The truth is, soccer isn’t an American game and never will be. It’s not adventurous enough. Not enough happens in games. You can hardly make out individual stars. What statistics are there to talk about?
In our Big Three sports there’s a lot going on. At any given moment during the action, the score can change instantly, with a baseball home run, a football touchdown pass or a basketball three-pointer. In the World Cup on Tuesday, England limped out of the competition by tying Costa Rica with the scintillating score of 0-0. At any given moment in a soccer game, someone is almost certainly not going to score. Because the player will be too busy falling down at the slightest touch, writhing in agony and hoping for a penalty call. If none comes, he almost invariably pops up, miraculously recovered and ready to play.
I’m not taking the jingoistic yahoo route of saying we in the States do everything better or chuckling about a sport played by foreigners. I became a soccer fan in the 1950s, rooting for my school, the City College of New York, which won a national title in 1957. I played intramural soccer and loved that I didn’t have to be a 6-foot weightlifter to play. It was a most democratic game.
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