Post About Sport VS Well Nobody But I Wanted The Title To Look Like A Sport Score. You Can't Blame Me For Wanting To Be Clever!

Soccer is not the most exciting sport of all time, 22 people run around a field kicking a ball back and forward for 45 minutes while nothing else happens, then after a 20 minute break they go inside for a chat and a quick bite to eat before coming back out and doing the same thing for a further 45 minutes before again returning inside to chat a bit more and finally out again for 10 more minutes in which time the poor guy standing by himself in the nets, tired after standing there as the ball nearly but not quite comes near him for the last 95 minutes, has a lapse in concentration and the ball goes into the net, with the result of the entire game resting on that one pivotal moment.

Two questions need to be asked now. The first question is how is this sport not only the most popular game in Europe, not to mention Africa and South America? The second question is why is this sport more interesting to be a spectator for if you sit there watching nothing happen for the whole 97 minutes than if you just watch highlights packages of thing nearly happen for the most exciting 2 minutes.

I can answer both those questions, and will but I’ll do it in the wrong order. The reason it is more interesting to watch a full game of soccer is the same as why it is more interesting to watch any other sport (with the exception of gridiron, baseball and golf). Scoring is the most important part of sport and it doesn’t matter how well the team plays, if at the end of the game the score is lower than that of the opposition then the team will lose. However people sometimes seem to get the impression that scoring is everything. This is certainly not the case, and the perception that it is leads to sports being either ruined, or made more boring.

The sport will be ruined if as a spectator you are unable to view it in its entirety. Being that time of year again I think I should pull out my anecdote about Channel 10’s Beach Cricket series. When it started in January 2007 I was really excited. I think everyone has thought of playing beach cricket at some point and now the retirees of cricket’s greatest agreeable nations would be playing. It was a hype-able event even without Channel 10 pouring heaps into promoting it. But they didn’t understand it and instead of an afternoon of cricket- cricket on the beach in fact- we got lots of talking about how great the game was, how it worked and highlights of the game. It was appalling and after I had been looking so forward to it I wasn’t just disappointed, I was kind of angry.
I don’t watch it any more and I also don’t watch any other highlights of sport. I’ll watch sport but as soon as I realize it is only highlight I immediately lose interest, regardless of how interesting it was until I realized.

Sadly sports highlights take less air time and are cheaper than live sport so TV stations are going to keep them. I hope Channel 1 doesn’t fall into this trap when they start broadcasting in autumn. All the same this is the reason why I took no interest in some team (I’ve forgotten who now) and their epic journey to the prime of English football under their new coach with all the brilliant moves, tactics and goals along the way, yet I did sit enthralled for 45 minutes to watch the second half of Liverpool kicking Newcastle. (A game that I may be slightly biased towards given that Liverpool is my favourite club and Michael Owen is my favourite player.)

To answer the second question now soccer is huge in Africa due to the occupation of the British Empire, same reason cricket is so popular in Africa and India. I’m not sure why soccer is so big in South America but if it isn’t for the same or similar reasons then it would be because when a sport is that popular in areas such as Europe the rest of the world follows, so follows the popularity in Asia.
Soccer is also amazingly playable. In Australia, with the exception of June/ July 2006 and the few people able to watch the A League on pay-bloody-television soccer isn’t very popular. As evidence I’ve been calling it soccer all post (mind you that is intentional to draw distinctions between other codes of football such as union, league, aussie rules and the stupid American game). The lack of popularity in this country hasn’t stopped the fact that right from year 1 at school people have been playing soccer rather than any other sport at lunch and that hasn’t changed over the last 11 years, or why there are more soccer clubs in the local area than any other type of clubs. Soccer is really fun to play, and why not, we all love to kick a ball around now and then.
The final reason I can provide for why soccer is so popular is because while it is by no means a high scoring game, the plays are good enough that you don’t watch the game for the scoring. If you watched football for high scores then you’d watch AFL and nothing but. People who don’t like soccer or don’t understand it don’t get this, but the subtle fieldwork like kicking the ball back 40 metres and then forward 40 metres and wondering why that happened is interesting and what makes the game. What it lacks in conventionally recognized skills such as the ability to tackle someone with more force than anyone else it make up for with the masterful judgment all players are required to have. Which may lead you to wonder why football is played by footballers, but never mind.

I feel like I’ve missed a point and I believe it is games becoming boring due to sole interest in scores. These games I would count as basketball and Twenty20 cricket. First of all these games are both designed to be spectator sports, like Rugby League although I think they got it right with that one. Basketball is fast paced by necessity because they enforce a score timer, an idea designed to force the game to be fast, produce high scores and keep audiences entertained. I find basketball dull as anything to watch and I’d rather watch lawn bowls (although as anyone who has watched a game of lawn bowls can confirm is far more exciting than it sounds). Playing basketball is heaps of fun though, I like playing it, I just don’t like watching it. Twenty20 cricket advertises itself as being 20 times the excitement, which I pointed out means that conventional limited overs cricket is 50 times the excitement and test matches are 450 times the excitement. Some people (people often referred to as Americans) think that cricket is an appalling boring game and if you describe it in the right way it can seem that way. Best quote I’ve heard about cricket comes from My Hero and went something along the lines of:
“You can’t be serious, how can a game that boring go all day?”
“Well test matches go for 5 days.”
“Oh now I know you’re joking. You’re not joking are you.”
You may want to check the accuracy of that yourself cause I’m going from memory.
But only truly exceptional cricket is sit down and watch a whole game from start to finish sport. Ordinarily you put it on and then go about your business for the day (which being over summer ordinarily involves watching the cricket). The game is so boring at times that you’d lose your sanity if you watched a whole game. Even the commentators don’t watch the whole game. It’s a relaxing sport because it is there, peacefully and you can be flexible watching it and multitask, only stopping to watch it actively when something interesting is happening or when you run out of other things to do. Treating it like that you can easily watch a whole game from start to finish.
Twenty20 cricket on the other hand goes for only 3 hours and while having big hits to every corner of the ground all game, it gets boring because it is just big hits and nothing more subtle and skillful. I get the impression that England are good at making subtle sports.
(Before finishing about cricket I’d like to say that the ABC commentary is great and really livens it up, although doesn’t work with digital TV due to the large difference in transmission time.)

Well this has been going for 2 and a half pages and seems to lack paragraphs, so I’ll wrap it up. Sport is about so much more than scoring even if scoring is ultimately the determining factor for the result. People who don’t understand this fact may dislike the longer more subtle sports like cricket and tend towards more score active sports like basketball. Personal preference obviously plays a large part in what you like but I think that a sport with the skill taken out is ruined and particularly do not at all like highlights games. I rambled on a lot about soccer and cricket but before wrapping up I think an opinion about golf is in order. Golf is a fun game to play, not because there is anything interesting about the game itself but because you are out in great surrounds with a mate (to play without a mate you’d be mad) and it is slow paced enough that you can relax and just enjoy the time off. I do not understand people who watch golf, that seems very pointless to me, but if you like golf then do please try and explain why on earth you do.

All other comments welcome, though if you just spam me with hate mail about my dislike of gridiron I will delete your comments. I’ve both watched and played that game and it is entirely stupid in both regard. Baseball is included by this policy also, but one less rant from me tonight will do us all the world of good.

Good game.