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SOCCER!!!
When the World Cup began last Friday, I plopped in front of my 50" DLP screen, tuned into the high-definition channels, cracked open a can of Germany's finest and hollered at the screen for 90 minutes like I was born and bred for futball hooliganism (this opening sentence rocks so much more if you get the 3-chord riffs from The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" stuck in your head).
On Saturday, I didn't watch ALL the matches, but I still had a steady supply of beer and I at least had the TV on at all times so I wouldn't miss anything.
By Sunday, I slept in and missed the first half of the first game, but that's okay because no one scored.
Monday, I woke up groggy and swimming in melatonin, lurch over to my computer, checked the scores, and then went back to bed. It wasn't even worth it to power up the TV--not even for the World Cup.
This morning, the startling realization has hit me: I'm all soccerred out. It's not my fault--I still have plenty of beer--but my diet of FIFA over the weekend has convinced me of one thing: You've seen one soccer match, you've seen them all. Every game a variation of kick, pass, shoot, and on average, every 50 minutes or so, there's a goal. The goals are never a direct result of something impeccably awesome that the offense did, but rather something stupid that the defense forgot to do. And if that's all there is--sitting back and waiting for the other team to make mistakes--what really is there worth watching?
Americans, you are not alone. I, too, do not understand the underlying excitement that has the world captivated about positional play, trench-like defense and suffocating midfield passing. Don't get me wrong--I love good, solid defense as much as the next guy, but there's something inherently wrong with a game that makes it so easy to defend. I watched a team on Saturday set up their offence delicately and constructively, like chess pieces, for 25 minutes, moving the ball gradually upfield, positioning every man just perfectly, drawing the defense into the formation they wanted, and then when the time came to strike....the ball was deftly booted out of bounds and they had to reset their pieces and start all over again. A 25-minute attack strategy, a stupid, meandering, egregious waste of copious amounts of time plotting to get conditions just right, destroyed in two seconds. Nothing gained from it. Nothing to show for it. It's like one of those excruciatingly long and turgid single-shot scenes in a Stanley Kubrick movie that does nothing and goes nowhere but lures the audience into a false sense of security. But even Kubrick gave you a rewarding payoff every now and then. What's soccer's excuse?
Here, then, are my super awesome suggestions to make soccer the exciting game it's supposed to be:
1) Put up a damn timeclock already! For God's sakes, it's the 21st century and you scoreboard-deficient Euro weenies can't afford a couple jumbotrons? The best sports have their most gripping moments in the second to last second, where things get tight and urgent. Football, hockey and basketball have timeouts to help prolong the suspense, to maximize those last second heroics. But soccer? Not knowing precisely when the game ends is too anti-climactic. Why is the referee hiding it on us? It's like he's deliberately trying to not make the game exciting. And don't even get me started on injury/stop time. Yeah, let's add another minute on just for the hell of it.
2) Get rid of offsides. I know you think this will result in legions of goal-sucking cherry pickers and not much else, but in reality no sport is really conducive to that kind of blind, offensive thinking. It doesn't happen in basketball or lacrosse, and in soccer the field is too big for it to be an effective tactic anyway, which is pretty ironic considering the only thing the offside rule does is keep everyone together. And prevent scoring. Because scoring is bad. Nobody likes scoring. It interrupts the sophisticated cheers prepared carefully by the diehard faithful. Maybe if the game wasn't so godawfully boring the people wouldn't have to find alternative ways to collectively entertain themselves.
3) Free kicks are not really all that helpful. I suggest a new idea for penalties: Remove the man from play for 10 minutes. And we can call the plays that take advantage of being short-manned something powerful. Like....power plays!
Artists conception of soccer in the year 2144.
4) Allow body contact. It isn't a real sport unless there is some element of physical domination and subjugation involved, so it can feel more like the war metaphor it's supposed to be. But here's the clincher: you can't use your feet.
5) Every so often, the ball explodes for no particular reason.
6) One word: Steroids.
7) To increase scoring, make the goals 50 feet high. Goalies are allowed to wear jetpacks.
8) For now on, all soccer players must look like this:
9) Eliminate boring midfield play! Make the goals 40 yards from each other. And build a wall.
10) Statistics! Lots of them. If there's one thing that will get the Fantasy League Owners pumped, it's tons and tons of meaningless statistics. The only statistics I've seen are goals, yellow cards, shots and possession. That sucks. There should be stats like "shooting percentage when kicked with left foot against right handed goalies in grass fields played in Europe" and "Average angle of cross corner kick when headed by the striker into the penalty area for a goal" and also "Average length of time spent rolling on grass acting like they've been shot faking a broken leg injury". Never underestimate the power of the ALTSRGASFBLI stat.
11) No more injury timeouts. If a player goes down, let him roll and writhe on the grass while play continues. If he's still at it after five minutes, the opposing team is allowed to kick him off the field.
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