Draft Day Suit

The following post is by our lovely and talented friend, Suebob. Suebob usually writes over at Red Stapler which is a hilarious blog and also coincidentally where I found this post. – Sarah

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Please bear with me. This post is kind of about World Cup but not really. You’ll see.

(DON’T LEAVE!)

(YOU CAN’T GO! WHO WILL WATER THE PLANTS?)

Thank you.

Today was the World Cup Final and of course Spain won, so I was happy, because it fell under my Suebobian rule of “If you don’t really care who is playing, root for the team with better-looking players.” Sorry, Netherlands. Something about wearing wooden shoes has made their faces pinched and pasty.

Except maybe their goalkeeper, Maarten Stecklenburg. Ai yi yi:

Forgive me, Father, for I have done perved.

I was never into futbol before this World Cup. (I call it futbol because everyone else in the world calls it “football,” not soccer, but if I say “football,” everyone thinks of NFL, so this is my compromise. Works for me.)

I don’t know what synapse snapped together in my head on June 11, but suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about World Cup. And the weird thing was that I was surrounded by futbol fans, but I had never noticed it before.

It was like I had walked through a secret door into another world – like my house had landed after a tornado and suddenly, everything was Technicolor instead of black and white.

With my World Cup fandom, I joined a new club. A club that consists of about 40% of the people on earth. I gained new friends all over the place.

The Nigerian security guards and I bonded over the knockout round. My cube neighbor, Tai, discovered me during the Round of 16. I trash-talked with a German guy in line at the grocery store. A girl in my class at church gave a dissertation on the storied career of Diego Maradona.

Everywhere I went, whenever I saw someone with a futbol jersey or t-shirt, I would start talking to them. Someone once told me that God gave us weather so that we would always have something to talk to strangers about. Now I have the weather AND futbol.

When I first started the month, I didn’t even know how the tournament structure worked. I had heard futbol was “boring” and “slow” because there are so few goals scored in a game.

By the end, I – a former NBA fan who had to quit watching because I was getting horrible headaches from screaming too loud at televised games – realized that futbol is the most thrilling game on earth precisely because of the emphasis on quality of play, NOT on just scoring more than the other team.

Today, when I watched the finals, I was among the 25% of the people on earth seeing the game at that moment. It felt amazing – like I was suddenly a citizen of the world, bonded by this crazy love of the Beautiful Game, wishing for nothing more in that moment than to see some great play.

If you didn’t watch the game, you can see all the highlights here.

Olé, Olé, Olé. I’ll see you in Rio in 2014.

(p.s. My mom gave me money to buy a cute outfit for my birthday. She said “I hope you got something nice with your birthday money,” and I had to admit “Yes, I did, Mom. I bought LA Galaxy tickets.”)

Germany just lost to Spain in the semifinals of the World Cup. They’ve been the team to beat all tournament, systematically and methodically destroying defenses one by one. But that makes no difference now. They’re playing for third place. But this post isn’t really about soccer. It’s about the German National Team’s manager, Joachim Löw, and his behavior on international television.  Just watch this:

Wow. There’s just no explaining this one away. That’s definitely not a scratch. Definitely not a delicate, necessary pick. This is a full-on, digging-for-gold, rolling-booger-in-fingers, not-his-first-time-at-the-rodeo BOOGER PICK AND EAT. With all the cards given out by referees this tournament, I don’t see why this wasn’t a red-card offense.  Do you think he honestly, truly didn’t realize what he was doing, all caught up in the moment of being on the world stage and coaching the team to beat? Or does he just not give a fuck because he’s on a world stage and is coaching the team to beat?

Either way, Löw is in serious need of some hometraining. I bet he doesn’t wash his hands after he pees and he probably needs to cut his toenails. It’s enough to make me root for the Dutch.

So, it seems the lesser of two cheaters advanced to the World Cup Finals. Yay, Dutch! It reminds me of one of my favoritest lines ever from a movie: “If there are two things I can’t stand, it’s people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.”  ~ Nigel Powers (Austin Powers: GoldMember.)

But really, every time I see anything Dutch I think of this line, so it really has nothing to do with anything, I just like it. And you could replace “Dutch” with any race (including my own) and I’d think it’s equally funny. The Dutch just got unlucky with this one.

Anyway, good riddance, Uruguay. I wrote a post about wussy-girl soccer cheating last week before the quarterfinals. And what does Uruguay do in the very next game against Ghana? Well, to prevent Ghana’s winning goal from hitting the back of the net, a Uruguayan player (not the goalie) swatted the ball away with both hands. The player would get a red card, Ghana would miss the penalty kick and Uruguay would go on to win.  That, my friends, is bs of the highest order and proof that I have made no headway in persuading the Uruguayan team to not be wussy-girl cheaters.  Furthermore, this was the biggest play of the game and ripped the heart out of an entire country.  Why? Because one man took it upon himself to to so blatantly cheat that it would result in him being ejected. Oooo… ejected. How about…”GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLL!”  That’s what should happen.

The problem seems to be the rules and how it allows a certain amount of cheating. For example, the Dutch are known floppers, their star being the biggest culprit. Here’s how flopping works: Fall down, hold your leg, cry, look around and see if anyone’s buying it, uh oh, everyone’s still running, give it another second to show them you’re in serious pain, make it convincing, crap, they’re still running, ok get up and run, but hold your hands out real wide and yell at the ref in your native tongue.

And it’s that very piece of acting that often determines whether or not a yellow or red card is given to the player who accidentally brushed the victim on the shin guard while they were both trying to kick the same ball. The better the act, the more likely you can get a player ejected or suspended from the next game. It’s not just about penalty kicks, it’s about eliminating the other players through cheating. To me, the equivalent would be a boxer faking being headbutted or punched below the belt in order to get the other fighter disqualified. It’s just dirty pool and a gross manipulation of the rules.

When the Uruguayan player knocked that ball out of the net with his hands, he knew very well what he was doing and, in the end, it resulted in his team winning. This is so wrong on so many levels. If you can’t trust the players to not cheat, you have to govern them, not place the game’s fate on their honor. In basketball, this would have been “goal tending” and resulted in a score. Simple. Boom. No controversy, no cheating, goal. Period.

I have some other ideas, but I’ll save them for my draft to the FIFA board. You see, it’s not a bad game, but I’d like to see some changes for me to watch it regularly. For example, if they had helmets, full pads, could pick up the ball and run with it, tackle each other and only one guy was allowed to kick it and nobody liked him, then I’d probably watch it more.

So, Netherlands is in the finals and Germany plays Spain today. I like Germany because they seem to be the one team that realizes the value of putting the ball in the net. And if they advance, we’ll have a rematch of the ‘74 finals, and we all remember what happened then. Wow. I’m still tingling. We should all take a moment to reflect…

Was it as good for you as it was for me?

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The first game I watched this year was when Ghana defeated the US team.  It was the first soccer game I’d watched in years, and it made me remember why I don’t watch soccer.

First, soccer is everyone’s game but ours, so it didn’t break my heart that we didn’t pop in and steal the world stage of what is, truly, everyone else’s sport. For us, soccer is like the gateway sport, something non-violent for our kids to do for a couple of years until they move on to another sport or the opposite sex.

Of course, there are obvious exceptions, but by and large, Americans care as much about soccer as they do curling, and it only happens every four years. Conversely, most other countries still involved in the tournament eat, sleep and breathe this sport, so I’m not going to get depressed about a country like Ghana advancing and the US going home.

All this being said, soccer pisses me off. I was watching a little special about what’s called “the Hand of God”, an illegal goal scored by Diego Maradona in a 1986 World Cup Quarterfinal against England.  Argentina would go on to defeat Germany and win the World cup.

What you have here is intentional cheating. He couldn’t hit it with his head, so he grabbed the ball and threw it in the goal. If you don’t know much about soccer, that’s illegal.  The ref missed it and the goal counted. Four minutes later, Maradona would score what is considered to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest goal in history.

Lionel Messi, considered to be Maradona’s successor and star player on the Argentinian team, is as equally talented at volleyball as Maradona, as he would exhibit last year.

In baseball, they have pine tar (or used to) and Vaseline under the brim of their caps. In football, they teach how to hold and push-off in subtle ways.  I guess cheating is everywhere. But usually when we find it, there’s a bit of disgrace that goes along with it. An example would be when it was discovered that the Patriots were filming signals. It tarnished their dynasty, and it should have. When we find our best home run hitters were actually just juice machines, it devalued all their accomplishments.  But it seems with soccer, getting away with cheating comes with zero disgrace, even adulation. That’s weird to me.

And it’s not only that.  At the end of the Ghana vs. US game, one of the Ghanaians laid down and feigned an injury (I know, a soccer shocker). It was obvious he was wasting time, and he took it all the way to the trainers having to bring out a stretcher to remove him. As soon as they were off the field, he got up off the stretcher and walked away.

In American football, when a guy leaves in a stretcher, the crowd either cheers as he offers the thumbs up as if to say, “Hey everyone! I’m not paralyzed!” or the crowd sits in silent prayer as the player is put into an ambulance.

In soccer, it’s as important to be a good actor as it is a good player and I find that highly annoying. I watch Ultimate Fighting and NFL football. I see bones crush, blood, mens’ limp bodies being carried away, and what I never see is one of them writhing in pain unless they are in some serious pain. I like my pain real. Call me a purist.

It really is a shame, because it’s really a great sport. Controlling anything with your feet is hard, and diving at things with your naked head, knowing full and well you’re going to hit them, is pretty impressive. Just stop being such wussy girl cheaters, please. That’s all I’m asking.

Oh yeah. Update. Here are the quarterfinal matches.

Ghana vs. Uruguay (July 2nd)

Nederlands vs. Brazil (July 2nd)

Argentina vs. Germany (July 3rd)

Paraguay vs. Spain (July 3rd)

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