World according to Lump

I watched quite a bit of soccer in the last month.  I tried to come into it clear of any pre-conceived notions and really take it at face value to see what America has been missing out on.  I even developed rooting interests.  At first I played the homer card and cheered for the U.S. team, after their demise I switched to my ancestral roots and cheered for Germany, and after they lost out I turned to the Netherlands, partially for the cool orange kits, but mainly to see whether or not the Dutch porn star who promised bj’s for all of her Twitter followers would have to pay up.  In the end Spain ended up winning which probably ended up saving Bobbi Eden from getting her stomach pumped more often than Rod Stewart, Elton John, David Bowie & Mick Jagger combined.

My conclusion is it’s not for me and I think I’m in the majority here.  Cue the soccerphiles to insist that I just don’t get it.  Maybe they’re right, but I think I’ve given the sport a month of it’s best competition and still walk away with a bad taste in my mouth.

First off you have the tedious nature of the play.  This is a sport that I have no doubt is very enjoyable to play but as far as a spectator sport goes it’s tedious.  Now don’t get me wrong, 90 minutes of play does usually result in 90 seconds of good highlights, it’s the other 88 1/2 minutes that are tough.  To make the game exciting the rule changes would have to be so extreme that it wouldn’t come close to resembling the game.  I’m not sure if the pitch is too large, or if the complete under-utilization of substitutions, or if the match is too long due to an antiquated time management system, or if an infraction system that doesn’t penalize a team committing fouls until their next scheduled match are the problem, but you can take your pick as to what leads to the monotonous nature of the game.

One of the biggest obstacles to any widespread American popularity will be the diving.  Maybe I’m guilty of having an oversensitive macho gene when it comes to watching sports, but I love the fact that there’s an unwritten code of manly behavior in hockey, I like that baseball uses a sensibly-placed beanball in the small of the back to police other teams from showing them up.  Soccer repeatedly rewards players from faking injury.  My beloved sport of hockey has a penalty for diving and enforces it.  I heard that soccer has a similar foul, but if it only exists in theory, you can debate whether it truly exists.  To correct this problem, league front office and sport sanctioning bodies could start to handing out some significant fines.  For the on-field referee it is often difficult to judge an injury immediately following the incident, but the beauty of video tape is that if a player cries two broken legs at the beginning of a match, but then jumps up after a yellow-card is issued and proceeds to run eight miles over the remainder of the match you can pretty accurately come to some conclusion about the extent of his previous injury.  But the only real way to discontinue this behavior is too stop glorifying these pussies.  Also, if they started handing out red cards for this behavior, or to just continue the game around the artificially maimed players.  My guess is that here in the states, if Landon Donovan showcased the acting chops of a B-movie star and flopped like a dead fish a handful of times a game during this past World Cup, that people would’ve gotten really tired of it really quick, but for the rest of the world, this behavior has to be at a minimum accepted if not full out glorify it.  In case your curious about how bad the diving gets, take a look at this “highlight” reel.

I was actually thinking about writing a paragraph here about how the large numbers of children playing the sport are only the result of parents following a herd mentality and taking the cheapskate approach to youth sports, but then I realized that Chuck Klosterman already wrote a great essay on this subject in his brilliant collection of essays, “Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs“.  Grab a copy of it or ask to borrow mine, it’s great stuff, particularly considering he’s a NoDak guy.

Now don’t get me wrong, I will continue to follow the English Premier League (go Chelsea!) and future World Cups, and I would still like to attend an EPL game, plus I’ll continue to play the FIFA line of video games, but I’m done watching full-length soccer matches on television at home.

If God meant for us to play soccer he wouldn’t have given us arms & hands.