USA! USA! USA!

There needs to be some truth telling. During these troubled days of “World Cup frenzy,” it’s easy to get carried away in the excitement of hours of poorly struck balls, own-goals and Europeans holding their ankles and rolling about. We need to take a long look in the mirror and admit it—Soccer seriously, SERIOUSLY, sucks ass. Luckily, however, this isn’t a deathblow to the game; it just means it will be nothing more than a Saturday morning acitivity for the Pimms and cucumber crowd and their little “Landon’s,” “Kasey’s” or whatever the name was of the anti-Regean protagonist in that political best-seller from Knopf 22 years ago. After all, soccer isn’t afflicted by the intrinsic fault of built in obsolesce that affects certain games such as basketball and bowling (i.e. bowling’s problematic nature of being “too easy," causing professional play to be little more than a contest of who blinks first. And, of course, there's basketball’s ridiculous rules that make is basically impossible to stop teams from executing innumerable passes into their respective “big guy” and watching him pivot and shoot a lay-up over and over and over again. The only reason there are still fast breaks and turnovers is because the quality of play has degraded to that of the “school-yard.”) No--soccer is by no means “too easy” nor does suffer from rules that limit creativity and competition. Nor, even, does suffer from football’s pure ugliness or laughably unorganized stumbling about.

In fact, soccer has some acceptable qualities. For one, it is nonstop action. I watch as many World Cup game as the next guy and probably scream and swear more than most precisely because it is damn exciting. Unfortunately, excitement alone does not a great sport make. Look at hockey after all. Nor is soccer problematic because of low scores. All the great sports involve low scores: baseball, minor-league baseball, Legion baseball, Rounders. Even the fact that teams can “tie” is not a determent to the game. For the most part, the teams are so evenly matched in ineptitude that anything more than a draw would be an insult to the concept of victory. While these qualities make soccer clearly better than football, basketball or bowling and only slightly more impressive than, say, bocce ball; it still suffers from some serious flaws. Flaws that make it impossible and downright dishonest for a self-respecting Americans to accept it for anything more than a quaint spat between silly little countries with nothing to their names than hordes of blue-collar hooligans and economies that can’t support much more than a ball and an open field. So what are these laughable qualities?

For one, it is the embarrassingly poor quality of strikes. Half the passes on the world-stage are intercepted or just plain miss the intended target. And the shots on goal? For starters, a shot “on-goal” doesn’t mean it could actually go in the goal. It just means the camera angle is suck that the goal and ball are both in the shot. 15 feet over the goal? “A shot on goal!.” A slow roller 10 feet to the right. “A shot on goal!” The fact that Brazil plays “a beautiful game” means nothing more than that they execute the basics of the sport more or less consitently. Any sport where world-class players look like idiots sending half-struck balls 10 feet wide of an embarrassingly large goal is just unseemly. Of course, the fool might object that baseballers have a similar inability. But, of course, the difference is that baseball intends to make striking the ball difficult; soccer however is premised on an ability that few seem to actually posses and it is just plain embarrassing.

Secondly, there is the gross subjectivity. L-A-M-E. Any sport so dependent on the subjective whims and partisan flubbery of a man with a pocket full of colored cards needs a serious reworking. Like basketball, soccer suffers from being a contact sport where contact is forbidden. As a country built on the myth of the self-made man forging his own destiny, being captive to the whims of a unduly elected whistleblower strikes at the very core of our native stuff. Suspension without representation will not stand.

Finally, we have what is the ultimate and final blow to soccer. The players themselves. Perhaps there is nothing more infuriating and ignoble about the game than the fact that a man can trip on his boot laces, roll about screaming in agony, be taken off the field on a stretcher, have a can of liquid nitrogen sprayed on his ankle and be back out playing in less than a minute. It’s inexcusable and idiotic. “The Dive” makes soccer nothing more than a sport built on the Western Europe’s work ethic and mental prowess (i.e. laziness and snake oil.) And the fact that they spend the better part of a match cringing in feigned agony looking for someone else to make it better is why soccer is the sport of a rather pedestrian “world.”

All that to say, the South American teams are pretty kick ass and the USA isn’t that great but doesn’t suck like everyone else. GO USA!!!