I agree, soccer is a bunch of sweaty guys in tacky uniforms(excuse me, kits)randomly kicking the ball around and maybe,just maybe someone makes a goal.People watch it because it represents their city or country, take the politics out of it and most soccer fans after fifteen minutes of watching are out mowing the lawn.By far the biggest problem I have with soccer is the low amount of athleticism involved, they stand 20 ft in front a goal thats the size of a 2 car garage door opening and they still miss it!!Imagine of a basketball player missed the basket by that much that many times-he would be laughed off of the team.Scoring is also a problem, out of 106 soccer scores I got from ESPN, 29% ended in a tie,1-0 alone came up 23%.
What a brilliant deconstruction Professor Irwin Corey.
I haven’t followed the NBA closely for a while but I don’t remember players kicking a basketball into the hoop past a designated “hoopkeeper”.
hmm, yes, aha, fascinating, aha, yes, yes, good, good,
no…please do go on.
Yes! Yes! This is exactly why none of us watches it! You’ve nailed it on the first try!
I think the funniest part of it is the “tacky” comment, because of course US sports are famous the world over for their subtle and tasteful emblems and names.
Ah, so that’s why ratings go down as we go further into tournaments ;).
Bowling a bouncer to a man who quenched theFires of Babylonwould be hilarious.
I’m having fun just imagining the look he’d give the bowler afterwards.
I am a good soccer fan but not one that tries to shove it down anyone’s throat and can understand why someone would find it “boring”. There’s little scoring, few scoring opportunities and the diving doesn’t help either. I get the arguments against the first 2 btw.
As a fan, I will also admit it’s an inferior sport and the reason it’s so popular around the world is that in the USA/Canada
we were forced to develop alternatives to soccer that are much better:
American Football is physically more brutal.
Basketball requires more athleticism.
Baseball has more strategy.
Ice Hockey is faster with more scoring.
Soccer? Very fit but usually small lesser-than-life athletes compared to the above who kick a ball around until it goes into the net, and sometimes that doesn’t even happen.
That’s no disrespect to the World Cup and the unique club-supporter bond that is unique to soccer, it for American fans soccer is still a hard sell.o
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Tell Croatia that basketball requires more athleticism. BB is a game where there is a timeout (tv or otherwise) every five minutes. And has unlimited substitutions.
That’s nonsense though isn’t it?
Any sport that is played at the top level will see the participant push their bodies to a point where they can, just about, compete without breaking down. They will drill their players in skills and train them to a point where they are puking and utterly spent.
Soccer is absolutely at that level. They are supremely fit athletes and a massive amount of time, money and expertise is spent in balancing on that knife-edge of fitness and breakdown. How many basketball, ice hockey and American football players collapse on the field of play with cramp and fatigue? as multiple soccer players do every match.
Certain sports favour certain physical traits and values some areas of performance over others. You cannot compare one to the other and say they are “better” because that is a purely subjective opinion. Basketball players are fit for purpose on court not for a pitch, same for all the others sports you mention. They are not “better” or “worse” overall merely fit for their own, individual purpose.
But, last point, *ALL *of them are operating at the limits of what the human body can do within their relevant sphere. Because that is how you gain an edge and if you don’t do it the opposition will. Why anyone would think the same doesn’t apply to soccer is beyond me.
Life sized players are a feature, not a bug. It makes the potential player pool so much deeper than football or basketball.
These guys are greyhounds. Skilled, nimble greyhounds.
At the same speed, yes. But batted baseballs are much faster in terms of exit velocity than cricket balls.
I’m a huge fan of great fielding in cricket. That’s the one part of the game for which I think world class cricket is light years ahead of world class baseball. But if the implication is that a baseball field full of cricket players without gloves could play decent defense, I’d bet against it.
I know this because my cousin, an excellent cricket player in India with a room full of trophies, came here on a visit and claimed that baseball players were wimps for using gloves. My friends and I took him to a local baseball field and started hitting baseballs at him, fungo style. Since he was my cousin, I was hoping he’d impress and he did dazzle us on a few, but sadly, the fielding percentage was pretty low.
I don’t think us cricket snobs reckon more, hard catches would be held, just that the big gloves seem a bit…ostentatious? The difficulty of taking bare-handed catches is a feature of cricket.
As for the speed, I’m certain they are quicker off the bat but that drops off quite quickly and I don’t think baseball fielders are routinely taking catches as close as some of the cricket fielders (who are routinely within 10 yards of the bat).
Have a quick look at this link. The baseball comes off the bat so fast that sometimes a pitcher doesn’t have time to react.
I don’t doubt it, the same is true for bowlers but they end up much closer to the bat, it probably evens out it terms of reaction time
When I was a kid I was always picked to pitch for neighborhood pickup games because I was the only one halfway decent at it (I won’t go so far as to say I was good). One time the ball got hit back at me and hit my cheekbone. It didn’t do anything more than bruise me but I remember it hit me so hard I thought the bat was thrown at me. And holy hell did it hurt.