Return of the Blogger in Blog Form or: Soccer? I Never Touched Her!

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd we're back!

After dropping a hundred thousand words worth of the greatest blogs ever written in the HISTORY OF TIME, then disappearing off the face of the earth, what could prompt such a magnanimous, stupendous, superfluous, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious return? Why, of course, the game we call "soccer," or, as it is known to the rest of the world, "soccer."

[Editor's Note: I'm not sure you know what the word "superfluous" means.]

Since there's so much to talk about, let's break this up into sections:

I

Soccer Team Names That We Probably Should Have Given Some Thought to Sometime Before a Few Weeks Ago

And the award goes to . . .

(drumroll)

The All Whites, New Zealand's national soccer team.

Granted, they are going over slightly better in South Africa than Germany's national soccer team, the Triumph of the Wills, and France's unbelievably awkwardly named team, the Apartheid Wasn't Such a Terrible Idea, Was Its?, but only by a little bit.

[Legal Team's Note: None of those teams are actually called any of those things; We don't have any idea how he's coming up with this nonsense . . . oh, wait, New Zealand's team is actually called the All Whites . . . huh.]

II

Noise Horns from the Depths of Hell

Also knows as vuvuzelas. Look, I'm all for respecting the quirks of a particular culture, but what the fuck is up with the cicada horns, people of South Africa? I was about four minutes in to U.S. vs. England before I binged (okay, fine, I googled it, but can't we all just agree to use "binged" from here on out if for nothing more than comedy's sake?) "World Cup buzzing sound."

From a technical standpoint, it would be remarkably easy for ABC / ESPN to kill the audio feed from the stadium and add crowd noises from the Madden '10 video game under the announcers' commentary. I'm giving you networks that bit of advice for free. Think about it.

III

United States Soccer Coach Bob "It Rubs the Lotion on Its Skin, or Else It Gets the Hose Again" Bradley

Otherwise knows as the man who led me to text the following to a friend:

Over / Under on number of hours since our coach last touched a child? Six?

[Legal Team's Note: Yeah, um, we're just getting the fuck out of here. He's on his own.  We're sorry.]

Okay, maybe I'm being a little out of line . . . but, again:

And one more time:

As for this next point, I'm going to try to put it somewhat delicately:

IIII


Why Isn't Our National Soccer Team Composed of Gigantic Black Men Like the Teams in All the Other Sports That We Just Happen to be the Best in the World At?

Okay, sort of failed at the delicate thing, but you know what I mean.

Meet Landon Donovan:

A balding, 5'8, seemingly middle-aged man. Not only in Mr. Donovan one of the best players on our World Cup soccer team, but he's so good at the game of foots (I just made that up, thank you) that he occasionally plays in the Premier League, a magical, mystical league in Europe where apparently some of the best soccer in the world is played, even though I've never actually seen a game on TV or met anybody who's claimed to have seen a game or seen anybody wear one of the teams' jerseys and which is composed of teams with names like (not making these up) the Bolton Wanderers, Crystal Palace, Ipswich Town, Sheffield Wednesday, and Queens Park Rangers.

Okay, just kidding, I made-up that last one up . . . oh, wait, no I didn't!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens_Park_Rangers_F.C.

So basically if you go to Queens, New York, head to the nearest public park, then track down a park ranger, that man has a soccer team in England named after him. You figure out why. My head hurts already.

[Editor's Note: Women can be park rangers too.]

Okay, but where were we?

Oh, yeah, that's right - Mr. Lebron James, ladies and gentlemen:

6'8, 250 pounds, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Basically, if the fate of the human race ever comes down to us having to pick a person to fight one of those aliens from Aliens in a coliseum gladiator-style, we're sending in Lebron and taking our Lechances.

Now, Nate, you say, we're not even a thousand words into your blog comeback and you're already up to your old obscuration and obfuscations. You obviously picked a, let's say, "less than physically imposing" soccer player and put him up against one of the greatest athletes alive.

But NO!

One of soccer's dirty little secrets is that, in every country in the world, teams are composed almost entirely of petite, fey man-children, who flail around the "pitch" (I'm not even making that up!  That's what they call the field!) like so many pieces on one of those electric football fields.

Why do you think that nobody ever scores?

I'll wait while you think . . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

Okay, good, let's continue.

Wait, don't believe me yet? Okay, consider Lionel Messi, who you've never heard of, but who is considered by many as one of the greatest soccer players in the world, and who is 5'7 and weighs 150 pounds. So basically he's my size if I was eleven years-old and fat.

Or how about Cristiano Ronaldo, another candidate for greatest living soccer player. Okay, he is a respectable 6'1 and in great shape, but would you ever take this guy seriously as a top-flight athlete?

The villain in a 1980's teen film set at a beach resort?  Sure.  World-class athlete?  Nope.

And this isn't a recent trend. I give you this blast from the past, England's soccer legend, George Best:

Apparently he was an extra in Quadrophenia when they snapped that photo. But still a great soccer player, right? Sure. Probably. I don't know. I do know that he drank himself to death by age fifty-nine after blowing out his second liver (most of us only get one) and was apparently able to excel against the best players the soccer world had to offer while blindingly drunk.

[Legal Team's Note: Yeah, one more thing before we head out the door: He's a god in England. So if you ever step on British soil you will be murdered. Brutally. And they don't shoot people in England.  It's all good old-fashioned British stabbin'.  Good luck with that.]

And what about the soccer player you have heard of, Pelé? Let's do some Pelé-math. Pelé is best known for leading a group of prisoners of war to a controversial draw against prison guards in a soccer match that took place in a German war camp in 1942.

In 1970 Pelé won his last World Cup, defeating Italy while recording one goal and two assists. So, figure that Pelé must have been seventeen or eighteen in 1942, which would then make him an astonishing forty-five or forty-six at the time of his last World Cup.

Soccer: Where old, brittle men dominate championship games.

Finally, here's Diego Maradona, the man who shared the FIFA Player of the Century award with Pelé.

Yeah, let's just leave it at that.

Or let's not -

Maradona is infamous for punching a soccer ball into the goal in a World Cup match against England in 1986. Here's a little soccer lesson: If you're not a goalie, then using your hands is the ONE THING that they don't let you do. Except when they do let you do it. Which is sometimes.

Okay, to get back to my point, so instead of sending our nation's best athletes to the World Cup, we sent Alexi Lalas, who isn't a hot porn star as the name would suggest, but who is this guy:

Yep.

Now, before you start telling me about how the U.S. won't ever be competitive on the World Soccer Stage as long as our best athletes are drawn to the sports that actually, you know, pay you money and earn you respect, let me stop you right there.  I'm not proposing that the goal is to twist the cultural zeitgeist to the point where are athletes are drawn away from baseball and basketball and football and, fuck it, even NASCAR and toward soccer.  No, not at all.  What I'm proposing is that we just send a Division I football team or the Los Angeles Clippers to the World Cup.  They'd probably be the favorite to win it and at the very least we could enjoy watching this guy

destroy the "best" players at a "game" that the rest of the "world" considers us Americans too "dense" to "understand."

Too dense?

Pfft

Try too awesome.

Next up: What's wrong with Megan Fox?