mmmm... Football...

Or Soccer to the US. Which leads me to wonder why when for the first time (that I'm aware of) all games are finally being broadcast in the US, they get relegated to ESPN2 (aside from the very nice high def coverage on ABC)? Not even ESPN? Although from what I understand (I haven't watched it in quite awhile) ESPN doesn't actually show sports anymore, much in the same way music videos are like albino rhinos on MTV...

So we have the world cup, which is soccer goodness to all (except the US, where they don't seem to much care). So much so that places in England are actually selling companies insurance to cover for losses due to people being absent/neglegant(sp?)/not paying attention due to watching the games. Cool!

I enjoy much the soccer, however it is appearing that the most fun games to watch are the ones involving the non-big players. Italy is a sit back team, and also one of my favorites (at least in terms of lineups), and England can't figure out how to work with their own players. I actually had this problem myself in the armchair version I play, and found that if you got over your tendancy to put players in the positions they are famous for at the club level, and just stick them in where they work, you get alot better results.

So now I change subjects to the US commentators, of which Kris and I could perform just as well. I heard in the England Paraguay game the announcer, that obviously was out of his element, try four different times to mention the gossip pages between two of the players rather than actually speak intelligently about the game. The one US guy that does know what he's talking about can do little more than repeat what just happened and say that's just great. The problem being that most of the world is trying to get away from the slightly underhanded play he seems to encourage...

However, it is 64 games of soccer goodness which is good enough for me! And the Beth has been gracious enough to allow me to watch them all!

Wow, this blogging thing is hard, I think I failed to come to a real point in all this. I shall attempt to bring more consise thoughts to the table for next time, but at the moment I just need some pants...