how exciting football is. …

It’s foreign. In fact, that’s the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not “catching on” at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it. …

Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European.

Read the whole thing.

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For some absolutely unaccountable reason, Coulter’s column resulted in much controversy and provoked a great deal of criticism (all from lefties writing in places like HuffPo and Talking Points Memo.

Coulter responded to her critics here.

Further proof that soccer is a game for girls: Since my column came out, a guy from the Paraguay team (Uruguay? Who cares?) was caught biting an opponent in a match. Not punching. Not a cross-body block. BITING! How long can it be until we see hair-pulling in soccer?

28 Jun 2014

Borges Hated Soccer

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Borges
Jorge Luis Borges

Shaj Matthew, in the New Republic, explains why one of the last century’s greatest writers justly despised his own country’s national obsession.

Soccer is popular,” Jorge Luis Borges observed, “because stupidity is popular.”

At first glance, the Argentine writer’s animus toward “the beautiful game” seems to reflect the attitude of today’s typical soccer hater, whose lazy gibes have almost become a refrain by now: Soccer is boring. There are too many tie scores. I can’t stand the fake injuries.

And it’s true: Borges did call soccer “aesthetically ugly.” He did say, “Soccer is one of England’s biggest crimes.” And apparently, he even scheduled one of his lectures so that it would intentionally conflict with Argentina’s first game of the 1978 World Cup. But Borges’ distaste for the sport stemmed from something far more troubling than aesthetics. His problem was with soccer fan culture, which he linked to the kind of blind popular support that propped up the leaders of the twentieth century’s most horrifying political movements. In his lifetime, he saw elements of fascism, Peronism, and even anti-Semitism emerge in the Argentinean political sphere, so his intense suspicion of popular political movements and mass culture—the apogee of which, in Argentina, is soccer—makes a lot of sense. (“There is an idea of supremacy, of power, [in soccer] that seems horrible to me,” he once wrote.) Borges opposed dogmatism in any shape or form, so he was naturally suspicious of his countrymen’s unqualified devotion to any doctrine or religion—even to their dear albiceleste.

Soccer is inextricably tied to nationalism, another one of Borges’ objections to the sport. “Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity,” he said. National teams generate nationalistic fervor, creating the possibility for an unscrupulous government to use a star player as a mouthpiece to legitimize itself. In fact, that’s precisely what happened with one of the greatest players ever: Pelé. “Even as his government rounded up political dissidents, it also produced a giant poster of Pelé straining to head the ball through the goal, accompanied by the slogan Ninguém mais segura este país: Nobody can stop this country now,” writes Dave Zirin in his new book, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil. Governments, such as the Brazilian military dictatorship that Pelé played under, can take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support, and this is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the Dish.

Borges, of course, was perfectly right.

Soccer is just the most popular commercial team game in the world outside the United States. All commercial team games are modern developments organized originally by carnival impresarios to separate the urban proletarian from his beer nickel. These teams and the games they play are totally and completely meaningless spectacles performed purely for commercial purposes. The teams’ regional identifications and mascots are utterly meaningless. Players come from anywhere. Teams may be sold and relocated, coaches and recognizable styles of play & performance may be routinely altered on the basis of owners’ whims at the any moment.

Commercial game teams stand for absolutely nothing, and fan identification and loyalty is, as Borges recognized, a kind of willful stupidity constituting an intentional surrender of self to a totally ersatz sort of group identity.

19 Jun 2014

This Must Be Why Some Other Countries Like Soccer

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MarlenDoll
Marlen Doll

Scallywagandvagabond.com:

It seems South Americans take their soccer very very seriously after all. Case in point, Chilean porn star, Marlen Doll who made good on her tweeter pledge of having sex if the Chilean team score at least three goals and win the match.

The text below promised that the Chilean porn star would have random sex for at least 8 hours from her twitter feed (since suspended).

Porque yo soy la cabala de Chile encomiendense a santa Marlen doll #laroja#Vamoschile por las 8 hr sexo!! pic.twitter.com/5941JxSc9V

— Marlen Doll (@marienchilena) June 13, 2014

According to TheEliteDaily, the translation of the above tweet goes something like this:

“I promise if Chile wins, I will have sex for eight hours with different men from twitter”

That tweet was noticed by several people following her on Twitter and was retweeted many times. Marlen went on to reiterate that she would stand by her promise, come what may.

Inquisitr tells not only did Chile triumph over Australia, they did it with a score of 3-1! The conditions laid out by Marlen Doll were met and people began asking if she had any plans to fulfill the promise she had made a few days ago. Being a woman of her word, Marlen Doll actually called in people to come in and “celebrate” Chile’s victory with her in a night-long party. Pictures of the party would go on to be posted on to Marlen’s Twitter account before the account interestingly became suspended.

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Apparently, Marlen not only fulfilled her 8 hours of sex promise, she went on celebrating for twelve hours.

And she promises that if Chile succeeds in defeating Spain, she is going to go for sixteen hours.

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