June 23, 2010

ULTIMATELY IT'S JUST TOO EASY A GAME FOR US NOT TO BE GREAT AT IT:

The True Story of American Soccer: From The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup. (Dave Eggers, June 9, 2010, Slate)

The beauty of soccer for very young people is that, to create a simulacrum of the game, it requires very little skill. There is no other sport that can bear such incompetence. With soccer, 22 kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines, or crying for no apparent reason, and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match. If there are three or four coordinated kids among the 22 flailing bodies, there will actually be dribbling, a few legal throw-ins, and a couple of times when the ball stretches the back of the net. It will be soccer, more or less.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 23, 2010 6:41 AM
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