Will this be the game that shuts up the soccer-haters who say that scoring is too infrequent?
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Fuck these fucking interesting times.
Let there be snark.
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bill d
Anybody who says that needs to see a replay of yesterday’s Italy vs. Japan game.
Ronnie Pudding
Well, a dreary blowout isn’t going to win over the haters.
Randinho
@bill d: Agreed.
Roger Moore
Haters will never stop saying that scoring is too infrequent. SATSQ.
MikeJ
@Roger Moore: There is not a sport on earth that isn’t mind numbingly dull if you don’t know the difference between good play and bad play. Happily, over the past 30 years more and more kids are playing and we’re finally getting to the point where people who played as kids have kids of their own.
FourTen
Soccer has made amazing gains in postive preception over the past 20 years (me, for example, have come around on it) but it won’t ‘take off,’ as it has beat itself up trying to do, until the USMNT wins not just a WC, but at an Olympic-medal-count-level of global domination.
Also, it’s “only” 3-0 so far, Spain is showing remakable…wait, now it’s 4-0….better stop now.
Punchy
Over/under for the game is a mind-blowing 8.5 (normal o/u’s are 2.5-ish).
Spain’s ML is 7.5. That, too, is stunning.
Looks like we’re on the way to a blowout.
MattR
The one nice aspect of this matchup is Spain doesn’t feel the need to exaggerate, to put it kindly, the fouls against them.
MikeJ
So what is going to happen with Fox Soccer? ESPN has Confederations Cup. NBC’s new sports net has the Premier League. Will FSN be around?
Steeplejack
No, this is the game where I renew my request for some sort of euthanasia/mercy-killing/no más rule, à la T-ball.
Randinho
@MikeJ: You will become a fan of the San Marino Premier League.
burnspbesq
The score of this game is likely to look like the score of a first-round game in a state high-school lacrosse tournament, where the top seed pulls all of its starters at halftime. 9-1 or something like that.
cmorenc
@MikeJ:
Actually, Fox Soccer Channel will be folding and disappearing in a few months, but not because they decided interest in soccer in the US was too low for it to remain commercially viable. Instead, NBC simply out-bid them for the right to cover English Premier League games and MLS, and in fact (provided you get the right cable channels) more, not less EPL games will be available to you; ESPN will broadcast some of the international games as well. Maybe someone can comment further (and with more particular accuracy) on the details of the upcoming changes.
Overall, this is a good, rather than disappointing development for US soccer fans.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Is Granny Puyol officially retired from the national team? I kinda miss that guy. Not that Spain really needs him to do what they do…
Randinho
@cmorenc: In addition, BEIN Sport is on more providers including Time Warner Cable. I assume no one has yet outbid Gol TV for the Bundesliga.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Greedy Spanish forwards need to give Reina more chances to score.
reflectionephemeral
Tahiti obviously doesn’t look great on this stage.
But they’re much, much better than I expected. That country has the same population size as Providence, RI.
Haydnseek
be@Randinho: I’m not sure about that. Is that the same as BEin sport net or whatever they call it? It was the station that broadcast the Jamaica/USA world cup qualifier. I get a lot of channels, and pay for them (Time Warner Cable). I had never heard of them, found the channel number, tuned in, but I was livid when I couldn’t access this microscopic cable channel, who for some insane reason had the rights to broadcast a very important game.
Randinho
@Haydnseek: They broadcast the USMNT away games. Blame US Soccer for that.
They’re actually pretty good, with a lot cycling and other international sports.
Haydnseek
@Randinho: Fair enough. But I prefer not to blame US Soccer for that. They aren’t a multi-billion dollar media company. I don’t expect them to be able to negotiate with a giant cable behemoth. I’ll blame Time Warner, for putting this piss-ant channel on another tier which requires me to pay extra for 52 channels of Lithuanian folk dancing and facial tatoo rituals from Papua New Guinea. US Soccer needs to hire some take-no-prisoners attorneys. This is absurd.
JWL
I’d say the U.S. ‘soccer indifferentistas’ outnumber the haters by 9 to 1.
I’ve sat and watched the final four teams slug it out for the World Cup, for example, and enjoyed it. But only because I happened to be in front of a TV when the games were played.
So it’s not that I hate or even dislike the game, it’s simply I don’t care one way or the other about it.
Thlayli
@Randinho:
Don’t blame US Soccer. Each country sells TV rights to its home games, so US Soccer has no control over who buys the away games.
Anyway, the final score here: Torres 4, Villa 3, Silva 2, Mata 1.
Randinho
I understand Lithuanian folk dancing, but what have you got against Papuan tattoo rituals?
Randinho
@Thlayli: Here’s the back story.
Haydnseek
@Randinho: I really have a hard time discussing it, but years of therapy have helped. If you saw my face, you would understand…………..But all seriousness aside, I really do value your presence here, and sincerely thank you for giving soccer fans a forum on this blog.
Haydnseek
@Randinho: Thanks for this. It’s very informative, albeit discouraging. Maybe ESPN can bigfoot this outfit with a truckload of cash and get in on the ground floor of the soccer boom, extending their basic cable empire……..
phil
Hey, we don’t want too many soccer/real-football fans, it will make it harder to get tickets for the best teams.
burnspbesq
Torres missed a penalty?
BWAhahahaha!
mellowjohn
no.
MCA1
Couple thoughts:
– A 10-0 blowout is more of an exception that proves the rule for the “not enough scoring” crowd. And they’ll (fairly correctly) just point out that a completely uncompetitive game is no more fun to watch than a “boring” low-scoring game.
– I’m with JWL here. There’s a continued persecution complex amongst some soccer afficionados, and a lot less of the “haters” crowd that only fancies them some real, manly, ‘Murkin football to go with their Bud Lite than there are just indifferent consumers, who give the game credence as the world’s most popular sport and probably played it for a couple seasons as kids, but aren’t compelled by watching it and have little available sports bandwidth for it, what with the NFL and MLB, etc.
– Count me in that camp to some degree. Soccer’s a good game, but it suffers from a couple significant, related issues for me personally: First, it’s counter to human evolution – we’re special because of our hand-eye coordination and opposable thumbs; why would we invent a sport in which we force ourselves to use our more awkward appendage, and thereby insure such a high rate of failure? And second, there’s too low a correlation between which team is “better” than the other and which team actually wins, and too great an opportunity for an inferior skilled team to force a tie on the scoreboard. That’s partly related to the foot thing, leading to it being ridiculously difficult to actually score a goal, and thereby encouraging lesser teams to park the bus and play for a 0-0 tie or only counterattack to try to get a lucky breakout. I get that that difficulty in putting the ball in the net makes the eventual goal more exciting and orgasmic for fan and player alike and all, but it doesn’t overshadow the problem of it being too hard to differentiate yourself from a lesser team on the scoreboard. Worse teams win in basketball and baseball, too, but not as often because by the nature and rules of the game each team gets equal opportunities to score. It just strikes me as alien, and upsets my sense of karmic justice, to watch some team accept a 30/70 time of possession differential with Spain or Brazil because their chances of getting a nil-nil draw or winning a shootout are so much better than if they man up and try to actually outplay the other side.
Randinho
@MCA1: With respect, I’ve participated on soccer forums since Euro 1996 and I can tell you that they often get infested with soccer-hating trolls. I don’t see the reverse in NFL or MLB forums. Just sayin’
@Haydnseek: Thanks for the kind words.
Paula
It took a few years, but Ian Darke finally calmed down about the Suarez handball.
burnspbesq
@Paula:
Some handballs you never calm down about.
Ja, Torsten Frings, I am looking right at your ugly mug.
Randinho
@burnspbesq: What you said: a sure pk and red card in a game where the US outplayed the Deutschers.
MCA1
@Randinho: Fair enough, and I don’t doubt there are some yahoos with an irrational axe to grind out there. From my own personal experience, I see a lot less of the questioning of the basic legitimacy of the game now than I did as a kid, when it was totally saddled with the wuss label and attacked by jingoists without the anonymity of message boards to hide behind. My own anecdota, so limited, but I see less hate and less of the condescending “Look at that silly foreign game” stuff these days.