Football isn't quite the same as "Soccer"

Though it didn't say so on the Chinese calendar, this is the year of the "FIFA world cup". Having been deprived of football( or should I say soccer) action after moving west of the Greenwich meridian, I looked forward to this world cup as redemption, a way to pay my respects to footballers of all nations. My excitement received a kick in the shin when I realised that the matches would be telecast in the unseemly hours of the morning, when it would be awkward to drink beer and shout at the TV. I fondly remember the times when we used to stay up until 2 am in the morning to watch champions league games which ended in goalless draws. However, I was happy I reconciled myself to seeing games on the weekends.

The first weekend had a bunch of obscure matches, as is common to the group stages. The important match, as plastered all across ABC commercials was the USA playing ... did it matter? It just takes some sport, any sport and a bunch of pricks who keep chanting " We're the best. We've gotta believe in ourselves and step up to the plate" to get the whole country convinced. Whats more.. this time by some weird anomaly , the team which makes a living out of beating cuba, peru, american samoa and puerto rico, happened to be ranked fifth in the world... and the suckers believed it. Sure, I am not one for engaging in "un-american" activities like disparaging their national pride, but when this irrational enthusiasm affects the commentators, it might be a cause for violent reactions in a football fan

I woke up early on the first Saturday to catch the pre-game show, and regretted it every bit. The panel of commentators included .... you guessed it right, only american commentators. Well and a respectable lot at that. There was america's top male goalscorer (I'd estimate the number of goals to be 6) and america's top female goalscorer (The last time I saw a female commentator was Mandira Bedi... so you must forgive my apprehensions). The match they were supposed to previewing was France vs. Switzerland or something but it didn't matter. They had a bunch of cheesy, crappy, oh-so-sentimental stories about Claudio Reyna and Oguchi Onyewu. The stories ended with "will this be the golden year for the US?" and I found myself shouting aloud "Are you kidding me??!?!?" . Sorry, but I have seen my last three world cups with impeccable coverage by fantastic commentators like John Dykes and Andrew Leci. And if I remember right, USA got nothing but a passing mention. Here I was, seeing some jackasses on national television talking about winning the world cup. Perhaps they thought it was like the NBA, NFL or MLB, where they just hold a local club tournament and christen themselves "World Champions" only to be thrashed by Argentina (in basketball) or Ghana (as in this world cup). My world cup had started off on a sick note. So you can guess I felt really happy when the Italians could not name a single member from the US team; what I call separating the "who's who" from the "who's he?".

If the pre-game show was anything to go by, things only got a lot worse in the match commentary. The commentators were talking like retards, like a cricket fan watching a baseball game for the first time. Their language was ridden with artefacts like "drew the contact" and "sold the play" to which the English would have said, "bugger off, you wanker, thats not quite football". They seemed to have no concept of how the game flowed, raving about ubiquitous skills from Christiano Ronaldo and cheering for Beckham, by far the worst player in the English team. Obviously they had seen little or no European football, abandoning their lives to watching Chicago Fire or whatever. They were not just uneducated about football, they seemed proud of their wonderful opinions and littered the airwaves with their ineffable twaddle. They had people in America believe that "Casey Keller is the best goalkeeper in the world". I mean .......do the names Dida, Buffon and Cech strike a bell??
This free circulation of their jaundiced opinions spilt over to refereeing and yellow cards.(jaundiced opinions about yellow cards ... beat that!!) . These guys had a God's eye view of things and were so god-darn sure of all the calls and constantly heckling the referee, calling him ineffective. If I were the referee I 'd find the ABC camera and show these morons the finger. They obviously had no idea of how these offenses are judged in Europe and how mistakes are inevitable. I could not fathom how the same asses had no problem accepting blatantly ridiculous decisions in favour of Shaq or Wade or Bryant and reconcile them as "home-court advantage" .

As a counterpoint to this awful unprofessional display was the constant jokes on every talk show about how boring "soccer" was. Well, I dont know about "soccer" but I know I've seen the most absurd sport when I saw baseball. Frankly I think the world would be better without these twats participating and polluting the fun of football. Please keep your hands to those commercial gimmicks you pass off as sports; lionizing individual players in team sports and making a whole sham of it. No wonder these guys cannot appreciate a sport which 3 billion people in the world find irresistible. They cannot understand what a real team sport is. They just seem at a loss when faced with anything larger than the "individual"... ooh, the sacred individual, the mantelpiece of american life.

Afterthought:
When Ghana made it through to hte round of sixteen in the world cup (which the americans call "sweet sixteen" ... can they ever get over their own egotist selves), the government decided to reduce the amount of electricity used by the country's gold mines so they could use it to power up TVs for people to watch. USA is believed to have offered Ronaldo $120 million to come play in the american soccer league and .. . he REFUSED.
Just an afterthought. .....