What seems to have American sports pundits in a tizzy is that everyone who likes the sport is ok with the fact that bad calls are made that will impact the outcome of the tournament. Even the members of the US team are unconcerned about what was obviously an arbitrary bad call. Don’t they care? Well, of course they do. But what these critics of the soccer system don’t seem to understand is that soccer players, despite all the professional fouls and faking of injuries to get a ref’s attention, are actually good sports. At the end of the day, they accept the ref as the final arbitrator of the game. Understanding that the ref is indeed human and can and will make mistakes and that those mistakes will sometimes go against you. That’s just part of the game. If you don’t like it play something else where people actually want to listen to you whine.
A big part of being a good sport is accepting the outcome of the game and not being a whiney baby when things don’t go your way. I’m not saying that football players are big fat babies; I’m just saying that soccer players approach their game in a more mature way. And besides, on field instant replays would spoil the flow of the game. Seriously.
I don't know. Whenever I hear my European friends talking about (soccer) football, they're always complaining about the refs making bad or unfair calls. Except my (French) husband, who was complaining that maybe France would have done better if they'd spent as much time on their game as they did on their hairdos.
ReplyDeleteYesterday, my German colleague was saying that calls against Switzerland were arbitrary, and that they ought to arbitrate by having twelve cameras trained on the ball from different angles, and use that information to decide when there's a foul...