Ole! Ole! Ole Ole Ole !

I'm watching the world cup. Soccer.
I'm actually in bed organising a trip to Thailand, waiting for an email.

I don't like watching soccer much. Australian Rules Football is a much better game - more goals, more skills, more spectacular.

What's to say about the world cup ?

It's a commercial proposition, as it stands, a rip-off. Coca Cola owns the world cup is the main economic beneficiary. One of the reasons your coke is so cheap is that it's more expensive at the world cup. Coke's operation in India is another reason your coke is so cheap.
I have no idea about the money that changes hands over the world cup, the cost to media, merchandise... I'm guessing trillions.
I don't really want to go into the social cost but I guess it's worth more than the economic cost.
   
Soccer is the ultimate in 'intermittent reinforcement', meaning mostly it's boring, sometimes excruciating, and once in a while it's brilliant.

I played soccer from the age of 8 to around 45. mostly 2 practices a week and a game on the weekend.
at one stage, over a few years, I was playing up to 6 times a week - in one outdoor team and 3 indoor competitions. our indoor team stayed together for a decade or more. we had a playing area and goal set up in the 100 acre backyard of the Montacute Chapman's, now of Chappies track fame. our goal had terraces behind it, and a dog - Jamus, to retrieve the ball, often out of blackberries. we were an academic bunch, the team were variously known as 'aliens' 'nads' (Gonads!) and 'illuminati'. one of our numbers was .08, the legal drinking limit, pi was another.

Interesting how skills develop. I started playing when I moved into a tenement building in the Hilltown of Dundee, Scotland. Technically the place was not a slum, but it was pretty close to it. heaps of condemned buildings and bomb shelters with people living in them. local groups picked kids up off the streets, me included, and took them for meals, dropping them off later. we had a game of jumping across the tops of bomb shelters, not so much scarey as frightening, as my father would say. free rides on coal trucks, hanging on the back, legs up, bum inches above cobblestone roads... whee ! I got into a game kicking tin cans around the entrance to our building. a bit noisy according to the neighbours. later I joined a game with a ball. In those days violence was endemic, so when I broached the subject with my mother, of 3 kids attacking me with sticks, the recommendation, delivered physically, was to go back and return the same. yeah right ! (I didn't.)
Coming to Oz, I was a shoe-in to the school team and local kid games. the kids in my street were Greek. I didn't have a clue what they were saying, e.g. vrai, and bhutsa mallaca, but I caught on quickly enough. Apart from Scottish people, not many others understood me either. I was speaking a language called Lallans. I had to enunciate slowly and clearly.

Position wise, I started at left back, moved to centre-half, sweeper, then to left wing.
The centre-half was usually the biggest toughest meanest kid on the team. I wasn't that mean but pre-emptive, and fast. the opposition usually bailed out of tackles. I used professional fouls, tripping up kids who got past me.
Sweeping is a heap of fun. the idea is that someone goes in for a tackle and as the opposition kicks the ball past the initial tackler, the sweeper comes in to kick the ball away. Soccer has a rule - 'if in doubt, kick it out', thus stopping the attack and giving the rest of the team time to catch up. In those days slide-tackling was permissible and I'd often have to sprint 20 metres to take the ball from a winger with a big slide, fun on a slippery pitch. only once did I injure a guy. he was huge and a monster kick. I slid in at speed, he kicked the ball slightly before my foot got to it and I blocked the ball on his foot. he came off with an ankle injury. I had blocked the ball with the underside of my foot, illegal in soccer. oops !
As a winger I really enjoyed scoring goals against clubs I had played against as a kid. The trick here was, during opposite corners, to leave your opponent standing in the 6 yard box. You would sneak away to 5 metres, then come running in, past your opponent. with that momentum your opponent couldn't catch up, leaving you with free space to take a shot.

My skills picked up playing indoor soccer. a much smaller playing area, and more scoring opportunities. I was a playmaker, very accurate with passes, and was happy to play back. Once, right before the end of a game, an opposition player ran past me from behind and kicked my knee. The game ended and he was gone. I had scored 5 goals in a previous game against this team. So the next time we played he was playing on the other wing. I decided not to bail him up re kicking me. But, going for the same ball, he crossed over and was travelling at speed to take me out. we were right next to a wall. I stopped a micro-second before him and 'helped' him into the wall. He crumpled, nobody said boo - we knew he got what was coming to him. He left me alone after that.

I was slightly dangerous in those days, mainly from rampant speed, racing into corners, being last to hit the brakes. I didn't intentionally foul people but was sent off 3 games in a row, maybe the umpire was trying to tell me something...

I gave up soccer when I started hobbling for a couple of days after the game. I didn't like the connotations of being an old man - time to look after my body. Plus my skills were such that I was being taken out. someone injured my knee and hip with a kung fu kick to the leg, which took a year before I could run again. my hip seized up in a wrong position, a chiro freed it and physios kept putting it back in place. I had an arthroscopy after I decided to start running again.
the last time I played, my opponent, a wrestler, put me into an arm lock and slammed it into the ground. there was a massive crack - my elbow I think, but nothing broken, just pain and a few days to recover. we were playing against Scotland !

I had a ball playing soccer. I won my share of trophies - cups, best and fairest and endeavour medals, I played 1st division amateurs, and against the national indoor soccer team. I was head hunted and played under a false name for a while. I coached for a few years. When I went back to Scotland, after 5 years of swimming, my extra lung capacity had me running rings around opponents in our school staff indoor games.

There's more I could write but that's enough for 1 post. I'm still waiting for an email...

Take-away ? Soccer is probably politically incorrect, a form of de-natured violence, a substitute for killing the opposition.  
                    

cheers dears !