Tomorrow morning (Friday, June 21) at 7:30 am Atlanta time, the United States soccer team will take the field in its biggest match in the modern history of American soccer. A victory over heavily favored Germany would propel the surprising American side to the semifinals of the world�s largest single sporting event for the first time since the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay.
Unfortunately, most Americans don�t have or understand the passion life-long (or even newly converted) soccer fans have for the world�s most popular team sport. Detractors like Jim Rome, Neal Boortz, and others say that it is boring, it takes too long, it is too slow, etc. They show a basic ignorance for a game that has swept the world.
The two primary differences between soccer and the three dominant team sports (football, baseball, and basketball) are the role of coaches and the flow of play.
In football, the coach has a primary impact on nearly every play of the game. The teams take forty seconds between plays that take seven seconds. The coaches then call these complex plays and formations that they players then attempt to execute before repeating the process. Where would these teams be without the guidance of their coaches for EVERY PLAY! This is how it takes over three hours for a grand total of twenty minutes of action. BORING!
n baseball, you have 30 seconds or more between pitches. Nearly every pitch is called by a coach in the dugout. Batters are told when to swing, bunt, take, etc. by their coaches. Base runners are told when to try to steal, attempt a hit-and-run, etc. by their coaches. Field players are told where to shift to for specific batters and pitch calls. All of this occurs while play has been stopped. The average length of a baseball game has risen to about three hours!
Basketball isn�t quite as bad as baseball and football, but coaches have a heavy imprint over the course of play. Basketball has frequent stoppages of play due to fouls and an excessive number of timeouts, allowing coaches to control the flow of play. How often have you seen a point guard walk the ball up slowly only to receive instructions from their coach as to what play to run. Basketball, to its credit, does have flashes of brilliant, creative play. However, this only occurs out of the influence of the coaches when the players have a time of uninterrupted play.
Soccer is very different than the aforementioned sports. Soccer runs in two 45-minutes halves. Play does not stop and occurs over a field larger than a U.S. football field. There are no time outs for the coaches to pull all of the players over to the side and draw up plays. This serves to minimize the role of the coach and maximize the role of the players in ultimate victory or defeat. Allowing only three substitutions forces players to have superior athletic conditioning than are required by sports with seemingly innumerable substitutions or where the players do more standing or sitting rather than kitting or running. The nature of soccer promotes inventiveness on the fly by the players. How many times late in football or basketball games are coaches expected to draw up the winning play! Not in soccer. In soccer, it�s up to the players.
I genuinely hope more of my countrymen will open to the glorious game that is soccer. It is a glorious game that showcases its players more than any other sport. Not to mention that it�s advertisements are far superior to those of any other sport.
Tune in tomorrow (Friday) at 7:30 am to see that it�s all about. GO USA!