I watched the Honduras/Chile game today. Honduras was thoroughly and completely curb-stomped. They controlled the ball probably 25% of the time. They took fewer than three honest shots at the goal the entire game. Chile took at least a dozen shots, and were on offense so much the Chilean goalie could have cooked breakfast and smoked a cigar and nobody would have noticed he was missing.
The game ended 1-0. The one goal Chile scored had a profoundly lucky unintentional ricochet off a defender, which then caused a second profoundly lucky unintentional ricochet off an unsuspecting attacker, changing the course of the ball enough so the goalie mis-timed the save.
That’s it? That’s how soccer games play out? A lucky shot is the difference between a completely outclassed team getting a tie or a loss? How is this game the world’s most popular sport? What am I missing?
I’m not a huge football fan either but I do love the World Cup. I think what you’re describing as a bug (that overwhelming dominance on the field is hard to convert into overwhelming dominance on the scoreboard) is seen by most football fans as a feature. Unlike Rugby or American football where stronger teams are able to grind weaker opponents into the dust, it’s so difficult to score in Football that weaker sides have more chances of getting lucky than other sports. Well that’s my take anyway.
Some of us just enjoy watching the play regardless of goals. Goals are nice highlights, but they’re not the be-all and end-all. I have seen some really boring 4-1 games. Best game of the last World Cup was probably Italy-Germany, which was 0-0 until deep into extra time.
That said, I understand the frustration of a superior side having nothing to show for its efforts. OTOH, what does “superior” mean? Chile deserved a bigger lead today, from what I saw of it, but if you look at Brazil vs. North Korea yesterday, it was 0-0 for an hour and Brazil had not surprisingly played the better attacking football. But North Korea had defended really well too. 0-0 seemed fair enough to me at the time and it was entertaining to see if Korea could hold them at bay (in the end they couldn’t, and it finished 2-1).
I personally wouldn’t mind if soccer were a little higher scoring. Say an average of 3.5 goals per game, when the current average is more like 2.5 or maybe a bit lower.
The OP is bitching because a weaker team beat a stronger team, and how boring a goal seemed because of a lucky bounce. It’s complaining about the sport on the strength of one game without knowing anything about it and then declaring it worthless.
And by the way, weaker teams sometimes beat stronger teams in every sport that has ever been played. Otherwise no one would play them.
If it had been 1-0 to Honduras you might have a point.
But only if you persist with this notion that the “best” team has some incontravertable right to win. It seems to be a curiously American judgement about soccer that isn’t applied in other US domestic sports.
The Chilean goal was a beauty. If Beausjour had made the deflection, which was the way it looked initially, it was arguably the most clinically executed goal of the tournament so far. That it went in zag zig rather than zig zag, que sera, sera.
There was absolutely no luck involved in creating the position. There was no luck involved in Beausjour being in the correct position to turn the cross inside the post. Look where he was when the move started. No Honduran player missed a tackle or was caught seriously out of position. The move created a few inches of room through technical brilliance against an outgunned but defensively orientated team in a crowded penalty area. As Gary Player (amongst others) said. “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
He really isn’t. You don’t necessarily have to think his reason for displeasure is valid, but you have legitimately misunderstood his point. His complaint was that one team’s complete domination of the game was barely reflected in the score (and might have not have been reflected at all save for one mildly fortunate bounce).
To someone accustomed to, say, American football, where the kind of dominance that Chile displayed would almost certainly be rewarded with a large margin of victory, that could easily just feel wrong.
Then he just not watch it and stop complaining about … “How is this game the world’s most popular sport?”
He obviously doesn’t get it. It is a completely different mindset than watching a sport like American football, or basketball when there’s a score every 10 seconds.
Yes, one team dominated the other, and despite that, they lost. That’s the fucking beauty of it. You can’t just coast on beating up on the other guy … you have to finish. Closers fuck the prom queen.
The op is right. That’s one of the frustrations of being a fan - when your team are obviously the better team but you still can’t actually win. Most of the time it doesn’t happen - the best team wins. But sometimes the underdog can hold the opposition off for the whole game. It gives them something to play for. Even though they are obviously being outplayed, as long as it is 0-0 they are still in the game.
Good example is Spain v Switzerland today. Spain tipped as one of the countries that could win the whole thing, they played better than Switzerland but they lost 1-0. That’s how it goes - if you don’t translate your dominance into actual goals you might lose.
At it’s best though, it’s a thing of beauty. When your team are both dominant AND score goals - such as Germany the other day.
Which is precisely where they go wrong. That is the very nature of all sport.
Or are you saying that in a NFL/baseball/basketball season you don’t hear commentary on a weekly basis of the ilk “Despite holding overwhelming field possition ZZZ didn’t score the win they deserved” or “YYY got out of gaol (jail) after being in a losing position all game” or “If XXX had shot the ball better they would have won easily”. “The closeness of the final score didn’t reflect WWW’s dominance”.
Let me just correct one thing. Honduras didn’t dominate and lose.
Chile dominated and won.
The OP mistook a goal that was scored due to good positioning as one based entirely on luck.
Soccer is a difficult sport to watch. It takes more of a brain to understand what’s going on than a sport like football (not saying I don’t like American football, just that it takes less of an understanding of the game to watch).
Take a look at the first goal Brazil scored against North Korea. It was a simple pass from Roninho and a easy, skipping shot from Elena. All in all if you watch that it seems easy. It’s teh fact that Robinho created the space for himself, Elena timed his diagonal run absolutely perfectly, and Robinho’s pass was picture perfect in both timing and position that created the opportunity for Elena, who simply had to slide it past the keeper, which requires less power and more precision.
It’s a game where so much happens off the ball that is essential to the play that people viewing it for the first time will miss 90% of what’s actually going on.
Now my advice for the OP: Triangles. Look for the triangles and you’ll begin to understand the passing game.
Actually, I think you’re not seeing the similarity. Imagine one baseball team does not nothing but strike out and the other team gets a dozen hits but in the end only scores one run off a fluke error. The point is that dominating your opposition/getting hits is not the point of the game, getting goals/scoring runs is. A great offensive display met a great defensive stand. Unlike some sports, defense matters greatly in soccer.
And hell, arguably Spain dominated Switzerland by an even greater amount today (75% possession) and they lost.
That off the ball action mentioned by PopeJewish is important and you don’t really see it on tv. You only really fully appreciate it when you watch a game live and you can see the whole field.
Anyway, I guess if you boil it down to its essence, the OP’s complaint is that there’s too much emphasis on finishing in soccer. You see the same phenomenon in other sports – football teams can drive up and down the field but fail to score touchdowns, baseball teams can leave a ton of runners on base, and even in basketball a team can create excellent shots all game long that just happen not to fall. It’s just that, in those sports, all the stuff that leads up to actually scoring tends to have a more direct correlation with tangible success than in soccer (and even those times that it doesn’t, the disconnect is usually better camouflaged).
And yeah, you can just say that this feature of soccer has benefits of x, y, and z, and if you don’t like it than soccer isn’t the sport for you. That’s the right answer, I’m sure. But the OP isn’t an asshole or a clod for not liking it, you know?
