A friend of mine recently commented that soccer was proof that five billion people can be wrong.
I'll admit that I've never been the world's biggest footy fan. It's fun to play but the lack of goals, blatant dives and fake "oh, the agony!" faces on players that would get laughed off any other professional sports field make it excruciating to watch. This World Cup was more of the same - spotty officiating made 10 times worse by the lack of refs on the field and no instant replays of goals and fouls.
I've had this argument before with assorted soccer fans from around the globe who insist that I "just don't get it" - that northern North Americans as a whole, where soccer ranks somewhere below high school basketball for television supremacy, just don't get it.
I'm sorry, but what exactly is there to get? It's a sport. The players are skilled. Goals get scored. Games are won and lost. There is running. You can touch the ball with any part of your body but not your arms. It's not that complicated.
Stripped down to its fundamentals it's not so different from other sports, yet it never seemed to catch my imagination like football or rugby or hockey or chess-boxing. I'm not going to pretend to like soccer every four years even if it does provide a ready excuse for getting drunk at eight in the morning.
If anything, this World Cup merely reinforced my "meh" attitude for the so-called beautiful game.
There have been so many low points in South Africa. The U.S. team was robbed in two different games, as were the Brits. (Yes, Germany did win 4-1, but that disallowed goal changed the whole flow of the match).
The lowest point for me was the quarterfinal match between Ghana and Uruguay. First, Uruguay was allowed to tie the game up from a penalty shot that was the result of a dive. Later in the game a player from Uruguay, who appeared to be standing behind his own goal line, batted out a Ghana shot with his forearm and sent the game to a shootout that Ghana lost. That should have been a goal.
But the worst part was watching the Uruguay team celebrate. They knew they should have lost but instead of being deferential or humble - it was the ref's fault after all - they partied like they had actually earned it.
I could almost hear the collective pop as thousands of televisions across Canada and the U.S. clicked off en masse, disgusted by yet another soccer scandal in the making.
Maybe they're right and we don't get it. But is that really so surprising? "Not getting it" is a condition that generally occurs when a thing makes no logicial sense to a reasonable person, and "getting it" would mean overlooking the facts. I'll never doubt the passion of soccer fans, just their judgment.
Take hockey - not because it's Canada's sport of choice, but because it has a lot in common with soccer; nets, lines, creases, offsides, "no hands" rules, etc. Some diving also goes on in hockey but there's a penalty for that and it does get called. But players get stitches between shifts in hockey, they don't roll around screaming and holding their shins - unless of course their shins are broken, but even then they make an effort to skate off the ice.
There's a reason they don't settle playoff games in hockey by shootout, and that's the simple fact that a shootout - while exciting to watch - is just not hockey. It's a fun way to break a regular season tie but it's not the game itself.
"But soccer games are 90 minutes," you'll say, "you can't expect them to play longer than that!"
Well, why the hell not? Wouldn't that at least ensure that the best and fittest team won, even if it took four hours to get there? These are highly trained athletes and they deserve a chance to settle matters on the field of play.
Hockey also has two referees, two linesmen, two goal judges and an official timekeeper watching the games. Any disputed goals are sent to a little room in Toronto where another set of officials can review the shot using seven different camera angles before making a ruling. Sometimes it takes a minute, sometimes three, but the end result is that 99.9999 per cent of goals are called fair and square. There are 12 players on the ice at one time including the goalies, on an area around 1,580 square metres.
Soccer has just one ref and two linesmen, plus another official on the sidelines - and no instant replay. There are 22 players on the field, on an area of at least 6,400 square metres.
Why so few officials?
It seems FIFA, the egomaniacal purists who sanction pro soccer and the World Cup, have at last woken up to the fact that refs are fallible and that flow matters less than winning to fans. They have suggested that they will bring in instant replay for the World Cup in 2014, though it's too little, too late for Ghana, and for millions of potential North American fans that will have to be convinced again in four years' time that soccer is the greatest game in the world.
Sorry, but I'm just not buying it.
