[quote]stevekweli wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Claudan wrote:
[quote]Aggv wrote:
It’s hilarious how anti-soccer ppl are just trolling, and then you have 2 retards trying to argue that America would not field a competitive team if our sole focus in sports were one game. Which i hope you 2 tards are also trolling because you would have to be the stupidest people alive to not understand how our athletes would compete/dominate just fine if we dint have a plethora of choices for our kids. Which i’d rather have the options for our kids rather than access to only one game…[/quote]
Fact of the matter is if brutes and simpletons could dominate the sport, you would.
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The implication being that American athletes are brutes and simpletons? What a brutish and simplistic thing for you to have said.
All sport involves a certain kind of intelligence, spatial awareness, nuance. The kinds of calculations that Darelle Revis does are no less complicated or elegant than the kind that Andres Iniesta does. Same for Chris Bosh, Brett Gardner, Michael Vick (actually, his are much, much more complicated).
Anyway, the point, which you are missing, is simple and inarguable: The best U.S. athletic stock is depleted by sports that aren’t soccer. If they weren’t, the story would be different. There is no counterpoint to this; it is simply true. If Brazil were losing its best athletes to 5 sports that weren’t soccer, their hopes in this tournament would have to be tempered accordingly.[/quote]
I think that there are different athletes for different sports,andre iniesta is fundamentally different from vick. Vick is a six footer,obviously weighing above 200 pounds,iniesta is like 5.6 weighing around 130-160 pounds,iniesta has a low centre of gravity,vick doesn’t, why would we expect them to perform the same way,or easily interchange sports,because vick is an “elite” athlete.[/quote]
Yes, Vick is taller than Iniesta, but then he’s shorter than Ronaldo, Zidane, Balotelli. There is nothing about Vick’s physical dimensions that suggest he’d be at a disadvantage in soccer: He carries more muscle than the average association footballer, but the context of my hypothetical is such that we can easily imagine a young, soccer-addicted Michael Vick to have grown and trained in pursuit of an ideal soccer, rather than football, body.
In any case, it is easy to fall into the “this specific player would do better in this other sport” discussion, and that discussion is fraught with a lot of conjecture (I know I did this). The point is simply that high-paying American sports divert attention and athletic capital away from soccer.
[quote]
And darelle revis calculations are definetely less complicated than what pirlo does.[/quote]
Again, this is a subjective kind of assessment that’s open to lots of argument by assertion, but I completely disagree. I’ve played a lot of both soccer and football, at high school levels, and I don’t think there’s anything harder–and I mean more mentally demanding–in either sport than trying to cover a receiver who’s as fast as you are, while reading an offense, while watching a quarterback’s eyes. Now, I haven’t played professional soccer or football, but there’s no reason for me to assume that the comparison does not hold at elite levels.
More importantly, it’s simple poppycock to claim that elite American athletes are brutish or dumb or inelegant as compared with elite international soccer players. Team sports all require an identical kind of fundamental mental prowess–lightning-fast judgments of space, time, velocity, momentum, angle, etc. There is as much in Lebron’s mind as on Messi’s, and there is as much on Dempsey’s mind as on Ovechkin’s.
