[fabsroman]

Yeah, to each their own. To those of you that do not understand soccer, I will put it just like I put it to those that do not understand hunting, "If you do not understand why I like it, there is no way I can explain to you why I like it."

Suffice it to say that I like watching soccer. Used to love playing it. Likewise, I like to watch cycling, used to love training and going to bike races too. Even raced against one of the Tour de France yellow jersey holders (i.e., George Hincapie) as a junior in New Jersey and New York. Americans are too transfixed on what is going on in their country to think much about anything else. Soccer is one of the biggest sports in the world, yet Americans just cannot understand it. Then again, I have some friends that have been trying to learn the game and they are actually impressing me. I am awed that American television is televising the games uninterrupted (i.e., no commercials while the games are being played because there are no TV time outs).

The overall World Cup has been one of the lowest scoring World Cup's, but today's game between Germany and Portugal was 3 to 1, which in American football terms is 21 to 7.

Don't get me started about boring. How is American baseball any fun to watch until the playoffs? Maybe it gets slightly exciting after the All Star break, but come on, 180+ games. In the World Cup a team plays 3 games in group play and 2 of the 4 teams in that group move on. After that, it is elimination for every game, now that is exciting. The World Series is even the best out of 7 games, so is basketball. How about a single game and the winner takes all. Ah, but the owners wouldn't be able to get the Americans to come to enough games so that Lebron James could make $16 Million a year before endorsements. I won't even start with the baseball players.

As far as the "diving" is concerned, I hate it, but you have to have watched soccer long enough to know why it happens. It used to be that if a player broke free to the goal, the defender would foul him to stop him. FIFA has tried to prevent that this World Cup by issuing yellow cards in those cases. Get two yellow cards in a single game, and you are out of the game and your team plays with 10 men instead of 11. Get two successive yellow cards in successive games and you have to sit out. Step on somebody's groin like Rooney of England did and you get an immediate red card. Take a dive and you get a yellow card, and I saw quite a few yellow cards given out for diving.

My main complaint with the game is that they should have two referees to make sure that games aren't won or lost on bad calls, which there were quite a few of, especially in the USA games. However, bad calls are one of my biggest issues with sports in general, other than the drug use. We have the steroid scandal in baseball, blood doping scandal in professional cycling which knocked the two best cyclists out of the Tour de France and included 55 professional cyclists in all (side note: if I get started on Lance Armstrong and his swearing that he did not use performance enchancing drugs or do blood doping, this thread would be extremely long), and then there is the game fixing scandal in Italian soccer.

In the end, I will watch the World Cup tomorrow and while I am Italian, I do not care who wins because the French players have been a class act during this World Cup. They did not take dives and they did not commit cheap fouls.

If you do not like soccer, do not watch it. Plenty of people find hunting, fishing, and shooting shows boring as hell, but I hope they don't stop showing them because of those people. Likewise, I hope they do not stop showing soccer because of people that find it boring.

By the way, baseball used to bore me to tears, but my wife is a die hard Yankees fan and she has been teaching me the game. She even bought me a rule book, which I read, and now I understand the game. I like watching the baseball playoffs and can almost stomach a game every now and then. Granted, if there were less games and more urgency behind each game, I might find it a little more thrilling, but it is America's greatest PASSTIME (i.e., a great way to waste a day).