World Cup

As I sit here watching the U.S.' World Cup hopes coming to an end, I realize how much the game of soccer frustrates me. It's really frustrating to watch a game that goes so slow and has hardly any action. As I have said to people before, soccer is probably a really fun game to play. I gave it a shot as a child and didn't like it at all, but I have no foot-eye coordination at all. All of my coordination is in the hand-eye area, but oh well. So back to my original point. Soccer is probably a great sport to play, but it might be the worst sport in the world to watch. Maybe it's the fact that it seems like the field is huge and there are only 11 players on the field at the time. And it also seems as though refs can control the game so much more in soccer than in any other sport. There is so little scoring that it seems as though 1 bad call could lead to a goal and that ends the game. Take today's game for example. The penalty kick call was horrendous as the U.S. player never even pushed the Ghana player, but that one bad call really changed the outcome of the game.

One of the issues I have had with the U.S. team in the games I have seen is that they seem to want to set stuff up too much. One thing I have learned in watching sports like this such as soccer or hockey is that you can't set stuff up. It's almost like they try to hard to make the perfect play or the perfect pass to set up a goal. And that hardly ever works out. I don't think I ever saw the U.S. take a shot from the midfield off of a kick. And I saw all three other teams in the group do that. The U.S. just tries to make the perfect play and that is one of the main reasons why I think they ultimately lost and that they only scored one goal themselves in the World Cup (I'm not counting the goal in the Italy game since Italy actually scored it on themselves). And another thing I don't get and I'm not familiar with all the players is why Eddie Johnson didn't play that much. The announcers made the comment when he came in that he was the U.S.' best goal scorer and that is what you need when you are playing in a must win game. I guess that just goes to bad coaching in my opinion and i really think that's what all of the World Cup goes back to. It just didn't seem like the U.S. team was ever ready to play in the World Cup and that goes back to coaching. And it's a big shame to because so much was made about this U.S. team and how good they were, and it was really a big chance to gain more U.S. soccer fans, but after the performance by the U.S. team this last two weeks, they have disappointed a lot of fans and the country as well.