Sunday, June 25, 2006

I'm over the world cup

Wherein I'll prefer to waste my time getting ready for the Tour de France


I am done. Stick a fork in me done. FIFA and their idiotic referee instructions have destroyed my enjoyment of these games. Between the stupid ass calls and the stupid ass diving and the stupid ass diving being rewarded with stupid ass calls, I can't take it any more.

We've yelled at the TV so often even our daughter is shouting "get up, you big baby!" This isn't healthy. So, no more. I might catch a couple minutes here and there, otherwise, whatever.

Screw FIFA and screw soccer.

8 Comments:

Blogger Icepick said...

You could have avoided all of this agony by acting like the average American, who never cared about soccer in the first place. Score one for the intelligence of (American) crowds!

6/26/2006 12:19:00 PM  
Blogger bill said...

I have no argument for that.

Luckily, OLN has bull riding most nights. Now there's a good time.

6/26/2006 01:04:00 PM  
Blogger Pooh said...

I only wish I had a counter-argument. I will struggle on, manfully, for the two of us...

6/26/2006 01:50:00 PM  
Blogger Amy said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

6/26/2006 03:12:00 PM  
Blogger bill said...

Amy's comment was deleted due to ground rule violations

6/26/2006 04:02:00 PM  
Blogger Icepick said...

All mocking of soccer aside, I feel your pain. It absolutely sucks having a favorite sport get screwed by lousy officiating and lousy governance.

6/26/2006 04:52:00 PM  
Blogger Pooh said...

Pick, that's the thing. Everyone has known for 30 + years that FIFA is completely screwed up (like the UN, but worse in many ways) but for the most part (Italy '90 being the recent exception) the soccer has managed to overcome. And for the first 2 weeks of the World Cup, it did as well, largely. I mean if you weren't a partisan US supporter, there wasn't all that much to get agitated about (hence the rather clucking attitude of the international press...) But in the round of 16, just awful. Terrible red card against Sweden (not that it mattered) Portugal-Netherlands was ludicrous (though this is a good point. At least it would be in a rational world.)

6/26/2006 06:00:00 PM  
Blogger Icepick said...

I didn't realize FIFA was screwed up. Still gotta be better than FIDE (Federation Internationale d'Echecs, the World Chess Federation). For the last ten years it's been run by a man named Kirsan Iljumzhanov, who is the billionaire leader of a small semi-autonomous Russian Republic, Kalmykia. He's a third world dictator who has political opponents (in his republic) killed, has destroyed the Chess Championship (imagine the World Cup being held every year, with 128 participants, and decided ONLY by penalty kicks and you will get an idea of what he's done to the Chess Championship), has run the finances of the federation into the ground (it is now solely dependent on his largesse), AND claims he has been abducted by aliens with a secret plan to evacuate the Earth to save us from ourselves.

FIDE just had a new election for the presidency. Running against Kirsan was another billionaire patron of the game from Europe, who has had much experience running successful businesses and chess endeavours in the past. Naturally, Kirsan pasted that guy. (The opponent was Bessel Kok, on of the founders of SWIFT, recently in the news because of the bank monitoring, BTW.)

It's so bad some of us chessplayers wish that Chess was run as well and as corruption-free as professional boxing.

The Democracy of Nations sucks. :(

6/26/2006 11:16:00 PM  

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