Wednesday, July 14, 2010

World Cup Recap: Foreign player most American's could root for

A couple of observations;

The foreign player that the uninformed American football fan could root for: Uruguayan defensive midfielder, Diego Perez. Tireless work ethic, in-your-face defensive style, no frills, lets get on with this game. You want to sell the game in America.......... stock teams full of players like Diego Perez and Joe SixPack will start watching soccer. Most true American football fans don't revere the offensive stars as much as the tough defensive generals, the middle linebackers, the tough, eat grass, come, cross that scrimmage line and you'll pay big time..... Lawrence Taylor, Mike Curtis, Mike Ditka, Ray Lewis (sorry, I have a Baltimore bias). In soccer, Diego Perez fits the mold.

The game for third place (Uruguay vs Germany) was the entertaining game. In the final, it was slow going until the extra 30 minutes. Tactically, the Netherlands had to shut down Spain's elegant short passing game. How to do that? Aggressive clattering foul after another. Slow the Spanish down to a crawl and hope for a lightening strike, which Robben almost delivered twice. However, if you accumulate enough yellows, eventually someone gets another and you are down to 10 men. That happened in extra time and Spain's finesse prevailed.

For the U.S.A, we will hold onto the late inning strike against Algeria that sent us out of the group. A compilation video of how this goal played around the country

I was the dude from Arkansas, except I didn't have my wife to hop over to, arms upstretched, only my puzzled three legged dog.




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