Soccer is Un-American

The entry you are about to digest is perhaps my most provocative to date and may place me and my make believe world in great peril. With my penchant for offending people from all walks of life, I have officially entered the global arena with some premeditated antagonizing of roughly two thirds of the world’s citizenry who live in what is confusingly called the third world (even with my crude arithmetic ability I know that they actually live in the two-thirds world); factor in the demographic reality that most of this population is alienated, poor, hungry, angry and actively looking to scapegoat any second rate blogger for their lowly status on the world stage, and you have a recipe for disaster. But as my Myrmidons know, I am a truth teller, and the truth is that Soccer is Un-American. Never let it be said of The Captain that he didn’t courageously stand up and shout the naked truth from the safe anonymity of the internet. Notice I have waited until the eyes of the world are on the silly tournament called the World Cup of Soccer. I could have written this when no one was watching, like during the Olympics. But yours truly has never seen a fight he can’t pick, so here we go!

We in America unapologetically play sports with our hands and we play games that end with a winner and a loser. I have to laugh whenever I hear some ignorant “futball” fan criticizing the USA for playing the truly great game of American football mostly with our hands. We only call it “football” to mock the lame game the rest of the world plays. So am I supposed to feel inadequate because some poor farmer from Uruguay can bounce a ball on his foot? Maybe if he tried planting seeds with his hands instead of with his feet he’d be able to grow enough food to feed his country. Maybe if he practiced composing the alphabet by holding a pen between his thumb and forefinger rather than between his toes he’d be literate. Maybe if he cupped his hands together to scoop up and drink some life giving water instead trying to splash kick a few drops into his mug he wouldn’t be so parched and dehydrated. And maybe, just maybe, if he learned to use his hands to pleasure himself, he wouldn’t overpopulate the world with all those children he can’t afford to feed. Yes, with an active imagination and an abundance of vodka, it’s not difficult to hypothesize that the majority of the world’s problems can be traced to the popularity of soccer, a sport which insists that its players use their feet instead of their hands.

And let’s talk about the most idiotic result for a sporting event ever invented – a 0-0 tie. WTF?! Let’s take some real life examples from the ongoing World Cup and see how this is working. Take the American Soccer team, you know, the team with players whose hands weren’t good enough for them to play real sports like Football, Baseball, and Basketball. The Yanks are placed in Group A for the preliminary round of the tournament along with England, Algeria and some country whose name escapes me. There are three other Groups of four teams. Each team plays one game against the other three teams in its group with the top two teams from each group advancing to the final round of sixteen. In its first game the USA played England, a supposed Soccer juggernaut heavily favored to kick our butts. Well, they scored one whole goal (woohoo) and were on their way to victory when their goal keeper, the one player allowed to actually use his hands, bobbled a routine kick from an American player, allowing the ball to wriggle out of his hands of stone and barely over the goal line for the tying goal, or what they quaintly refer to in the two-thirds world as the “equalizer,” which is appropriate because the game ended with both sides with an equal number of goals; one each for a whopping total of two. Maybe if your spastic goalie had spent some time as a lad fielding ground balls back home he would have handled that shot and saved his country from embarrassment on the world stage. Oh well.

So England and America tie 1-1, which seems like a tidal wave of scoring when compared to England’s next match, the ever-present 0-0 result with Algeria. Meanwhile, the USA plays some Slavic country nobody’s ever heard of (is there a way to check to see if a nation is legitimate like you can check a Little Leaguer’s age by requesting to see his birth certificate – maybe ask for a copy of its Constitution or a note from its Dictator?) and falls behind 2-0 at the half; to add insult to injury, after each goal, the Slavs, who were all sporting haircuts from the eighties, did some group fairy dance straight out of A Mid Summer Night’s Dream. Well, being Americans, we fight back and tie the game and appear to take the lead late with a third goal, only some Referee from the minor leagues of the African subcontinent decides that the goal doesn’t count because the goal scorer committed a foul that is nowhere to be found in the silly soccer rule book. And that reminds me of another reason American sports rule – INSTANT REPLAY! But guess what? The World Cup governing board (I think it’s Foccer or Fifedom or something like that) doesn’t employ this modern technology, probably because the cameras needed for it require the use of hands. So this ancient Referee from the Two Thirds world doesn’t even have to explain what the infraction was – ever! The match ends in a 2-2 draw instead of a 3-2 American victory. No big deal you say; except that this is soccer, which necessitates the use of arcane tie breaker rules because they play games where NO ONE WINS.

So the Slav country had defeated Algeria and tied England 0-0 for a record of 1-0-1. Algeria, losers to the Country-who-cannot-be-named, were sitting at 0-1-1. England, with a single, solitary goal, were 0-0-2. America had an identical record. With one game left for each team, I had no fucking clue which two teams would likely advance. There were more mathematical possibilities remaining than my schooling left me equipped to analyze, so I simply paid attention to the scores of the final two matches to see if any clarity could be reached. England was playing the Slavic Pucks (my name for them) and the Americans the Algerians. If England tied the Slavs 0-0 or 1-1 and America tied the Algerians, they would have identical records and America would advance to the next round without having won a single match because they would win the tie breaker. First, they look at goal differential; but since both teams would have played three ties, they would both have identical goal differentials, which would be ZERO. So on to the next tie breaker, which is number of goals scored. Since we scored two (but really three) against Slovenia (I just remembered their name!), we would advance. OR…if England managed to defeat Slovenia 1-0, then we would need to defeat Algeria to make it to round two. We again would have the same record as England but win the same tie breaker. If you want to know what tie-breaking scenarios applied to Slovenia and Algeria, then you’ll have to do it yourself; I had a hard enough time figuring out England and America and I’m exhausted. Besides, I already knew the results before I wrote this. England did indeed defeat Slovenia 1-Nil (pretentious way soccer fans say one to nothing) which meant that the USA needed to defeat Algeria outright to advance, which they did in the nick of time by scoring the game’s only goal in extra time (which is the stupid rule which allows the referee to add “injury” time for all those times the players take a dive and roll around on the ground pretending to be hurt when they’re simply just embarrassed because they tripped over a daisy or whiffed on a kick) because they haven’t figured out like we Americans that there is such a thing as a TIME OUT! All in all, an abject failure of a sport. No clear winners. No instant replay, and no hands. No mas!

So The Captain sits hear typing with his hands, a proud American sports fan. The only time you’ll catch me using my feet is when one of my legitimates requires a swift kick in the ass for doing stupid shit – you know, like playing youth soccer!

Believe The Captain when he says: I may regularly put my foot in my mouth but you’ll never catch it near one of those soccer balls!

Yours shagging balls with one hand and practicing birth control with the other,

The Captain

Post Script: Before I had the opportunity to post this on the world wide interweb, Team USA played a team from Ghana, a country with a geographic location unknown to 99% of Americans and a good 40% of Ghanans or Ghahanaians or whatever they’re called. There’s good news and bad news. I’ll start with the bad news. Ghana beat America. The good news? It’s only soccer, the one game on the planet that Ghana can beat us at.