As people who follow my
blog, my author page https://www.facebook.com/authorJeffLaFerney?ref=hl, or my Sports, Movies, Books, and Music Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/sportsmoviesbooksandmusic?ref=hl know, I’m an English teacher, an author, and a former athlete and coach. My
blog topics range all over the place, but right now my mind is on soccer. It’s
World Cup Soccer season, and I’m not a soccer fan. I know, lots of people are,
so my intent isn’t to offend soccer fans with this blog. It’s to tell why I don’t
like it personally. It’s simply my opinions and perceptions, shared with anyone
who is willing to read them. Because I’m being bombarded with soccer images, “highlights,”
etc., I decided to tell my four biggest pet peeves about soccer. I’ll get right
to it.
Pet peeve number one is
simple. I know it’s a generalization…I know it’s a stereotype…but soccer fans
around the world seem to me to be dangerously crazy—deranged to the point of absurd
violence. Here in America, we have loads of different sports to watch. We get so
much sports coverage that we’re bombarded with images, but there is rarely a
violent incident at a game. We rarely see riots, stampedes, murders, and other
senseless violence at our sporting events, and we have far more events than
other countries. My first problem with soccer is the perception that its fans
are overly zealous to the point of demented recklessness. I typed in a Google
search for “soccer riot images” and there were literally thousands of them—police
in riot gear, stadiums on fire, people being carried out on stretchers,
stampeding fans plowing over innocent spectators, tear gas, armed police
beating fans with sticks, blood. I typed in “American football riot images,”
and the same soccer images came up. There wasn’t one with American football
players that I noticed. To me, if my life is in danger when I go to a game,
there is a problem with the atmosphere of the “game.” I don’t think an
entertainment sport should be a life or death event.
Pet peeve number two
becomes more personal. The game is such that there is very little scoring. I
can respect that the pro soccer players are fantastically talented, but when
Sports Center only has to take fifteen seconds of its thirty minute program to
show virtually all of the professional
goals scored from the previous day—all over the world, I think—to me it
demonstrates an adequate reason to not like the sport. And when the majority of
goals are scored directly from corner kicks, free kicks, and penalty kicks, I
have to wonder what all the other running around for ninety minutes is all
about. On a field that’s approximately two acres big, with gifted players, and
with a goal that’s eight feet high and 24 feet long (a hockey goal is four feet
by six feet), no one seems to be able to get the ball in. You need evidence? I
Googled the average score of a soccer game. I don’t know if I got the “right”
answer, but the “best” answer given was the winning team averages 1.63 goals
and the losing team averages .54 goals—2.17 goals a game. You need more
evidence? In any other sport, does the announcer yell, “Gooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllllllllllllllllll!!!!!”
for thirty seconds or more when one is finally scored? Goals are so rare, that
announcers practically hemorrhage when they see one.
Pet peeve number three
has to do with stoppage time. For some reason, the clock doesn’t stop in a
soccer game, but a referee is allowed to determine how much extra time is to be
played at the end of each half. How does he decide? “The most common reasons
include time taken to make substitutions, the treatment of injured players, and
deliberate acts of time-wasting by individual players. The referee decides how
much stoppage time, if any, should be added at the end of either period.” I
guess it’s random—some sort of judgment call one man makes based on what? How
much energy he still has? And the irritating thing is….it used to be a secret.
No one knew how much stoppage time was granted, let alone how the referee
decided upon it. And the time wasn’t put up on the scoreboard for anyone to
see. And zero on the clock wasn’t and still isn’t the end of the game. They can
play on if the referee thinks they’re making adequate progress toward a scoring
attempt. Can you imagine a referee in an American professional football game
(the NFL) keeping a secret clock that only he knew about, and then at the end
of the game, the players played on without knowing how much time was left? So
Payton Manning would line up at center from the ten-yard-line, down three
points, and while directing traffic for thirty seconds and while changing the
play three times and while giving seventeen hand signals and while shouting out
“Omaha” twice, the referee could blow the whistle and say, “The game is over. I
just decided. We’ve had enough stoppage time. You made two hand signals too
many and don’t seem to be making progress toward the goal line. New England
wins!” My son has informed me that stoppage time is now displayed on the
scoreboard, and that I would have known if I ever watched any games. Someone—probably
someone who didn’t like soccer—convinced the rest of the knuckleheads that
displaying the time should be a normal and acceptable practice in the world’s
most popular game. But why don’t they just stop the clock when it’s deemed
necessary? The ref could just blow a whistle and make a hand signal. And then
when the clock hits 0:00, he could blow his whistle again, and the period could
be over like in other sports that actually have scoring as part of the
competition.
My fourth pet peeve
makes all the others pale in comparison. I hate, hate, hate that soccer players
flop and act like they’re dead. This happens all the time in an attempt, I
suppose, to persuade the lone referee who can make a call that something horribly
awful just happened. This is either cheating, in an attempt to draw out a
yellow or red card for the opposition…or it’s cheating, in an attempt to give
the cheater’s team some sort of free kick so they might attempt to score the
only goal they can possibly score…or it’s cheating so the player can rest.
After all, there will be stoppage time later when he might not be so exhausted.
Everyone knows this is happening, and any true football, hockey, basketball, boxing,
wrestling, X-games, or baseball fan (whatever American sport whatsoever) is
irritated by the absurd fakery. Let me give two examples from this year’s World
Cup. First, U.S. offensive star, Jozy Altidore, suffered a life-threatening
hamstring pull—apparently. He was running, pulled a hamstring, grabbed his leg,
fell on his back, and nearly died—I guess. He never moved. Too much pain,
certainly. He lay on his back like he’d suffered a heart attack. He never tried
to sit up, roll over, or stand on his good leg. A hockey player could have had
his leg ripped off, and he would have continued playing. Jozy? He needed a
stretcher. Six men tried to lift him and failed. Jozy didn’t help whatsoever.
They had to tip the stretcher sideways and slide him in because Jozy was too
injured from a pulled leg muscle to move any part of his body. Now, I’ll give
him credit. Unlike other stretcher injuries I’ve seen in soccer, he didn’t get
to the sideline, bounce off the stretcher and run back into the game, but days
later, I saw him jogging with his team. Here’s video evidence of the horrendous
injury and stretcher humor.
The other example is
Luis Suarez’s biting incident. I’ll show you some pictures, but I have to hand
it to Luis. He has quite a set of choppers. He’s been gifted with an incredible
set of teeth, so I can understand the need to use his gift. His nickname is Dracula…and
The Cannibal…and Chewy Luis. So he ran down the field and chomped into his
opponent’s shoulder. The victim, Giorgio Chiellini, was in such agony that his
legs discontinued working, and he fell to the ground like he was shot in the
head or possibly hit by a truck. I watched Mike Tyson literally bite part of
Evander Holyfield’s ear right off. Holyfield stayed on his feet. A soccer
player would have had to be hooked to emergency IV’s and transported by
helicopter to a nearby hospital. Amazingly Chewy Luis also fell straight to the
ground in an attempt to persuade the referee, I assume, that he was illegally
shouldered in the teeth, rendering him temporarily lame. When poor Chiellini
finally managed to stand again, he was able to run all over the field (I guess
he wasn’t hurt so badly after all), showing the bite marks. The skin wasn’t
even broken. No blood. Just a mark.
I’ve seen hockey
players take a stick across the face—broken nose, blood dripping—and keep
playing. Football players have collisions that could kill someone, and they get
up and play on. They don’t run around the field showing off their bruise
(generating who knows how much stoppage time). Can you imagine a catcher, after
taking a 100 MPH foul tip off the shoulder, being sympathetic to the soccer
player with bite marks? Can you imagine a professional basketball player who
just took an elbow to the teeth being sympathetic to the Cannibal who was
rolling around the ground, holding his fangs because he bit his opponent too
hard? Can you imagine anyone besides LeBron James or Paul Pierce getting
carried or wheeled off the court and then heading straight for the scorer’s
table again to re-enter the game?
Honestly, I have my
reasons for not liking soccer. If you’re a fan, you’re not alone, but I’ll
watch almost any other sport before I’ll watch soccer.
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