Moving the Chains: What in the World Cup?

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I’ve never been a fan of soccer.  One of the reasons is that I grew up playing the sports that most of us will end up watching from the couch.  Football and basketball, for example.  

Another reason I’ve never been a soccer fan is because when I was a boy hardly anyone talked about it.  That is, except for the boys who played it.  You had no trouble picking them out because they always fastened the top button on their shirts. 

If you want a third reason, it’s because it’s soccer – so people need to stop calling it football.      

I will admit, however, to watching my fair share of World Cup Soccer recently.  Call it investigative journalism.  You can tell I’m being serious because I capitalized World Cup Soccer.  

I’ve compiled a list of what I’ve observed.  They’re not in any particular order, mainly because I have no idea if any of them are important.  If they appear to be prioritized in any way, then it’s just like when someone scores a goal in soccer.  Call it dumb luck. 

Here goes:   

• A soccer official pulls out a yellow card when a player has the misfortune of having their foot land in the exact same spot that an opponent’s foot landed a split second before.  

• There are never more than three consecutive minutes of action without at least one player lying on the field in the fetal position.  (The National Basketball Association doesn’t have anything on soccer when it comes to flopping.)

• There was a foosball table in my college fraternity.  All the brothers played the same way: by wildly spinning the little wooden men, hoping they might accidentally kick the tiny ball in the goal.  That is, all the brothers except one, who methodically passed the ball back and forth from one player to another.  In the process he would lull his opponent to sleep.  That’s exactly what watching World Cup Soccer reminds me of: Bob Hollingsworth playing foosball at Phi Kappa Tau.  

• For me, the best part of a match is the overtime shootout to decide the outcome of a game that ends with the score tied.  That happens a lot in soccer, because 77.3% of all soccer matches end in a scoreless tie – according to a statistic I just made up in my head. 

• The two biggest stars in soccer are Argentina’s Lionel Messi (39) and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronald (41).  I’m not sure why I brought it up.  Probably because they’re making such a fuss over how well tennis player Novak Djokovic (39) is doing at Wimbledon this year.  Just forget I mentioned it.    

• The best strategy for overtime penalty kicks seems to be kicking the ball directly at the center of the goal.  That’s because it’s a common practice for goalies to pounce to either the left or right side of the goal in anticipation of which way the ball might be kicked.  By the way, a goalie’s reflexes remind me of a cat: not our 17-year-old cat sleeping on the couch at the moment, but a real cat.  As Wee Willie Keeler might have said if he’d known about soccer when he was alive, ‘kick it where they ain’t.’   

• In the closing minutes of one game I watched, the team that was behind was desperately trying to score a goal to tie the game.  One of their players was lying prone on the ground in the end zone (?) while his team played on without – or perhaps oblivious to – him.  I’m guessing it was because in soccer the clock never stops running, not even for an injury or when a team celebrates scoring a goal – which they absolutely have a right to do because that happens about as often as tectonic plates shift.  So I can understand why his teammates didn’t want to waste precious time dragging him over to the team bench.  

• A soccer official pulling out a red card could result in a player being automatically suspended for both the game currently being played and, should there be one, the game after that.  That’s exactly what happened to one of the key players on the team from the United States.  That is until our president, who received the FIFA Peace Prize earlier this year, pulled out his trump card.  All of a sudden the suspension was reversed and the player was allowed to play in the team’s next match.  *This caused quite a stir in the soccer world, from what I understand (which I don’t because, well, it’s soccer).  What I do understand, however, is that only POTUS could turn the United States soccer team into the bad guys in their very own country.  

*The Union of European Football Associations, Europe’s soccer governing body, 

said FIFA ‘crossed a red line’ and expressed it’s ‘disbelief’ at a decision it called 

‘unprecedented, incomprehensible, and unjustifiable.’

Meanwhile, Americans who were accustomed to what goes on in 

the White House these days merely shrugged as if to collectively say

 ‘what’s new?’  

I’ll wrap this up with two last things I absolutely know for a fact about World Cup Soccer:

(1)   There are a lot of people in this world who really, really love it, and

(2)   under no circumstances will I ever be one of them.