(Editor’s Note – The following column is written by someone who, by his own self admission, knows very little about soccer but has watched more of it in the last two weeks than he had in the previous two decades. And if he tries to use the word “futbol” at any point below, you have permission to kick him in the shins.)
Play enough athletics for long enough and you’ll discover – and believe – that the “sports gods” do exist. More importantly, you quickly find out that the last thing you want to do is anger them.
The basic premise is this – play the sport the way it is supposed to be played. Don’t cut corners. It may not be considered outright cheating, but just because you can do it, that doesn’t mean you should do it.
It doesn’t matter the sport is: there are baseball gods, golf gods (the two I am most familiar with), hockey gods and basketball gods.
And, as we found out earlier this week, there are soccer gods.
As soon as it was discovered that the red-card suspension of Folarin Balogun had been overturned, I knew the U.S. men’s national team was in deep doo-doo against Belgium in the round of 16.
Sure, we got one of our best players back and, at least in theory, that gave us a better chance to advance to the quarterfinals.
But we were never going to sneak that one past the soccer gods. That it only ended up as a 4-1 loss was a sign that the soccer gods threw us an ecumenical bone because it could have been much worse.
Now we can all get back to not paying attention to things that keep getting shoved down our throats like a Joey Chestnut hotdog during the summer sports lull: Aaron Rodgers drama (you know it’s coming), college football Media Days, NBA Rookie Summer League, where Lebron James is headed next, who will be the next WNBA player to cheap-shot Caitlin Clark and, of course, the ESPYs.
Oh, the World Cup will continue but we are no longer obligated to have watch parties to sweat out a bunch of one-name Spaniards faking an injury. The average Soccer IQ of the viewership for the remainder of the World Cup is bound to be significantly higher than it was while the USA was running roughshod through Group Whatever.
I will admit it was fun while it lasted. Sometimes it was nap-inducing and sometimes it was pretty amazing to watch. But if you’ll allow me to be golly-gee for a moment, the best part of it all was having all of these foreign visitors invade our country and watch the co-mingling of cultures.
The Norwegians doing their rowing thing at Fenway Park and cheering on their guy Viktor Hovland at the Travelers Championship … the Dutch “Oranjebus” (Orange Bus) making its way through Texas … English fans adopting Atlanta centerfielder Michael Harris as one of their own from the bleachers at Truist Field (they made a song about him) … these fan takeovers were pretty cool to see.
It does remind you how great the world’s human beings can be when politics aren’t involved.
Having the World Cup in this country was a great event, but let’s not make too much of it. We had one of these babies in 1994 and it didn’t exactly revolutionize the American sporting landscape.
To the soccerphiles out there, it’s been a magical existence as they get a chance to bask in the glow of the most-watched sporting event in the world.
To the rest of us, we are left with one question: How many days is it until football season starts?
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com