GOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!!!!

The 2010 FIFA World Cup competition has started in South Africa today. This is one of the most highly anticipated events of the year (unless you live in the U.S.). I'm trying to get hyped up for this, but I'm having a hard time. I live in the land of football, not futbol. Yes, I know we are an arrogant group, us Americans, that everyone else in the world calls it futbol and we call it soccer. Why we have a sport named football when the ball touches anyone's foot less than 1% of the game, I'll never know, but I digress.

For some reason the United States has not embraced soccer/futbol in the same way as all the rest of the world. We're trying though. We can actually recognize a few players on our own national team now and more and more kids are playing the sport. Baby steps. Maybe it's due to the latter that I'm making more of an effort to watch. My youngest likes soccer even if, bless her heart, she's not that good at it. Hey, it gets her out of the house and she gets to make new friends. I'm all for that. However, I did not grow up watching this sport. We had the standard sports: football, baseball, basketball, volleyball, tennis and even golf. Yes, we had golf as a high school sport that you could letter in. That being said, I don't have any background on the rules, what's acceptable and what's not. The little bit of professional soccer I have seen seems like a bunch of guys running way too much on a field that's way too big and becoming major drama queens anytime anyone comes within ten feet of their person. Well, that and having seen Bend it like Beckham a number of times.

Not saying these guys aren't athletes. Au contraire, mon frere. These guys are running back and forth on a futbol field the size of a football field. Everyone got that. That's a whole heckuva lot of running. I saw some article saying that the refs can expect to run some crazy amount over the course of a game like 12 miles or some such number. That's just the refs! That's about 12 miles too many for me. Well, you never see a fat soccer/futbol player now do you? So the media is trying to get us uneducated Americans into the World Cup by having stories about the players and whatnot. They even had a thing on msnbc about the 50 stars of the World Cup with the picture, name, age and a little blurb about each player. Know what surprised me the most about this? The majority of this 50 are around 27-34. Much older than I would have thought. I figured these guys would have to be in their early 20s to handle that kind of stress on the body. Crazy.

So all this leads up to the match tomorrow between England and the U.S. Should be interesting. I'm hoping they don't smear our boys all over the pitch (yeah, I said pitch). Taking bets on if the UK runs out of beer before the end of the match. And if we do happen to win this, major bragging rights which as an obnoxious American, I'm all about. :)

Good luck boys! at life.sa.laugh@hotmail.com.