BOREDOM CAUSES VIOLENCE

World Cup: Because my back went out big time I am confined to living life from a prone position and almost HAD to watch the World Cup this Saturday. I am not surprised that fights broke out almost everywhere in Europe after the games. The boring nature of that "sport?" means that young guys with testosterone counts in the nine hundred thousand in a million will end up acting out the offence that their teams never display. Everything we Americans have been brought up to believe about sports is challenged by the existence of this European wussie activity. When you have fake injuries as "part of the sport," as was stated by the soccer hyping commentator, you have a fraud. Also the lack of offense, meaning the lack of even attempting to score as in the first game between England and Italy, makes for the most boring possible encounter, one which was "won" by the officials and something called "penalty kicks." I must admit that even though the second game had almost no scoring at all either, the fact that both teams were continually trying to score supplied tension as the 90 minutes wore on. Yet when all is said and done, my earlier comment about Brazil just working out with a bunch of fancy dan moves without doing any scoring executed by so-called all stars (more accurately a bunch of over the hill old geezers) was proved to be correct. Bottom line, this game will never catch on here unless fake injuries are punished and a rule to eliminate the refusal to score that is similar to basketball rules, those that demand the launch of an attack within a time certain period of time (and a shot clock??) are put in force.

As a post script, I have a close friend who is a soccer coach who is of the opinion that when coaches have video tapes of opposing teams the only result between closely matched teams is total lack of scoring. He told me that, unlike football or even basketball, soccer has very few original "plays" that can be called. This meant that a team like Brazil which attacked with a "four slant" offense could be shut down no matter how clever the players are if the scouting is correct. I think soccer will eventually change the "offside rule" so that plays will be called and executed in much quicker thrusts. Maybe that addition, along with the offside rule change, would liven the game so it would catch on here.

BTW the "offside" rule was changed in 2003 (applied in 2005) that limits the effect of speed, a change that many feel was put in by white Europeans to counter the athletic and speed advantages enjoyed by Blacks (Brazil, all the African countries). The current "offside rule" is just a change of the original 1925 rule which had so limited goal scoring that the game was in danger of boring everyone to death. The application of the "new" rule resulted in an immediate three fold increase in scoring. The rule was changed again in 1990 because the scoring had become too low once again. The problem now is a device called the "offside trap" in which the defense sends two or three guys down ahead of the ball thus making it impossible to attack without violating the "offside rule." The application of any "offside rule" was originally put in more than a century ago to stop "cherry picking," a tactic of leaving one player at the opponent goal to "cherry pick" a long pass. While this sounds innocent, the game had become a bore because all teams were just kicking the ball to their "cherry picker" who was in turn guarded by other guys who were trying to stop the cherry picker from ever seeing the ball.

Meanwhile, I lay on my back applying a vibrator to my aching back and smiling because the NFL training camps begin to open on July 24th; a man's game in which the only rule change being contemplated is whether it should be a five or fifteen yard penalty for gouging a guys eyes out while tackling.