Got soccer redux?

Boo hoo, America lost in the knockout round of the World Cup. Yawn. We scored once all game, on a penalty kick.

Ghana's second goal was a wicked shot, the best I've seen in the tourney so far. Beautiful kicks like that are few and far between because scoring in soccer is so hard, especially with defenders hanging on you every step.

It's almost impossible to get "space" in the box. The scorer in overtime created a tiny bit of space and made a superb shot.

If you get a step on the defenders, they'll take you down. And half the strikers cowardly take a dive in traffic trying to get a free kick.

Soccer needs scoring. It needs fixing.

The Americans could help out here. FIFA should borrow rules and procedures from the NHL, NBA and NFL.

Every goal in soccer is suspect because of the archaic, stifling offsides rule. Make offsides only be dependent upon no one being offsides when the ball first crosses midfield (the blue line in hockey).

Then strikers could spread out and get open. Teams would have to make choices in defending their end.

To ensure that two strikers don't hang out bracketing the goalie, have a three second rule in the box like in the NBA. We love those riveting nil-nil games after all.

Soccer is so boring because of all that backwards passing, often all the way back to the goalie. The rest of the world slowly passes the ball back 75 yards to try to advance it 90 yards into the scoring zone.

This is trying to get a head start, I guess. You know, like a quarterback taking a snap at midfield and running back to the 10 to try to throw a bomb.

To keep movement mostly being progressive, institute the backcourt and icing rules from basketball and hockey. No passes backwards past midfield once the ball on offense has entered the box unless it has been lost in the interim, or else the other team gets a free kick at the spot the ball was touched by the offending team (always at least 10 yards outside the penalty area regardless). No backwards passing series past two lines anyways, to eliminate all that boring back-to-the-goalie stuff.

When a player gets fouled, give a free kick from there but tack on 15 yards (move the ball closer). Why let the defense use fouling, and the resultant free kicks from the point of the foul, as a chance for the defense to catch up and reset.

Keep the game time on the scoreboard clock, and have it stop during all that "stoppage" time when players are writhing on the ground after receiving phantom hits. When the period is over, that's it.

This will give sponsors the ability to have TV timeouts. There is no 45-minute-long continuous flow to soccer, that's a ridiculous notion.

Change the asinine rule (which is hard to determine) that the ball is scored, or dead, only when it completely crosses the line. Adopt the NFL's break-the-plane rule.

And for sure, have the FIFA commish assess fines each week after reviewing game tapes for flopping, unseemly unwarranted writhing, peacock strutting after gooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaals, clothes-grabbing and bad fouling. Soccer sucks the way it is now.

Got Soccer?

I have been watching the World Cup on TV. This weekend I saw England (where modern soccer was born) play Algeria to a Nil Nil tie.

I sat still for ninety minutes of non-riveting action. Two beers helped me get through this.

Twenty players on the "pitch" using only half their bodies for play (if you ignore all the handballs) while two athletes get to use their finely tuned hands and arms. Is it only America that knows about opposable thumbs?

The goalies made the only exciting plays in this hour-and-a-half stinker, a coupla outstretched overhead catches of high balls sailing across the goal mouth, the type of plays that T.O. makes in the first quarter of an NFL game.

Yawn. Before you start thinking I'm just an ugly American who doesn't understand this "beautiful" game, I'm a certified soccer coach.

Tonight I was watching Chile beat Switzerland One Nil. At least there was a score in the interminable ninety minutes, because the referee had sent off a Swiss player on a questionable foul and thus pre-determined the contest.

This red card led to a Chile Goaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal! The Chilean peacocks in their little short pants went whipping around the pitch clawing at their shirts in their frenzy, sliding on their knees and backs to signal to the world, Look-At-Me!

There's more flopping in elite soccer than in the NBA, and these lithe international athletes regularly lie writhing on the ground for minutes after each close non-contact, holding their faces in their supposed agony at receiving a phantom elbow. World Cup soccer is a phoney.

I switched to a mid-season baseball game after awhile, a 2-1 contest. It was so much more satisfying, real and action-packed.

Seven.

I got tagged by my friends DC Rainmaker AND Jade Lady to come up with seven weird facts about myself that no one probably knows. Rainmaker is a longtime runner blogger (all right, he does some dark-side stuff too AKA biking) who is pretty accomplished, and Jade Lady is a newcomer to running blogging who is...pretty accomplished. (She also knows Shirley real well.) Okay, here goes.

7. I like number 7. Mickey Mantle's number. John Elway's number. When I was a boy, I used to hide two dollar bills in books on page 77, for later retrieval on that proverbial "rainy day." Why page 77? Because I could always remember it thanks to the then-current TV show 77 Sunset Strip.

6. The number of children my parents had. And no, we're not Catholic.

5. At one time all three of my sons wore number 5 at the same time for their select soccer teams. Jimmy was 5 on the McLean Sting, Johnny was 5 on the Arlington Force and Danny was 5 on the Arlington United Strikers. I had a little hand in getting those last two numbers assigned since I was the manager for the Force and the equipment manager for the US.

4. My social security number ends in 4. I like even numbers much better than odd numbers. It would be hard to get a social security number that was all even numbers, and I'm cool with that, but I was mightily pleased when my first two children got social security numbers that ended in even numbers. I was bugged when my last child got one that ended in an odd number.

3. The number of children I have. Although I was delighted with three boys, I always wanted a girl.

2. The number of children we had help in conceiving. We worked hard at it for a long time, you know, coming home in the middle of the day, that sort of thing, before we sought intervention in our thirties. Is it accurate to say that a child got conceived by a man with a cup in a stall in the men's room at a fertility center? I dunno, but those two look like me in many regards. The other child was definitely a surprise, at least to me. He looks nothing like me or anyone else on my side of the family.

1. I coached a team to first place in the recreational soccer league once. Danny's team, and Jimmy was an assistant coach and Johnny was an assistant to the coach on that team. This was harder than it sounds because we were a suburban team from Falls Church and we had to play urban teams from South Arlington with players who are immigrants from South America where they grow up with soccer and, apparently, they don't keep real accurate birth records. Some of those kids were shaving. And they were rough. The few times we got a breakaway going I winced because I knew what was coming. A brutal takedown from behind that was going to leave the kid writhing in the turf. But we went 7-1-1 one season and finished first. Danny was my rock on that team; booming kick, could score a little, pass a lot, and could and would go into goal.

Happy Birthday, Danny. I love you and miss you.

I tag...anyone who reads this and wants to continue the meme.

More soccer

Yesterday I ran a seven-miler during the noon hour at an 8:24 pace, the best run I've had in weeks. I ran across an office mate running on the Mall and I signaled for him to join me on a "Bridge Run" over to Virginia on the Memorial Bridge and back to DC on the 14th Street Bridge. He was game and we pushed each other. He's going to his H.S. reunion in Germany in a matter of weeks and wants to look good for it so he's working hard in the interim (he's faster than me). He said they won't be doing any running but they're going to drink a lot of beer. German beer out of steins.

My kind of reunion. My last H.S. reunion only confronted me with the fact that both of my high school roommates have passed on. Sigh.

Yesterday evening I went with someone from work to see a MLS game at RFK, the second professional soccer game I've seen in two weeks. It's a long story. (Whatever happened to the NASL?)

Anyway, the seats were highest up in the extreme corner of the lower deck. I could look down and see the top of the head of anyone taking a corner kick from that side. There was a foul pole in the way of my seeing some of the goalie box. (RFK is a baseball stadium.)

Good thing we arrived on time. DC United scored in the sixth and eighth minutes, both goals occurring right in front of us. It was pretty exciting. That was pretty much it. The other 82 minutes, the two sides swapped penalty kicks. DC beat the New York Red Bulls 3-1.

There were lots of balls the attacking team sent from inside their opponent's goalie box back to midfield, then back to their end of the field, then back to their goalie. This apparently is how you set up the attack in soccer, by slowly sending the ball backwards 80 yards.

The GK would hold the ball for forty seconds while everyone on offense and defense settled into their places on the long field nicely and then he'd loft a 50-50 ball back to midfield. This is as exciting as watching Mark Brunnell take snaps to throw passes.

But the DC United penalty kick was historic. You see, there's a guy on the United named Jaime Moreno. He's 33. In his eleven years in the MLS he had scored 108 goals.

He had scored three times this season, all on penalty kicks. His last goal was three months ago.

United Striker Luciano Emilio, this season's leading MLS scorer, was taken down in the box as he got free with the ball. Ignoring both the fullback's and Emilio's obligatory hands beseeching the heavens from their knees, the ref set the ball up on the 12 yard line and signaled for a PK. PK is referee shorthand for, I'm awarding this team an automatic point and probably the game.

Unlike the NBA where the fouled player takes the shot, anyone can shoot the PK. Moreno stepped up to the plate. (Sorry.) At the end of the season, if Emilio misses the scoring crown by one goal, do you think he'll remember this moment in a different light?

The dumb thing about PKs is that the GK can't move until the ball is struck. Motionless one moment, he's diving by guess and by golly the next. Yawn.

So Moreno took this PK and rolled his 109th lifetime goal inside the side of net two feet past one upright bar while the GK dove towards the other upright bar. Egg on your face! I swear the announcer bellowed "goal" as one word for ninety seconds. (Who is #19?)

You see, Moreno broke the record for the most lifetime goals ever in the MLS. Once the announcer had completely run down his copious breath pronouncing the one word "goal" for a minute and a half, he next announced that we could purchase "109, I was there" t-shirts in the concourse. How long were those suckers on ice waiting to be sold?

Here's the problem that soccer has in America as a major professional sport. Have you heard that Hank Aaron's lifetime homerun record was broken earlier this month? Did you hear that Jason Kreis's (who?) lifetime goal record was broken last night? See what I mean?

Next post: If there was $8 in cash lying on the floor in a crowded room that wasn't yours, would you claim it? Come on now! What if it was yours and somebody swifter than you claimed it and stuck it away in their pocket. What would you do? Come on now! It's a jungle out there!

Bend It Like Beckham

Ninety minutes, one-oh. That's my notion of watching a soccer game, reinforced by all those years I coached soccer when my three boys were growing up. As in 90 minutes of exciting runs across the midfield pitch with two or three wildly exciting breaks into the box (ohh!) and one ball that actually goes in (ahh!!). Delirium. What a game! But beware of the zero-zero tie. Because then they play sixty more minutes of overtime. And it ain't sudden death. Oh no, it's slow death.

I went to see English superstar David Beckham in his MLS playing debut at RFK on Thursday evening. It was a sold-out crowd. The LA Galaxy paid him $32.5 million to come rejuvenate soccer in America. This is a business model that was tried in the seventies when Pele was lured to America by the NASL to rejuvenate soccer in America. That league shortly became defunct.

The MLS has a problem. This is a major professional sports league that has been around for several years. I'll bet you can't even say what MLS stands for unless you figure it out for a few seconds. (Quick! Name one other soccer player in the MLS besides Beckham. Now name two hockey players in the NHL. See what I mean?)

I bought tickets for the match last month hoping that my estranged 21-YO son would go with me (a divorce, and PAS, situation). My oldest boy was a wonderful soccer player, swift and courageous with a good kick. He was a scorer on a travel (select) team.

It all slipped away from him as the boy took the easy and intellectually lazy route to adolescent comfort in the absolute familial destruction engendered by the berserker current American domestic law system. He quit soccer along with discarding his dad as he was grotesquely manipulated by all the social-work "professionals" who routinely murder the childhoods of children to achieve gain for their client or their agenda in the insane modern American divorce warfare.

I called NOS and left a message about taking him to this game. He ignored me. I wrote him about taking him to this game. He ignored me. His Mother (I think he still lives with Sharon Rogers, two miles away) was undoubtedly proud of him, again. I went to the game anyway.

These soccer players kick the ball very hard. But the goalkeepers (us soccer parents know them as goalies) can use their arms and hands, to everyone else merely using the rest of their body. That, coupled with soccer's oppressive and incomprehensible offsides rule, means lots of 1-0 contests. Any actual scoring is regularly waved off for being offsides.

Anyway, Beckham has been nursing a sore ankle even while his traveling road show has been selling out soccer stadiums. There was a sell-out in Toronto but he didn't play in that 0-0 nailbiter. Oops.

The DC United/LA Galaxy game sold out within two days of the tickets being put up for sale. But then started a month-long watch on how his ankle was. Would he play? Likely not.

He didn't start.

DC United scored in the 27th minute. Gooooooooooooooooooooaall!!!! Um, it was exciting for sure. The guy who scored whipped around the pitch like he'd just discovered the secret to cold fusion.

And that was it. It would have been a good time to beat the subway crush.

Beckham went into a warm-up routine late in the first half. The crowd roared. The skies opened and the rain came down.

The second half came and Beckham continued his warmups. A Galaxy player was red-carded and sent off the pitch. In the 72d minute Beckham came in. The crowd went wild. Beckham played center-midfielder and suspiciously was in open space the whole way.

Not many balls came to him. But when one did, you could see the promise. His kicks curled down to the pitch perfectly for a breaking teammate to run up upon and streak in on goal. But no teammates were ever there. I think they haven't discovered yet what he can do and so they don't "create." It takes energy to create. They give you millions in the NBA to create off the ball. In the MLS they give you tens of thousands. You can do the math.

Oh yeah, it ended 1-0. Beckham had a shot on goal, from 60 yards out, easily handled by the GK (no LA player was there). It could have been a 50-50 ball. His one free kick was a fine one. No LA player was where it came down.

The LA Galaxy was off to a sold-out crowd in Boston next, on Sunday. Beckham wouldn't play in that 1-0 thriller, won by New England. Oops.

Pele, meet Beckham. The result will be the same.