I'm with you Nic. Just shut UP already.
Things I’ve heard this week at work:
“Soccer will never be popular in this country. Who wants to watch 0-0 ties?”
“They just fall down and the referees blow the whistle. It’s like watching Duke but it happens every ten seconds.”
“So how is it possible that ref doesn’t have to tell anyone who that foul was on? The refs in the NFL call penalties on specific numbers.”
“I thought England and France were supposed to be GOOD.”
“ESPN needs to get back to the sports that matter. Baseball and college sports.”
“At least with the Olympics there are different things to watch. This is just endless ties.”
There’s a certain feeling I get around this time of year when the World Cup is going on. I call it World Cup annoyance. It’s almost as if I’d rather it not be happening on such a grand scale. It gets really hard to have to defend every little footy idiosyncrasy to those who don’t follow the sport religiously like we do here.
Look, don’t get me wrong, I’m always thrilled when this tournament comes around. I just wish that I was immune to caring about it so much as to have to constantly defend it from the naysayers who also come out of the woodwork as soon as a ball is kicked in competition.
Is this happening to anyone else? Or do I take it way too seriously?
It’s happening to me every single day now. Look, I get that you don’t like it. Maybe I’ll even accept that it’s an acquired taste. But you don’t have to crap all over it if you don’t like it. Change the channel and move on.
To be fair, at least a couple people are doing it just to annoy me and actually do watch a fair amount of soccer.
Some of the arguments hold water, some don’t. I completely agree that there should be more transparency and openness when it comes to referee decisions in soccer. American sports do a better job of that. And players do definitely play-act when it comes to fouls.
I think there is one major change that can eliminate a number of mistakes (and casual viewer frustration) and that is to add more assistant referees. Action in sports like basketball or American football are focused on a small court or a smaller portion of the field than soccer. It is tough for the referee and his assistants to see everything going on. If we can add more help, there is a better chance of seeing missed calls as well as getting the correct call (as opposed to just seeing the aftermath – a la Kaka).
As far as low score lines go, I can understand the casual viewer’s frustration. But that is something that can be cured by increased viewing and understanding of the sport as a whole. Just as there can be beauty in a great defensive battle on the American football field, so too there can be beauty on the soccer field. Sometimes you just need to understand the characters and the implications of the contest better to see through the scoreboard emptiness of the 0-0 draw.
Gettin it constantly. I was at my niece’s birthday party on Saturday and attempted to put on the game (Denmark-Cameroon) and was barraged with questions exactly like that. I try explaining that 3 billion people watched the last World Cup Final, but that just least to some of the most annoying jingoistic dribble you could posibly imagine.
Surprisingly, no. Everyone I know is mad about football. My wife, who is admittedly a die hard American football fan, fell for the Ivory Coast side (she likes Drogba and loathes Cristiano Ronaldo).
The big thing to turn people off are incidents like the play acting from the last Ivory Coast game (elbow to the face, my ass) and the French drama. Ronaldo didn’t help the cause with a dive or two in the first Portuguese game.
I am actually in the same boat as candle. Nearly all my co-workers are stopping by to catch part of the ESPN stream on my computer and ask me questions. I have left the TV on a couple times after the early morning (Pacific Time) game and my wife too is now into the games as well.
The only people I have heard whine about things are some of the local hosts on ESPN radio. And mostly they’re pissed about the Marlins allowing vuvuzelas into the baseball games.
It’s entirely possible that Philadelphia and the surrounding areas are a bunch of ignorant assholes. We can’t rule it out, anyway.
Rick Reilly was my source of annoyance the other day with that stupid article of his.
It hasn’t happened to me in person yet, but I’ve been in Spain. I’m sure it will next week when I get back.
I’m totally with you. I had to spend more than half of the USA-England match doing Footy 101 w/ a friend who doesn’t know anything about the game instead of watching the game. Pissed me off.
Rebuttals to common straw man soccer-hate comments:
In the average American football game, a 21-17 score is really just 3-2.5, and most baseball games have scores like 2-1. There’s only 12 minutes of real action in a 3.5 hour long NFL game. Baseball is minutes of standing around and most guys on the field don’t do anything on 90% of the plays. NBA sucks except for the Finals (even NBA die-hards will grant you this). College sports – so pure and amateur, oh, but pay no attention to the money-whoring AD’s and presidents in the conference realignment drama. Really, soccer drama bugs you? What about Brett Favre; TO; A-Rod; steroids; Pacman Jones; NFL holdouts; flopping NBA divas; disloyal, used-car salesman college coaches making millions while they break all the rules and skip town to leave the schools to deal with the costs; or the countless college football players arrested for drugs, hookers, stealing, weapons, or fighting? Off-field drama is as much why we love any sport as the on-field action. I’m sick of these lame arguments.
The underlying issue, as demonstrated by Tony Kornheiser’s “it’s not OUR game” comment yesterday, is patent xenophobia and a prejudiced refusal to try to understand or appreciate something new or different. Dumba$$es.
You know what’s great about this comment? You are just like me mate. We understand the other sports without issue. We get what’s great about them and what fails.
Yes, at times, footy refereeing is horrendous. Happens in all the so-called American sports.
Yes, at times, there’s a match with a lot of flopping. As mentioned, college basketball is loaded with it.
Yes, at times, there are nil-nil’s. Well, I don’t know that there’s a true equivalent there, but quite frankly, if you can sit through a full Red Sox-Yankees marathon from start to finish sometime, you’ve earned your keep in being able to bitch about a 90 minute nil-nil. But you’ll have a lot more time on your hands to do so.
All I ask for is that if you don’t like it, you find a way to respect those who do. That’s what’s missing. Simple respect.
DAMNIT
I’ve been in non stop class the last ten days and was planning on writing something like this when I finished tomorrow. Still might do that, because goddamn yes this has happened to me.
Sorry, man, it happened again to me this morning and I didn’t fire off an email to the group. Have at it though.
I’ve felt this way since the first day of the tournament. I bristle at people who seem to think Lou Holtz’s opinion on ties (“like kissing your sister”) is the last word on the subject. I cringe when people say things like “when does the NFL start?” I rage silently at people who claim the game is “boring,” knowing full well myself that “boredom” is generally a function of not knowing enough about a sport. It’s dumb that they say those things but I know it’s perhaps even dumber that I feel insulted/angry/defiant about it. Their loss, you know?
As someone who totally gets a bunch of the arguments that a lot of folk have, it’s the haters, ones who it didn’t matter what was going on in the game because it is a “foreign game” that piss me off. Even if soccer was 4-3 games, more like hockey and baseball, these people would bitch about ties.
For teh non-haters, I have to agree that the flopping is terrible, and that the non-accountability for refs is silly. Replay would help, and removing of yellow and red cards that shouldn’t have been given should be addressed. I think that FIFA doesn’t address some of these issues because they are seen as “American” ideas/solutions. Their tradition is that it is a certain way, and it’s American sports leagues that are leading the way, or have lead the way to solutions in some of these areas. As backward as we think they are, I don’t think anybody else does anything like the NFL with replay, the NBA with tv review of 3 point shots, and tennis with it’s Hawkeye or whatever it’s called (developed for the US Open…finally being used at Wimbledon the last couple years). The rest of the world seems pretty accepting of how FIFA runs these complaints, while Americans bitch and bitch about it.
We don’t have the history with the game, so we see the improvements that could and should be made, while they rest on tradition. The ABC announcers bitched about the NBA’s playoff technical system and how because ref’s give the dumb ass double T’s, Perkins from the Celtics was 1 away from being suspended for a game. The problem isn’t that Perk was out of control, it’s that the refs were taking the easy ass way out to solve a problem. It’s almost guarnateed that the NBA will look into this problem (like how they removed one tech on Perk after a game). FIFA would chop off it’s hand before it ever did such a thing. It should have stepped in and negated Findley’s yellow for a hand ball, but no, it’s refs can’t make a mistake!
I think in the end soccer is like hockey, the casual fan is too lazy to try and understand it’s nuances to enjoy it, but can easily see it’s faults, and thus can dismiss it as a “lame game” very easily. Remember this though, they probably don’t realize England is part of Europe, or find Canada on a map.
I don’t think it helped that you basically had everything the casual fan bitches about soccer actually happen right from the get go on Friday – the ego maniacal ref making the game about himself, the horrible obvious blown call, the brutally ugly goalless draw – followed by a weekend full of flopping. There was a lot of crap over those three days, and it wasn’t much better the first weekend.
I don’t care what the “haters” do, but I can’t really blame the casual fan for not going bonkers over what’s been presented when most of them would tune in. You can’t expect everyone to hang through Itlay’s theatrics to get to a Kiwi miracle. I barely made it myself.
What’s teh saying…Nobody can score a timely foul like Italy?
Shockingly, zero sarcastic comments about soccer here. Hell, I’ve even gotten my brother to watch more than one match this Cup, and that’s never happened before.
However, I’ve borne witness to no fewer than 20 unique conversations about how annoying the vuvuzela is. You know what’s more annoying than the bee horn? Constantly griping about the bee horn. Cri-mo-ny.
I guess I should note that local sports radio has ripped on the World Cup at every possible opportunity. But they’re a bunch of college football knob-slobberers, so they don’t *really* matter, right?
it helps to live in a city where the game is appreciated. in my case, San Diego. yes, our close proximity to Mexico kinda has a role in it, but when you have the largest audience/market in the US for the 2006 tournament – and are on track to repeat the feat again – it seems as though the people here are genuinely into it.
i’m not saying absolutely everybody here loves or tolerates the sport; there are detractors, as there are for everything, everywhere. but the atmosphere is very football-friendly, and a sense of interest & appreciation permeates the area.
so we got that goin’ for us… which is nice.
Okay, it finally got me. Watching CNN this morning, and the 4 talking heads had *The Argument* (one was actually supporting footy, with many of the points KC Gunner used). I want to punch the other three in their baby-makers.
What’s irritating for me is the lack of any casual fans. Fans in the U.S. tend to be one of two varieties: the asshats who don’t care about the sport, never will, and just want to ridicule it, or the asshats who care ONLY about the sport and if you DON’T care than you’re a COMPLETE INGRATE who DOESN’T UNDERSTAND THE BEAUTY OF THE GAME, man!
The first group is obviously irritating. That second group, though, is just as bad; the game isn’t perfect, there are problems with it, and it’s perfectly okay to not call it “the beautiful game” and feel content to just bask in every match’s awesomeness. Not every game is good. Not every game is fair. Not every game, furthermore, is innately superior to American sports just because it’s soccer. Hell, not every game is even WATCHABLE…just like in baseball or basketball or gridiron, there are some seriously awful games that are a complete waste of time.
It’s not about being a “real fan” or anything, either; it’s just about being a normal person. For some reason, this sport attracts people who really just want to support something that nobody else is into so they can be counter-culture or whatever, and that’s irritating. Just watch the game.
“It’s not about being a “real fan” or anything, either; it’s just about being a normal person. For some reason, this sport attracts people who really just want to support something that nobody else is into so they can be counter-culture or whatever, and that’s irritating. Just watch the game.”
YES! So many fans I’ve encountered are just like this, they’re way into the “counter-culture” aspect of it. It’s fucking sports and it’s fun to watch, stop taking it so serious.