World Cup

The World Cup is going on right now and as of this writing the US beat Algeria to win their group and advance to the knockout stages. The US should have been down 3-0 at the half and Algeria would be cruising into 3rd place in the group. What sickens me is that the US plays so very poorly in the first half of games and gets away with it. Against Slovenia, they got pummeled in the first half, they were down 2 nothing and the defense looked like a bunch of plastic cones and unfortunately Slovenia's forwards had at some point dribbled around some plastic cones. In the second half the US poured it on and all anyone could say was, "Wow that disallowed goal was the worst thing I've ever seen!" And the talk about that game became about the refs and not about how woefully inadequate the US was for half of the game. Nevermind the fact that a US player decked a Slovenian defender away from the ball.

Against England it was the same thing, blind dumb luck. The US got manhandled and eked out a tie because someone buttered up the England's goalkeeper's gloves. And now all of a sudden the country is ablaze with folks proclaiming Landon Donovan the king of the world, and I for one do not welcome our new Landon Donovan overlords. The hype is great but let's be honest, the US played over half of their three games extremely poorly, and only through dumb luck are the continuing.

It's quite possible the US will end up playing Serbia, which benefitted from the worst call in the World Cup against Germany with a red card that gave Serbia the win. And if the US plays them we will probably win because Serbia is terrible. Then all of a sudden everyone will be crazy about how USA is the new soccer Emperor and soccer fans will come out of the woodwork....Ugh

I love the World Cup, but I love the World Cup 100% more when the US is not in it. We are not a great soccer country, these are our D list athletes at best. The best athletes in the country are playing Basketball, Football, Baseball. Here's a short list of the sports more important that soccer in the US:

1. Football
2. Basketball
3. Baseballe
4. Hockey
5. Nascar
6. Golf
7. Roller Derby
8. MMA
9. Boxing
10. Jai-lai
11. Bowling
12. Table Tennis and Ping-Pong
13. Real Tennis
14. Bicycling
15. That weird Speedwalking thing they tried in the olympics
16 X-Games
17. Surfing
18. Competitive Video Games
19. Running
20. Monster Truck Rally
21. Billards
22. Lacrosse
23. Extreme Eating Competitions

All of these things get more coverage than soccer which is approxiamtely the 34th most important sport in the US mindset. It's a great amateur sport, fantastic at the college level. But the US national team is a joke, a silly silly joke.