The commie game

I love good football writing and, after reading Gulay's perverse thoughts on Galatasaray, I often go searching all over internet. Well, I hit another nugget of gold this weekend. This time from The Observer.

Basically it is about why football will never make it in the U.S. and A.. It is a cracking read and coming from Australia and having been brought up on rubgy league I can definately sympathise.

Some snippets from the Dave Eggers' article "Using your feet is for commies"

Our continued indifference to the sport worshipped around the world can be easily explained in two parts. First, as a nation of loony but determined inventors, we prefer things we thought of ourselves. The most popular sports in America are those we conceived and developed on our own: [American] football, baseball, basketball. If we can claim at least part of the credit for something, as with tennis or the radio, we are willing to be passively interested. But we did not invent soccer, and so we are suspicious of it.

Well that seems like a typical American view of the world but it is Eggers' next point that I have to agree with 100 per cent.

The second and greatest, by far, obstacle to the popularity of the World Cup, and of professional soccer in general, is the element of diving. Americans may generally be arrogant, but there is one stance I stand behind, and that is the intense loathing of penalty-fakers...

But diving in soccer is a problem. It is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging and cheating, an unappealing mix. The theatricality of diving is distasteful...

...It's disgusting, all of it, particularly because, just as all of this fakery takes a good deal of time and melodrama to put over, the next step is so fast that special cameras are needed to capture it. Once the referees have decided either to issue a penalty or not to our Fakey McChumpland, he will jump up, suddenly and spectacular uninjured - excelsior! - and will kick the ball over to his team-mate and move on.

Too bloody right.

Eggers goes on to talk about the most famous moment in American football history being Sylvester Stallone saving the day for the allies in the film "Escape to Victory" but also has a warning to us lovers of the round ball.

If you were soccer, the sport of kings, would you want the adulation of a people who elected Bush and Cheney, not once but twice? You would not. You would rather return to your roots, communist or otherwise, and fight fascism with your feet.

Excellent stuff.