Pretty fucking dissapointed in MANY of the World Cup threads here on DU

[matcom]

thought many of you were more 'worldy' than what I have read here :eyes:

right. YOU think Soccer is too simplistic/boring/stupid. the rest of the world is wrong.

right.

[Haole Girl]

1. I'm going to withhold the majority of my comments at this moment

because my emotions are running high. Thanks for backing up my thoughts, though, matcom. :hug:

[Texasgal]

2. If it isn't olive garden....

how to bread your fried chicken....or the the fat actress series...

I feel your pain brotha'. :)

[ZombieNixon]

3. Thank you!

:yourock:

That is all.

[SoCalDem]

4. My son went to Germany to watch world cup.. we LOVE soccer

in this family:)

[LeftyMom]

5. But you're promoting the idea that popular and good are eqivalent.

Boy bands used to be popular. Bush had a 90% approval rating in fall of '01. Sometimes things that have no great merit are inexplicably popular.

I don't give a flying fuck about soccer one way or the other, but surely a better argument can be made for it's merits than one based purely on it's popularity.

[mac56]

6. You said it, LeftyMom.

It's (ostensibly) the most popular sport in the world, and of course popular = GOOD GOOD GOOD.

Sorry, but that's junior-high-school reasoning to me. Give me something more than "popularity" as soccer's merits.

[Karenina]

11. Y'all be just landlocked

blind, arrogant and ignorant. However, I will defend your right to your opinions to the death. :evilgrin:

[mac56]

18. Landlocked, blind, arrogant, and ignorant?!

Really?!

Because I need something more than "popular" as a reason to consider soccer the sport of kings?!

Really.

[Karenina]

26. You are obviously unable

to WATCH THE GAME. You're not programmed to recognize the skill and endurance involved, nor to appreciate the competition STYLE, which is so much more subtle than ANY "popular" Ami sport. I don't BLAME you for that. I just find it sad.

[mac56]

27. Guilty as charged.

Hope that doesn't make me a horrible, horrible person.

But I still try not to resort to name calling!

[Karenina]

45. NO ONE

is demanding that YOU appreciate the beautiful game. You think it's BORING, well fine. Your "boredom" says everything about YOU and NOTHING about the GAME. And NO, that does not make you a "horrible person." It simply points out your limitations and lack of understanding.

We've had SUCH FUN!!! You choose not to partake of it, it's YOUR CALL.

[mac56]

55. Whatever.

My loss. Yes, I know.

But I haven't yet called anyone who disagrees with me "landlocked, blind, arrogant, and ignorant". To do such a thing would point out the namecaller's "limitations and lack of understanding", don't you agree?

[Karenina]

59. Whatever.

[jmowreader]

31. The same thing could be said for NASCAR

I'll throw a hypothetical at you.

You're Tony Stewart and you're running sixth at Talladega, where you've got to have a partner if you want to pass anyone.

Sitting in front of you are three guys running three-wide and side-drafting: Junior in the bottom groove, Mark Martin in the middle and Matt Kenseth at the top of the track. Ahead of THEM is Kevin Harvick with Robby Gordon pushing him around the track. The seventh-place car, with your teammate in it, is fifteen lengths back and closing fast. It's lap 180 of 187. (To envision this:

Kenseth
Harvick Gordon Martin Stewart
Earnhardt
)

If you want to win this race, you've got to get past all five of those other drivers--which means you need to partner up with someone, help draft him past those other two cars, then draft past Harvick and Gordon before passing your partner in a slingshot move.

Who are you going with? Earnhardt will take you to the front, but he's very hard to pass once you're up there. Martin doesn't have enough car to get you in front of Kevin Harvick, and you took Kenseth out of the race at Daytona so the odds of him dropping in front of Mark Martin, using his teammate to challenge Harvick, and letting you finish in 25th place are REAL high. Do you take a chance on one of these guys, do you wait until your teammate J.J. Yeley comes up behind you then let him take you past Harvick, or do you protect a good sixth-place finish? OR do you hope your crew chief is right when he comes on the radio and says "Tony, get behind the 8 because the 29 thinks he's going to run out of gas on lap 185"?

Oh yeah, before I forget: NASCAR changed the aero package fifteen minutes before final practice because the first six rows on the starting grid all turned laps faster than 205mph, and the back of your car now feels like it's a foot off the ground.

There is a lot of skill in NASCAR, but you are obviously unable to watch the game.

[Juffo Wup]

36. Well done

Of course, only us unsosphisticated American jingo rednecks like NASCAR.

[Karenina]

43. You're schimpfin' at the wrong gal, pal

I wanted to DRIVE. I KNEW I had the right stuff until my Canadian boyfriend took me to Watkins' Glen where I realized up close and real personal that it was the same scene I experienced as a kid in my ballet class when I went up on point and was thrown out of the class for being #1.

GOOOOO MICHA!!!! Would that I had been born white and male.

[jmowreader]

44. I hate trying to express tabular data in HTML

Now that I look at that in "posted" form it looks like Harvick is three-wide with Earnhardt and Kenseth, which isn't the case in the example.

Let's try this from the Goodyear Blimp instead of the infield...

Harvick
R. Gordon
Earnhardt Martin Kenseth
Stewart

[Ravenseye]

32. Spot on

The same logic rips apart Americans who cut on Soccer because it's not popular here. They make fun of it out of a position of ignorance for the most part.

Merits of Soccer?
-Just about anyone can play it, anywhere, with very little equipment besides a ball.
-It's a game of teamwork where individual efforts are almost never capable of winning a game. If a single player takes a ball and beats 6-8 players on his way, solo, taking the ball end to end and scoring, it makes the top five goals of all time. It happens that infrequently.
-It's a game of flow. For the most part it's a game where the players need to constantly adjust to a fluid system. It's not static like Baseball or even to a degree American Football, but one where every inch of space on the field enters the calcualations in a good player's head. It's a mental game.
-It's an exhausting game. It's an endurance nightmare. There are no fat soccer players, unlike other sports.
-It's an exciting game. It's a game where each game has moments of high excitement. Where games like Basketball have constant scoring, there are relatively few amazing moments where the whole world jumps out of their chair. That happens in nearly every soccer game. The excitment gets bottled up and released. Sort of like Baseball in that regard. You sit for a while and watch the game and then something amazing happens, or almost happens and everyone stands up.

How's that?

[mac56]

57. Thank you.

Finally. That's what I've been looking for.

[Writer]

9. Here let me try this out: Americans are obsessed with winning and losing.

Even the MLS won't permit a game to end in a tie because "there must be a clear winner and loser." I find this line of thinking childish.

So many soccer games are low scoring or end in penalty kicks - so what? It's the beauty of the play that makes the game so wonderful to observe. The control of the ball, the passing, the beautiful goals and almost goals. These men are themselves are at the apex of athletic talent. They swivel, turn, and jab - their bodies roll with utmost precision at times - and if they manage to put the ball into the back of the next, that long-awaited score, the effect on the spectator is breathtaking. Pure human beauty.

But we Americans aren't used to the beauty of humanity. Only black-and-white logic. Winners and losers. And that's why it has taken us so long to catch up with the rest of the world and fall in love with this game.

I'm 31 and I grew up in this country not knowing about the World Cup. This was the first time I have been able to watch it nearly in its entirety and I have completely fallen in love with it. I cannot wait until 2010.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

14. Well said

:thumbsup:

[LeftyMom]

16. There's some merit to that

A lot of the NHL's rules had to be adapted to appeal to American tastes outside of the traditional hockey strongholds of the northeast.

Yours is a much better argument for soccer than "lots of people like it!" It rather reminds me of the articles on the subject in this month's national geographic, which taked a lot about the flow of the game and soccer's relationship to national identity in many places.

[-..__...]

21. The same could be said about professional wrestling.

Perhaps even more so with regard to "athletic talent".


"These men are themselves are at the apex of athletic talent. They swivel, turn, and jab - their bodies roll with utmost precision at times - and if they manage to put the ball into the back of the next deliver a knee-drop off the top rope to an opponents neck,that long-awaited score submission hold, the effect on the spectator is breathtaking. Pure human beauty."

[Writer]

25. If a member of the WWF can dribble a ball and pass it to another teammate

for a bicycle kick into the net, then this comparison is poor. It's about skill not boorishness.

[Kire]

40. MLS allows ties

The Red Bulls home opener was a scoreless tie.

I'm 31 and I grew up in this country not knowing about the World Cup. This was the first time I have been able to watch it nearly in its entirety and I have completely fallen in love with it. I cannot wait until 2010.

I could say the exact same thing (even the 31 part)

[idgiehkt]

42. yes and unlike baseball, more than one person moves at a time

"So many soccer games are low scoring or end in penalty kicks - so what? It's the beauty of the play that makes the game so wonderful to observe."

Baseball can be too but baseball puts me to sleep. Soccer is beauty to behold. How many miles a game do these guys run just to score that couple of points? Amazing.

[WCGreen]

28. Ohh Girl....

You nailed it.....

[JVS]

39. .

:thumbsup:

[Ekirh]

7. "shrugs"

I enjoy soccer.. anyone else's dislike for it does not ruin my enjoyment of it. . .

[Karenina]

53. YUP! I just want folks

to LEAVE ME IN PEACE while I watch the game.

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

8. What is this "soccer" of which you speak?

Meh - I had a blast during this cup - as sad as it ended. It's their loss, man.

:thumbsup:

[HuckleB]

10. It is interesting to see the old "I don't understand it..."

"... so it's clearly boring crap" routine at a place like DU. Anyone who has attended a soccer match in, say, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, and on and on knows there is no more exciting thing to do on the planet. But, I digress. That's my opinion. It's just that, outside of baseball, I don't get very excited watching the old American standards. I wish I did. My friends still do. I don't know what changed. Clearly they are wrong, though, because I am always right.

[LaurenG]

12. Well if it makes you feel any better

your buddy has posted a picture of your first date together on another site. (old picture but I never knew it was him :rofl:) He's actually a fairly good looking girl. A little make up and...


Anyway end of thread-jack.

[cassandra uprising]

13. What just a minute,

are you insulting my isolated simplistic monolithic worldview, with sarcasm no less? I don't know if I could handle that Matcom. You just go to far.

[CrownPrinceBandar]

15. "The rest of the world is wrong"........

Gee, I wonder why the "rest of the world" thinks were such assholes? :shrug:

[cassandra uprising]

20. set and serve

:applause:

[YellowRubberDuckie]

17. I absolutely agree with you...

But one thing: The US plays soccer...the rest of the world plays football...there IS a difference. MLS has NOTHING on any other league in the world.
Duckie

[texanwitch]

19. I am not into sports period.

I am glad so many people do enjoy sports but not everyone does.

[Cannikin]

23. I'm with you, texanwitch. Sports just arent my cup of tea.

but I dont have a problem with them.

[RiffRandell]

22. Agreed.

Husband and I watched the whole game.

[WritingIsMyReligion]

24. And another flame-worthy topic rears its ugly head....

:rofl::rofl:

This is going in the direction of Fat Actress and Olive Garden and the 'Dan, inn'nt it?

:eyes:

[KamaAina]

29. I thought I had some pretty good snark going here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=105&topic_id=5350928&mesg_id=5350928

then I come back after two hours to find one flippin' response. One.

[RagingInMiami]

30. Not much of a response either

[Kellanved]

33. Thanks,

I posted a few times about the nonsense posted by a handful of DUers with some strange anti-Soccer agenda, especially regarding :
prostitution - didn't happen
violence - didn't happen
racism - didn't happen.

As a sport, people are free to like other sports better, the BS associated with it was a bit too much. But, well - very few people were bad sports and making fun about it is more than just OK. Finding it boring is just as OK, just the nefarious anti-European motives got to me.

[BlueIris]

34. It feels like the morning after the 2006 Oscars in here right now.

Blech.

[Placebo]

35. F this threads.

Just keep rollin' your eyes.

[Name removed]

51. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Ava]

37. maybe it's because ... oh i don't know...

people were actually WATCHING the game rather than posting online during it.

[JVS]

38. I refuse to kowtow to a stupid sport out of political correctness.

Soccer sucks. If the rest of the world has been duped, that's their problem.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

46. Wow...

You are allowed to have an opinion...you aren't allowed to shit all over the rest of the worlds'. That's what Bush is for.

[JVS]

48. Shitting on other peoples' opinions is what having an opinion is all about

And YOU don't get to tell me what I get to do. If my opinion is that everyone else is fucked in the head, then it's my right to say so. If not, then you have no right to tell me I'm wrong.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

49. I guess when you look at it that way, you're not wrong...

But still, I hold to MY opinion.
Duckie

[JVS]

50. Ok

:hug:

[Tsiyu]

41. Mmmmmmm soccer : P

Male soccer players have great legs and tookuses.

Baseball and football players' outfits are too practical to be very sexy.

Basketball players squeak too much and tennis players all look like they're still in the eighties.

NASCAR? :rofl: (Although the guy who just won the Indy500 Race was really adorable)


But a soccer player? (or rugby player :loveya: - ugga)........mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm :P

[Floogeldy]

47. U gotta be kidding me.

:smoke:

[Skittles]

52. yup

nothing like good old American ignorance, which I already had enough of as an American growing up in England. :o

[ContraBass Black]

54. It's just another Lounge whipping boy

For people desperate to feel clever.

[Kellanved]

61. Lounge whipping is fine

The GD whipping was the problem. Based on a few articles about fears regarding prostitution, violence and racism (neither of which has materialzed during the event), they went on a crusade against the sport and the event.


As to it being boring: de gustibus non est disputandum

[Karenina]

63. Pssst... Kellanved

Amis only do pig latin. :evilgrin:

[judaspriestess]

56. Bill Clinton was at the world cup for example

I fell in love with Soccer in 2002. This was the first year my fiancee watched soccer and he fell madly in love with the sport. The athleticism is incredible. There are no out of shape soccer players (lots of incredibly gorgeous men,bonus for me). I am sorry to see the world cup end. The USA womens team won the world cup. What an honor. It is truly a sport where you can say you are the "world champion".

We are going to try hard as hell to go to the MLS all star game Aug. 5th. MLS is going to play against Chelsea who has players like Ballack on there. AWESOME!!!

I've seen a soccer game in Buenos Aires! Priceless.........

SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER, SOCCER

[JackDragna]

58. I like soccer, in addition to many other sports.

It's different from sports with constant scoring, but compared to say, a popular sport like American football or baseball, there's a lot more constant action. If one knows what to look for, there's plenty to watch away from the ball. There's no draining time-outs, either. It's a fine sport.

[Burma Jones]

60. Whatever......

I've heard just as many people here (and overseas) badmouth American Football and the Grateful Dead as simplistic, stupid and boring.

That being said, I thought the end of the Italy v. Germany match was one of the most exciting things I've ever seen in sports.....

[Karenina]

62. It was truly STUNNING.

WHA HOPPEND??? My jaw hit the floor and my brain kept tellin' my eyes they were lyin'. :wow:

[Threedifferentones]

64. The "Big Three" American sports

are all highly dependent on size and strength, and break down reasonably well into numbers (especially true of baseball). In soccer height and strength are modest advantages, and numbers can be meaningless.

I think most Americans are too fixated on watching the ball, especially since they do not really understand the game. The key to enjoying soccer is that each moment is a new strategic situation from the last. Scoring goals requires perfect timing and great teamwork as well as fantastic speed and skill, which is something I think few Americans appreciate. The fun in the game is not waiting to see a goal scored, but in watching the players move the ball with such precise touches up the field.

Unfortunately, the MLS is quite medicore, and so Americans rarely get to see world class football. The commentators on American TV are also quite ignorant and talk too much, which I think detracts from watching the games.

Finally, I must add that I too am I bit upset at the way my countrymen seem to write off this great sport, but I think our attitude is slowly changing.

[Karenina]

66. EXACTAMUNDO!!!

Americans do not understand the game. I say that as an American NFL fan who attended Pastor Tannen's "church" in the wayback and taught her family to leave her alone on Sundays until 4pm.

It took some YEARS of dissing FUßBALL as "boring," (they run in this direction then the other and nobody scores) before Klinsi caught my attention. It was just cuz he's SOOO CUTE that I FINALLY got into figuring out exactly what HE was into. My infatuation with yet another blonde, white male opened up a whole new world.

Today when I watch a game, 45 minutes fly by so quickly when I concentrate on the play. HÄ? It's halftime already???? The skill, endurance and MENTALITÄT are all a part of my enjoyment. I am now able to spot "abseits" as accurately as I was able to make ref's calls in Ami Football!

We ROTW types have experienced a DREAM SUMMER in Schwartz-Rot-Gold. It was SO MUCH FUN. I can only feel sorry for those whose prejudices disallowed their participation.

[everythingsxen]

65. I love Soccer (or Football as it is called everywhere else)

It's the only sport I have ever really played with interest.

Of sports, it is one of my favorites, it and hockey. I am just not that into sports in general, but I did catch as many of the matches from this World Cup as I could.

[ComerPerro]

67. I think soccer is dull, but I don't like to see people trash it in threads