I agree. In fact, it is my position that (excluding referee error, etc.) the team that wins IS the better team. At least on that day. Even if it didn’t look like it for much of the game.
Sports teams are intended to win games. They are designed to win games. Their purpose on the field is to win games. The team that does this (within the rules) is superior to the team which does not, by the definition of success which is at the very center of what organized competition is.
Out of all of the “American football vs. Soccer” back and forth that has been going on here for the last few weeks, this is easily the most ludicrous statement I’ve read thus far. A newcomer to American football usually can’t even follow what in the hell is going on, even in the most basic sense.
Right. Despite some upthread suggestions otherwise, this is what the OP said - adding that the margin of victory didn’t come close to reflecting the margin of displayed skill.
I didn’t draw that conclusion from reading the OP. He’s saying considerable luck was involved, which I think is a valid point when the last event before the goal was accidental contact between ball and (admittedly well positioned) attacker’s left hip.
Something tells me that “Soccer fans simply have better brains” isn’t going to be a fruitful line of argument.
A lot. The games of the current World Cup give you a wrong impression about scoring: 25 goals in 16 matches, 1.56 per game, is the worst average ever. You are right to point out that Chile’s dominance wasn’t reflected in the final score but that too is a little bit unusual – yet, it can be explained: Alexis Sanchez played well but made bad decisions in abundance: he created more than once a great opportunity for a goal but then missed the window of opportunity when he didn’t play the pass to the free man, held the ball too long and tried to run circles around opposing defenders instead of speeding up the game.
The second reason for their low scoring was Humberto Suazo. Didn’t see him in the game? Yeah, he is injured. But he is the one who reliably scores for Chile: ten times during their qualification for the Cup, for example.
But the fact that Chile produced only one goal wasn’t particularly interesting to me. I was far too impressed by their tactical formation, aka the strategy their coach, Marcelo Bielsa, had created for that game.
He had developed a defensive strategy that enclosed Honduras almost perfectly and made it very hard for them to even leave their half. This was done by a very high line of the wingers and the central midfield. And even their full backs stood so high that the opposing wingers had to drop back into their own half. That was an interesting but pretty dangerous formation because quick counter attacks find a lot of open space leading towards Chile’s goal.
But Bielsa had planned for that and had given his team the correct answers (at least against an opponent with mediocre passing skills, little creativity and no world class attackers). And whenever Honduras changed his shape, Bielsa responded accordingly with his substitutions, helping his team to maintain the high pressure on Honduras by keeping half of his men or more in their half.
If you have never watched football before, you might have missed his close to perfect strategy and his opponent’s ineffective counter measures completely – but football fans didn’t.
The game is far, far more than scoring: it’s strategy and tactics and counter measures, positional play and formation shifting, passing and tackling, control of the ball and the creation of chaos, team discipline and individual creativity, playfulness and straightforwardness.
A lot of that is easy to miss, for a novize and in this tournament anyways.
But ask yourself this: Do you really think billions of people enjoy a sport that’s boring per se?
Easy on the OP. He’s trying to like the game!
That’s not what I meant. I meant that there is more strategy off the ball and thus it’s harder to grasp than a game like football. It doesn’t take MUCH effort to grasp, just more. I’m also a football fan (9ers, unfortunately) but I simply think that the game is more approachable than soccer. You could argue that with the vast number of plays in an NFL playbook that it has more strategy (I wouldn’t argue that personally, just that it’s simply a different type of strategy) and arguing of what play should be used when, why the shotgun formation has no place in NFL, etc etc, requires a great deal of knowledge that the casual fan simply doesn’t have. I merely meant that the sport is more approachable and perhaps more immediately rewarding.
I don’t see where the OP is suggesting that soccer is boring. What he finds troubling is that a much better team only just managed to win.
The other contextual note (if the OP is an American) is that he’s been spoonfed, every four years or more often, a series of condescending, didactic, hectoring articles about how Americans need to get with the f’ing program and wake up to the beauties of the “world’s most popular game.” I’d suspect that’s the genesis of his game attempt to “try to like” soccer – it’s kind of an odd world where an entire nation is being exhorted that they “need to” “try to like” a sport they don’t really care for (I’d certainly never tell a Japanese he needed to “try to like” NASCAR or curling).
In that context – I’ve played soccer (recreationally/badly). I know the rules. I’ve been to a few live games. I’ve watched hours of televised games flicker by on barroom televisions. And . . . I have the same problem the OP has (plus a few others). And it’s not provincialism – I always regarded baseball as too random as well, when you’d see two teams split a doubleheader 10-3 and then 6-2 for the other team.
I’m speaking with a fairly recent annoyance fresh in mind. Not necessarily “trying to like” soccer, but because circumstances conduced to it, I watched what should have been an electrifying scene – I caught the entire France-Uruguay World Cup opening match. Sitting at a sidewalk cafe. In Paris. On a lovely night, with a bar full of excitable Frenchies and lovely mamselles, and a glass of pop in hand (several glasses). Oh, did I say I watched the entire match? Well, I left about 86 minutes into a gripping 0-0 snoozefest. Soccer, if you couldn’t grab me with a setup like that – no amount of nagging sportwriter lecturing is going to get me excited about watching greasy-haired guys in floppy nylon shorts kicking the ball back, forth, back, forth, out of bounds, hitting it with their head, hitting it with their head in the other direction, now out of bounds again for good measure. So that’s the deal – I’ll leave soccer alone, if the PTB stop telling me that’s not an option.
I have to admit, I used to think professional soccer was boring. However, I’ve now learned to enjoy it for at least the first two and a half hours, right up to the point where somebody makes a shot on goal.
I had a very good discussion with a rabid soccer fan some time ago, and he completely changed my opinion. My position at the time was that the game would be improved with with average results like 5-4 rather than 2-0. I now think I was wrong.
Let’s look at basketball, which I enjoy watching. Either the teams are evenly matched, in which case they trade baskets for 3.5 of the 4 quarters, and it only gets exciting in the last 6 minutes, or one team dominates the other and the result is pretty much beyond doubt by half time. Either way, defining moments aren’t likely to happen early in the game. Defining periods, sure, but not defining moments.
With soccer, the scoring is so low that a defining moment can happen at any time. Each time a push is made towards the goal, this could be the moment in which the game is won. On the other hand, if one team has a one goal lead, that could be wiped out in a moment of lapsed concentration. It’s very common for a result to be changed right up until the final whistle (unless Australia is playing Germany of course). For me, this makes watching a game much more interesting.
I still won’t go out of my way to watch a game, but if I do see one, I enjoy it far more than I used to because of the above explanation.
ETA: Of course I can also watch a 5 day cricket Test which ends in a draw and still think it was a great game, so perhaps my opinions need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Yeah, it can sometimes feel like the longest 90 minutes of your life when you get a boring game.
But it can be quite gripping when you get a good game.
Think Lord Mondegreen has pretty much nailed it. Goals are precious. And there’s always the chance that players like Messi of Argentina or Ronaldo of Portugal will suddenly transform the game by doing something really out of the ordinary like just run round everyone and score a goal.
I’m starting to get tired of the ridiculous meme that soccer is somehow a brainiac’s game. It’s a pathetic and weak argument. It’s a subtle game and requires a lot more practiced timing and skill than most non-fans would ever guess, but this isn’t difficult or advanced or complicated. It would take the span of a single game to grasp the basic strategies that teams use to score a goal. You could watch an entire season and not understand how even just the offensive and defensive lines in American football interact.
Soccer is more subtle. Subtle does not equal sophisticated.
Elano.
Well… several points:
This isn’t how soccer games play out, it’s how this game played out. Sure, this sort of thing happens and sometimes it’s even worse and the clearly dominating team loses. Thing is, those are the exceptions, not the rule. Luck does play a part in this game but skill and sound tactics usually come first. That this isn’t always the case bothers some people more or less depending on the individual. Personally, I’m in the “feature instead of a bug” camp. There’s nothing wrong with an element of chance in a game.
If this is your first game then I’d say you’re missing most of what makes the game fun, which is all those tactical aspects that the other dopers have mentioned, plus the emotional involvement that’s also a big deal in most sports. It’s true that football isn’t the most sophisticated sport in the world, nor the most cerebral (for this I vote for chess*), but there’s a lot going on that’s very hard to spot if you’re new to the game. Football tactics and the great displays of skill from the players are not always obvious and increased familiarity helps immensely. I’d disagree that it’s more complicated than american football, which I find mostly incomprehensible (and consequently boring as hell), but that just goes to show how unfamiliarity is key.
But hey, if you don’t like it, that’s okay too. This weekend I was more excited with the UFC than with the World Cup and I’d trade any game that doesn’t feature Brasil playing for the Liddell x Franklin fight any day and MMA** is unfortunately still a very small sport. Hell, I have a friend that isn’t interested in any sport whatsoever that doesn’t feature motorbikes.
As I noted in the pit thread (pages 6 and 7), Skinner and Freeman have shown that the odds of the best team winning the world cup is only about 28%. Low scoring games have a lot of randomness to them.
Cite: [0909.4555] Soccer matches as experiments: how often does the 'best' team win?
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24182/
http://www.insidescience.org/current_affairs/best_team_not_guaranteed_world_cup_success
Not from the paper, but here’s a graph of average goals scored in the world cup since the 1920s: http://wm54.inbox.com/thumbs/2e_130b90_e2d4d8d_oP.png.thumb Something screwy happened in the early 60s, and it has only gotten worse since then. The average number of goals in 2006 was something like 2.3. Once in the 1950s it was above 5. Why did soccer defense improve so much more than offense?
This was Brazil’s second goal.
The first goal came on a shot from an almost impossible angle that should have always been covered by the keeper - but the keeper stepped up-field to guard against a cross, and the shooter was able to curl the ball in “near post” for a goal. It was an absolutely amazing display of tactical awareness: no one should normally be taking that shot because the keeper can trivially block it, except the player looked up and saw that the near post was wide open, even if the angle available was tiny. A cross would have gone right to the keeper, so the player did what he could - shot for the space between the post and keeper and put a little spin on it to give it a more more lean towards the goal as it slowed down.
I played 3.5 years varsity soccer (at a small school), and love getting the chance to watch guys at the absolute peak of the game. It does help a ton to know just how difficult what they’re doing is, especially with the timing of runs and the fitness to be able to accelerate and decelerate for 45 minutes without a break.
Just because a team has nearly continuous possession doesn’t mean they’re “dominating”. Goals are what matters. If you’re able to defend successfully and lure enough of the opponent’s fullbacks into making attacking runs, you might be able to counterattack profitably. Possession of the ball means very little compared to position of players.
I agree with th others that you are really only talking about what happened this game and not something that is typical of football perse. I also watched the game and actually agree with you it should have been 3-0 or 4-0; if this had happened it would probably have been quite a boring game. If Chili had finished of their first 4 opportunities, we’d be left with an hour of two teams who have nothing to play for anymore.
Also - like again has been said before - this kind of thing happens in many sports. I don’t follow the NHL a lot, but I believe the Candiens won a whole bunch of games in play offs, just because their opponents couldn’t get past Halak. This is part of the game and so Halak is hailed as a hero, just as the North Koreans would’ve been if they’d kept it to a draw with Brazil.
In football scoring is what wins you games, but any true fan of the game is interested in so much more. A defender who keeps his goal clean, a peace of skill that creates an opportunity to get a chance at goal. Just see them as good run at 3rd down near your own goal line - in the type of football that is played wit your hands - that gives you the chance to get farther upfield; is this play really less important than the touchdown pass later on in the drive?
It was a progressive evolution but the playing formations reversed.
The classic pyramid formation 2-3-5 (defenders-midfield-forwards) used at the turn of last century has been flipped. It wouldn’t have been used by a international team since The Great War.
More defensive formations were brought in, in part in response to efforts to increase the scoring rate like modifying the offside rule, but mainly due to increased fitness, speed and workrates. Goals are more often scored by midfielders and defenders moving forward to support rather than by passing interchanges between the forwards.
Also elements of a “don’t lose” ethic rather than “go for the win” particularly when applied to national pride.
The 4-2-4 formation was at it’s peak in the 1960s.
Now the standard formation is 4-4-2, and 5-3-2 is commonplace.
Some people really need to take a soccer ball on a big playing field and try using either foot to put the ball where they want to. Then they should try the same thing while someone with determination is trying to take the ball from you as you are doing it. Then, you could even try doing it while running as fast as you can while someone is trying to tackle you.
That’s not going to help Americans get into it.
It’s a broad brush but I don’t think any countries national team plays a more expansive/attacking game than is the standard in their domestic league.
The decline in goals scored is much less marked in the week in/week out competition, and that’s mainly because winning is still the prime object.
