I would not have expected that hearing about the death of Rowdy Roddy Piper would hit me quite this hard. But it has. I’m genuinely upset right now.
Is it too much to hope that he’s saying that to St. Peter right now?
Tag: sports
One of these things is not like the other
I shop at a local fat man store from time to time. They call themselves a “Big and Tall” store, but I never see tall guys in there and tall guys generally don’t need 5XL shirts, which is most of what they carry– I’m at the small end of the distribution in that place.
They send emails. Lots of emails. I got one today, in fact.
I was a little confused as to what this had to do with Large Person shirts and pants until I saw the capacities down in the corner there. I need a portable chair that can support a thousand-pound human. I need it for science.
There was more to the email:
This part, I have to admit, confused me; I don’t go to the beach as a general rule but if I did I can’t see that I’d want to bring a beach tent. I didn’t know beach tents were a thing; if you’re a beach person and you would want such an object, fill me in.
Back to the chairs. There’s no capacity listed for the Picnic Time Portable Fusion Backpack Chair, but holy hell does that thing look heavy-duty. No price listed, either.
And then the email went completely off the rails, as they forgot who they were marketing to:
I don’t know what the overlap is between “people interested in portable chairs with a capacity of half a ton” and “people who need neoprene wetsuits,” but it most certainly does not include me. I’m glad the zippers are heavy-duty, though.
Just for the record
I’ve talked a lot of shit about goalies over the last couple of weeks, but Jesus, if it wasn’t for Tim Howard having the game of his goddamn career we’d have just lost 16-0 instead of going into jesus why is the game still going please someone fucking score time.
#BecauseWhyNot
… You’re supposed to think the Lego dude is giving you the finger here, right? That’s not just my screwed-up mentality taking over?
It has been a singularly useless morning. Not only have I not gotten any writing done, which isn’t exactly the end of the world– I got through basically two full drafts of an entire story yesterday, and am not yet so far behind that I’ve got any reason to be nervous– but I haven’t really done anything else with the time. I’m pretty sure I spent an hour just lying in bed staring at the wall. Like literally staring, not trying to sleep or reading or anything. Just staring.
And now I’m watching soccer, which has been the other thing I do when I’m at home alone four days a week, and once the World Cup is over I’m seriously not going to have anything to do with my time other than yucky things like keeping my house clean.
I thought– at least partially due to a lack of anything else compelling to write about at the moment– that I’d take a couple of minutes to point out some of the things that I actually like about soccer since several of my other posts have either been critical or gently mocking in some way or another. So have some positives, although keep in mind that even right now as I’m listing several of them in my head that a bunch of them are going to be stupid:
- I love the opening ceremony for World Cup matches. I assume regular soccer matches don’t work like this, with the anthems and the little kids and the picture with the refs and the ball and all that, but there really is a lot of symbolism there that I’m quite fond of– starting with both of the teams walking out onto the pitch together.
- I like that the game never actually stops. You’ve got 45 minutes before you get a break, go run your damn ass off, and when that 45 minutes are over we’re going to add extra minutes for the places where you screwed up and had to halt the game. I know this makes American TV networks insane because there’s not as many places to stick in ads. That’s a feature, not a bug, and I love it. Fuck the networks; I like it when they’re inconvenienced. I’ve entirely lost the ability to watch football over the past several years and a good part of the reason is the way a damn game will take three and a half hours because of all the pauses and time-outs. (The other half is the evil; that’s another story, though.)
- I like that even though every soccer player is born with a genetic condition that gives them terribly weak ankles and calves that are incredibly easy to injure, they’re tough enough to shrug off those horrible injuries and get back up and get in the game like nothing happened.
- Okay, that was unfair. That said: the game has a weird sportsmanship to it, where once the players realize that someone is actually injured– it seems like someone gets hauled off in a bucket once per game– someone will generally kick the ball out of bounds to stop the game, and I saw at least one example where Team A kicked the ball out of bounds because a Team B player was hurt, and then when Team B took their corner kick they basically handed the ball straight over to Team A because that was the fair thing to do. Then again, biting and headbutts.
- While I still think the lack of scoring is a problem, it is really exciting when it does actually happen. There could still be a little more, though.
- I like intelligent announcers. Soccer seems to have a preponderance of those, or perhaps I’m simply mistaking British accents for intelligence, but I don’t think I am.
I still think they should get rid of goalies, though.
This is obviously official and real
Print and distribute as necessary. I have to have three thousand words by noon so I need to get to work.
In which let’s talk about soccer again
So I’ve figured out exactly why soccer isn’t going to ever really catch on in the States. It’s not the low scoring, although that’s part of it. It’s the inaccuracy. I just watched Cristiano Ronaldo, a soccer player so amazingly well-known and famous that I have heard of him, take a free kick on goal that missed the goal completely. It is at least the fourth shot on goal in this game that was not touched by any defensive player and literally did not even come close to actually touching the goal. I’m not talking about shots that were deflected by defensive players or the goalie. I’m talking about a guy with an open shot ten or fifteen yards from the goal who proceeds to miss the goal completely, and about the fact that this phenomenon happens all the time in supposedly “professional” soccer.
And it’s not limited to shots on goal either. Passes, corner kicks– why the hell is a corner kick even a thing?– regularly appear to go absolutely nowhere near where they are supposed to go. It lends the entire sport this weird atmosphere of amateurism and randomness that I don’t think us ‘Merkins really like to see in our pro sports.
I can hear the soccer fans. “Well, it’s difficult to <x>!” Well, I’m sure it is. That’s the problem. There appears to be no difference between athletic brilliance and pure geometric accident. Our goalie just pulled off what, on first glance, looked like an awesome save– but was it, really? There were two shots in rapid succession. One caromed off the goalpost– because, again, the offensive player missed— and bounced right back toward a bunch of other Portuguese players. One of them kicked it again, and our goalie, who let a goal in earlier by just falling down instead of doing some sort of, y’know, cool goalie thing, and who was already flailing around and stumbling because of the previous shot, just threw his hands up and just managed to deflect the ball over the top of the goal.
Was that an awesome save? Incredible athletic skill from one of the premiere soccer players on Earth? Or just dumb luck? Dunno; near as I can tell they look exactly the same.
(It’s halftime. Some doof sportscaster dude just said if you “take out the goals,” it would have looked like the US lost the last game and was winning this one. Can you imagine someone saying that about basketball or football? It means that scoring is basically random in soccer. That’s bad!)
I have a suggestion.
Eliminate the position of goalie entirely.
Think about it. Most of the missed shots in this game have been just that– missed shots. Each goalie has maybe a couple of saves, and I’m willing to bet that at least a couple of those misses wouldn’t have hit the goal anyway. It’s apparently really goddamn difficult to hit the goal. Why have somebody in the game whose job it is to make scoring even more rare? Get rid of ’em. Add another midfielder instead or something. It’ll make the game more exciting and at least make it look more skillful.
Get on that, FIFA.
I warned you, I did
So here’s a thing about soccer. I just finished watching the Switzerland-Ecuador match, right? Something happened in that game that apparently almost never happens in soccer: the game was won, excitingly, in the final few seconds, with Switzerland scoring the winning goal with maybe ten seconds of extra time or extended time or furthermore time or whatever the hell they call it left.
Now, the way the World Cup works (warning: I’m gonna get details wrong; it’s inevitable) is that your team gets points based on how you do in each of the group matches, and then the teams with the most points in each group move on to what I think is a standard elimination-style tournament. Or something. Point is, you get points for how you perform in a game– you win, you get three, you tie, you each get a point, and if you lose you get no points.
With about three minutes left in the game, the announcers gave up. And they clearly expected both of the teams to just stop playing, because there were three minutes left and, hell, you can’t score in three minutes in soccer. It was being treated as a foregone conclusion that the game was just going to be a tie and that not only was there nothing that either team could do about it, it was portrayed as genuinely surprising that either team even would want to. They’ve got their point for their tie; what’s the point of trying to win?
Then Ecuador got off a decent shot at goal that didn’t end up scoring, to which the announcers reacted with clear surprise. And then Switzerland actually scored, winning the game, and it was almost like they’d done something impertinent by daring to actually play to win when there was just a little bit of time left and clearly the game was supposed to end in a tie.
Can you imagine this happening in football or basketball? Three minutes is an eternity in a close basketball game; there could be half-a-dozen lead changes left in a close game in that amount of time, and while I’ve certainly seen any number of football teams take a knee in the last few seconds to end the game, the idea that you’d give up with more than a few seconds left is ridiculous. If there were two or three points separating the teams, okay. Soccer’s low-scoring; you’re not going to overcome a three point deficit in three minutes without some miraculous play. But a tie game?
Get it together, soccer. This is the fuckin’ World Cup; play like you wanna be there. And the announcers shouldn’t be playing into this nonsense.
I’m watching France play Honduras right now; I’m going to have to miss a chunk of this game as I have a pie to make before we go over to my sister-in-law’s for Father’s Day celebrations. Yes, I’m making pie.
Which means I’m baking.
It will go poorly. Be excited!
Fair warning
It is reasonable to assume that I’m going to spend a fair amount of time, at least over the next week or so if not for the entirety of the next month, talking about soccer. And I’m going to be calling it “soccer,” not “football,” because I’m ‘merkin and screw the metric system, dammit, or something like that.
SON OF A BITCH CHILE YOU JERKFACES
(Sorry. My “cheer for the team with more hits on the blog” plan has been 3-0 so far, but there’s about two minutes left in the Chile-Australia match and Chile just scored again, so so much for that.)
Anyway. I’ve watched all of two of the matches and a good chunk of the other two. Here was my day: Job interview, watch soccer, write 500 words or so of fiction, watch soccer, actively curate my Twitter account (I have spent way too much time today on Twitter, and oh by the way you can follow me off to the right, there) and watch more soccer. I can’t explain my attraction to the World Cup; I have paid no attention to soccer whatsoever since the last World Cup and in fact have watched virtually no sports at all this year. I don’t like sports. Watching sports nearly always feels like a massive waste of my time that could be spent more productively doing something else. Hell, I’ve even ignored the Olympics the last couple of times. But there’s something about the World Cup. I dunno.
I won’t get to watch most of the games tomorrow, so here are my picks:
- Greece (43 hits) beats Colombia (38 hits)
- Costa Rica (7 hits) beats Uruguay (3 hits)
- England (4,474 hits) demolishes Italy (114 hits)
- Japan (115 hits) beats Côte d’Ivoire (2 hits)
I am apparently pulling for a US-Canada finale, which I know doesn’t make any sense– does Canada even have a team?– but what the hell; I don’t know a single thing about any of these teams so I may as well choose a method that I think is fun.
(Also, I reserve the right to cheer for the Netherlands under any and all circumstances, and no, I don’t know why. Oranje!)
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