Look, I find soccer pretty boring to watch too, and don't really understand the appeal of a game where the scoring of a "good" match is so low. (Incidentally, basketball has the opposite problem: too much scoring means too little drama til the last few minutes.)
But this column is still a severe case of over-analysis (with little sign of any sense of humour). For example:
...soccer is a liberal's dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability.Hence, it is un-American.
More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair.
Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.
God knows what he would make of cricket.
This reminded me of a long-lost Imre Salusinszky column which I've gone to the trouble to unearth:
ReplyDeleteWhile most team sports, especially football, are imitations of a police state, in which the ubiquitous ``umpire'' intrudes into every aspect of the action, continually disciplining miscreants, cricket is the only team sport that imitates liberal democracy: many of the rules of conduct are ``understood'', rather than written into a formal constitution, and the umpire intervenes only when specifically called upon.