jjackkrash, that’s truly an inspiring story. But I can’t help but wonder if it was actually soccer than caused her dyslexia?
I don’t think it can be ruled out.
I’ve been watching a few games and I must admit Soccer players flop more than basketball players. I guess you have to be a really good actor to be a soccer player.
Lol @ the dumb-ass comments in this thread.
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Most “sports” suck these days. Soccer is gay, baseball is gay, hockey is on strike half the time cuz of greedy owners and players unions, football is fining people for fucking hitting and hiring refs that can’t officiate and upholding their bad calls that are clearly wrong. Basketball is fun to watch but their is no real CONTACT allowed. Rugby is the only sport worth watching or playing. Rugby is a man’s game. Everything else just pales in comparison.
There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
- Ernest Hemingway
[quote]theBird wrote:
Lol @ the dumb-ass comments in this thread.
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So tell me, when do you celebrate Australian Independence Day?
Oh, wait…you’re still a subject.
[quote]Aggv wrote:
There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
- Ernest Hemingway [/quote]
A substantial risk of death does elevate things.
"American sports culture exist in a different temporal universe to soccer. Because soccer is something fundamentally different to what Americans are used to, it creates a comletely different paradigm in watching the sport. American sports are all very structured and procedural, with standardized plays that can quantified into statistics, and the narrative of the sport is largely told through statistics. We cheer when a quantifiable number is achieved, we find excitement in that which results in a number indicating success. Soccer is completely unlike this, it doesn’t provide the standardized plays but complete free-form gameplay with only one giant milestone that is difficult to achieve (scoring a goal). To create a gaming analogy, American sports are like turn based games (Civilizations) while soccer is like a RTS (Age of Empires).
If an American watches say 5 minutes of soccer and 5 minutes of football, in the 5 minutes of football he will see on average 21 seconds of gameplay and lots of downtime and commercials (which European frequently cite as one of the reasons American football is boring to them), but critically to Americans that 21 seconds will result in quantifiable achievement, the team will gain or lose an X number of yards, and every player will be granted a plethora of statistics on exactly what he did in every second of gameplay. Football, like all American sports regiments and segments the game into a series of small statistical gains, which are tabulated and compared to previous standardized segments. Soccer is completely the opposite. In soccer, a 5 minute stretch may include the ball moving for several kilometers with players performing a many passes, feints, dribbles…etc yet none of that will be quantified to create a sense of linear progression. Soccer players cover by far the most ground in team sports compared to American sports and perform the most physical action, but none of that action follows a procedure with clear results except the goal. While the rest of the world gets excited by plays like this that don’t result in quantifiable achievement because of the skill and creativity, to your average American its “just kicking a ball around”.
That’s why you hear Americans say things like “soccer is boring because only 1 or 2 goals are scored”.
To most of them, the only exciting part of soccer is when a team scores, because its the only time soccer stops and a number on the screen increments and tells us something has been achieved.
Even the more freeflowing American sport of basketball is still segmented by design into 24 second parts (with a shot clock), and provides a plenty of statistics because of how repeatable the actions. Its guaranteed that every 24 seconds, you’ll get a shot, a rebound by one team or the other and likely an assist. These can be tabulated and a narrative formed around these numbers. Its largely why rugby and hockey have had a very hard time in America, hockey is largely regional and depends heavily on the North where there is cross border influence from Canada, and rugby has largely been absent from American TV.
But even if soccer was somehow to be segmented and quantified into a standardized set of actions with clear linear progression, there is also the question of identity. In many ways, sports are like religion, we tend to follow those that are dominant in the local culture and tend to view others coming from foreign cultures with a sense of rejection. So while the changing demographics and a more globalized culture in America will continue to drive soccer upwards in popularity, it will never truly be embraced since it will always be an outsider sport.
However there are many encouraging signs. This year 31 million Americans watched the final day of the Premier League across the NBC network family and MLS just signed a $720 milion deal with ESPN (despite being only the 4th most watched soccer league in Amerca, behind the Premier League on NBC, Champions League on FOX and Liga MX on Univision) and the Brazil-Croatia game yesterday got TV ratings on part with NBA Finals, more than double Stanley Cup finals. These are all healthy signs of interest and growth, but even if it doesn’t evolve past that, there’s nothing wrong that. Whether soccer becomes genuinely accepted in America as equal to American football and baseball no longer hurts American soccer fans ability to watch soccer since its commonly shown on TV now.
And in the end, soccer as sport needs no validation from America. Soccer already completely dwarfs every other sport in every measure of success, it has more fans, more revenue and more TV viewers than all American sports combined. It has never needed America, so it will never change to assimilate into what Americans are used to watching."
Americans don’t get butt hurt but you’re nonessential.
big block of un-paragraphed text = not reading
[quote]Aggv wrote:
big block of un-paragraphed text = not reading [/quote]
Thank the mod - thank you
[quote]Claudan wrote:
Americans don’t get butt hurt but you’re nonessential.
[/quote]
Wolves do not concern themselves with the opinions of sheep.
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
[quote]Claudan wrote:
Americans don’t get butt hurt but you’re nonessential.
[/quote]
Wolves do not concern themselves with the opinions of sheep.[/quote]
Ok.
To settle the dilemma over diving;
It’s a plague in the sport. You, and many of us that play and love the sport agree that diving is disgraceful.
You know what most of us do about? Simply not pay attention. It’s only really relevant until some straw-man comes along, much like a the majority of non-supporters in this thread.
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
My sister was once Washington State high-school athlete of the year; soccer was her main sport. She had multiple scholarship offers including from Stanford; but the combination of her undiagnosed dyslexia and 1.8 GPA resulted in all of her offers falling through. She ended up playing at a local junior college, where she is now in its athletic department’s hall of fame. So I guess the moral of the story is soccer is a good sport for high-school girls who can’t read. [/quote]
Actually to play football at the top,you have to be intelligent,because football requires patience,visualization and intelligence,infact you will see many top people in football speaking two,three even sometimes five languages.
[quote]Claudan wrote:
To settle the dilemma over diving;
It’s a plague in the sport. You, and many of us that play and love the sport agree that diving is disgraceful.
You know what most of us do about? Simply not pay attention. It’s only really relevant until some straw-man comes along, much like a the majority of non-supporters in this thread. [/quote]
But how do we do that when we have slow-mo replays from multiple angles in HD on wide screen TVs?
The dive from the last Brazil match which landed them the penalty was pure poetry in motion lol.
I wonder what our national team would look like if the only game we had to play here was soccer, and had the same youth development that our football/basketball/baseball/hockey has…
In fact, i’d take Lebron in goal over tim howard right now. Like hopefully he loses tonight, fly him down to brazil, and put that 6’10’ athletic freak in goal.
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
I’ve been working on a theory the last few days after reading quite a few articles about the role ref-ing decisions have played so far this WC and reading this quote in particular, “…trying to win a call is part of the game. 'Any team I’ve ever been on, if we feel contact in the box, go down.” I really can’t imagine a defensive end falling to the ground and whining to the ref if he thought he got held. Or a wide receiver collapsing into a pile if he’s bumped 6 yards off the line. I think the combination of a low scoring game and the huge advantage a PK gives, puts the course of the game in the ref’s hands, not the players and I believe that this doesn’t sit well with Americans. In fact, I think it is directly contradictory to our idea of a meritocracy and rugged individualism.
Therefore, I believe that the reliance upon a higher authority to determine the outcome of a game is attractive to those who have been bred to believe that they are but serfs and the outcome of a game must be trusted to a higher authority.
Let’s look at the winning WC teams over the last 50 years:
Spain - Authoritarian dictatorship until 1975
Italy - Fascist dictatorship until 1943, king until 1946
France - Socialist surrender monkeys
Brazil - Authoritarian military dictatorship until 1985
Argentina - Democracy in spirit, punctuated by military coup d’etets and military dictatorships. Most recent dictatorship ended in 1982
England - Currently supports a Monarchy, considers themselves subjects
W. Germany - German Empire ruled by royal families until 1918 when the German’s threw off the yokes of monarchy and embraced democracy. At which point they promptly voted A. Hitler into power.
In conclusion, I don’t see soccer as a sport that appeals to strictly the poor, but to those of weak mind who have been recently colonized, ruled, or otherwise oppressed.
[/quote]
So one would expect russia(communist government for a long time),china too,north korea,iran and the middle east to dominate football. You just mentioned developed countries except america for the most part, it has no correlation with football. I know america has a political system that works and it is probably the best the world has seen,but don’t you think you are stretching it too far?(And other sports have one form of a penalty or the other)
[quote]Claudan wrote:
You know what most of us do about? Simply not pay attention. [/quote]
Did the point from the PK in the brazil match not count?