Soccer really sucks, doesn't it?

[Kitschum]

the whole omg tie-low score routine is retarded. really the only diffrence between football and hockey is in football you need more stamina and in hockey you need more strength.
i have played both and the flair and creativity needed obviously all depends on your opponent.

That is pretty much my experience too. Growing up the people who were good at one were good at the other and many would have had the choice of sport. Although just the other day Peter Forsberg was on tv saying he sucked at soccer because he was too slow.

[OzzyKP]

tldw

That clip you posted with the top goals made me laugh though. The first one, the Ovechkin goal ended with two out of the five people sprawled out on the ice, a third person in the process of tripping (he may have fell down after it cut away) and several players all twisted up and stuck on each other. If that is one of the best goals in hockey history you can have it.

Hockey players can't blow their nose without falling on their ass.

[Asher]

tldw

That clip you posted with the top goals made me laugh though. The first one, the Ovechkin goal ended with two out of the five people sprawled out on the ice, a third person in the process of tripping (he may have fell down after it cut away) and several players all twisted up and stuck on each other. If that is one of the best goals in hockey history you can have it.

Hockey players can't blow their nose without falling on their ass.

Your ignorance is an embarrassment to your fellow Americans.

Hockey is a fast sport with tons of physical contact between very strong, powerful men played on a SURFACE OF ICE. Of course people will fall down all of the time. It's part of the ****ing sport, you colossal idiot.

People fall down all the time in the NFL too. At the end of every ****ing play if I recall correctly. I suppose that makes the NFL suck too.

Your stupidity is annoying.

(PS: You clearly can't ****ing watch anything. In the video, the only people on the ice were Ovechkin (he was tripped up) and the goaltender (where it is a positional technique))

[Guynemer]

Epic fail, Ozzy.

[OzzyKP]

Epic fail, Ozzy.

Somehow I'd rather root for crappy teams like the Lions and the Nats than good teams in a crappy sport like the Red Wings and Caps.

[Cort Haus]

1. Those horns sound like cicadas equipped with kazoos. An annoying, monotonous ****ing humming.

I see you've already found the Vuvuzela thread. They have nothing to do with football apart from a fad in South Africa, where the tournament is. They are shyte.

2. The game was utterly one sided, but by the time I left there were ten minutes left to play and four goals had been scored. That's an average of one goal for every twenty bloody minutes.

What's your point? You need goals every two minutes? Go and watch basketball. Value sometimes corresponds to rarity. A goal in football is supposed to be hard to get. It's why celebrating a goal is such fun, and why the sport is so widely loved. Just as you sneer at the sport, most of the world sneers at the USA for having an attention-span too impatient to appreciate what's happening.

3. The main evidence of "athleticism" was the sheer display of endurance. The field is way too big, so the players have to huff and puff all over the place nonstop. And that's basically 95% of the movement involved, just running back and forth chasing the ball.

No, they're not only chasing the ball, they're maintaining a position relative to their opponents - either creating space for themselves or closing it down. It's a fast game, and it's played on a field. There are smaller versions, played on smaller pitches with less players, but the full version is meant to have space and running.

4. There's some fancy footwork, but not much of the convoluted plays seen in other sports because again, the field is too damned big. The ball takes several seconds to roll any appreciable distance, so if they did complicated maneuvers to get it all the way down the other end they'd have to memorize something that looked like a five-legged ballroom dance. Instead the ball bounces sluggishly around, like a pinball game submerged in water.

Watch the Robin van Persie goal above for an example of how to move the ball from one end of the pitch to the other and score in a few seconds. You talk about 'plays' and 'maneuvres' (words which don't really translate out of the USAian sporting language), but apart from what we call 'set pieces' - free-kicks and corners, most of the game is spontaneous, with the players relying on fluid passing and movement. When it's played well, that is. The early stages of the World Cup is not necessarily the arena for this.

5 ... Made you wish those stupid horns would shut up.

Yep. See 1.

The group stages of the World Cup Finals is actually far from the best place to see football played well. The top teams in the top European leagues play far better football than all but a handful of international teams. The World Cup is not a tournament of the best football in the world, it is a Politically Correct affirmative-action festival fulfilling continental quotas of teams.

[Asher]

Did Ireland, Scotland, Wales, etc send their own teams also?

[MOBIUS]

Hey Asher, Ice Hockey is total ****. It's really, really boring...

[Kitschum]

In the NHL, diving is a penalty. Is it in soccer? Never seen it called

Just returning to this comment from earlier in the thread. In today's Germany v Australia match two Germans (Özil and Cacau) received yellow cards for diving. One of them seemed questionable, but it was that kind of referee.

[Wezil]

Isn't a yellow card just a warning?

Not really a punishment.

[Kitschum]

Isn't a yellow card just a warning?

No.

[Wezil]

Please explain.

[Kitschum]

2 yellow cards even if not in the same match equals an automatic suspension.

[Tuberski]

2 cards over 2 matches, or 2 in the same game is a red card. It kicks you out of that game and the following game.

Correct?

ACK!

[Kitschum]

2 cards over 2 matches, or 2 in the same game is a red card. It kicks you out of that game and the following game.

Correct?

2 cards in one match -> red card, sent off and suspended for the next match
2 cards combined in the tournament -> stay in the match, but suspended the next

Egregious offences (like dangerous tackles with straight legs) may get a red right away.