It does not take a great Marxian theoretician to figure out that if one area of the City has lots of great sidewalk cafes filled with beautiful people eating their hearts out all day, there is probably a section of the City which is piss poor. The best way to test this analysis is to take the proposed walk from my apartment to the soccer field. After about an hour walking through the cutesy sections of town, I suddenly found myself in a drab tenement section with mostly Asian looking women and African men on the streets. I would have to honestly say, it didn’t feel like a slum, it was definitely run down, but not dirty and the buildings looked in disrepair, but were clearly habitable. I stood out as different, but felt safe.
A weird store in the run-down neighborhood, I think it sold manikins.
This section of town seemed to extend endlessly and the treeless streets magnified the hot summer sun. I don’t understand why it doesn’t rain here, one can see the ocean in the distance and you would think with the heat the water evaporation would be significant, so where does that water get dumped? Anyway, I was told there probably wouldn’t be any rain until the fall, which gives the City a permanent dusty quality.
One of many drab tenement buildings, this was better than most, but there were rows and rows of them.
When I arrived at Bloomfield I was disappointed. It holds only about 15,000 fans and hardly compares to the 100K soccer stadiums in other major international cities. But no matter, it was the roar of the crowd and the excitement of the game which held my attention. Today was Youth Soccer Appreciation Day and I sat in a section with about 2,500 boys between the ages of about 8-14, a group I generally feel comfortable around. Unfortunately, I had two grown male idiots on either side of me who worst of all smoked cigarettes. I should note at this point, that my clothes are starting to smell like smoke which is the first time in about 20 years that I have had to think about that problem. I feel like I am in a scene from Back to the Future, because I know what is going to happen to this arrogant group of cigarette smokers, at some point they will be turned on by the non-smokers and stoned to death. I’m not exactly sure when that will happen, but I am absolutely convinced it will happen. I want to tell the smokers that “the times they are a changing and the first ones now will later be last” but they are so self-assured that I’m sure they wouldn’t hear a word I have to say or if they heard me, they wouldn’t care and certainly wouldn’t quit. So I just need to be patient and let the historical forces claim their victims.
The game was exactly as I expected and this is after I have worked really, really hard to understand what it is that makes this sport so appealing. Let me jump right to the heart of the matter, in the 83 minute, out of the middle of nowhere, the underdog team scored a goal on a header and as they say, “the crowd went wild.” So to make a very long story short, that was 1 goal in a total of about 93 minutes. I will spare you the endless runnings up and back, the dirty tackles and arguments with the refs, and the repetitious singing of the teams’ fight songs accompanied by non-stop drumming. Every time a shot was attempted and missed, which even as a non-math person you can figure out happened all the time, EXCEPT ONCE, the two guys next to me lit up a cigarette. (But they didn’t light up after the goal, interesting!) This was followed by a heated sports analysis in Hebrew. I simply couldn't understand how there could be so much analysis to a stupid missed shot, but these two guys could go at it for hours if they hadn't been interrupted by another missed shot.
What was most telling to me was how quickly the kids got bored with the game and started horsing around. Here was a group of boys who definitely loved soccer because they were all picked from teams that had won championships, but they were bored watching the game. They didn’t show any great appreciation for all the special nuances that I have been told make the sport so interesting to watch. But in all fairness, I have to admit that everyone (except me) had a great old time. A missed shot was just as exciting as a goal and even when a shot went astray, if the play leading up to the miss was good, the crowd showed their appreciation by cheering (and of course lighting up a cigarette)
My one Bend it Like Beckham moment on a penalty kick.
Here are my few suggestions for making soccer more interesting: The obvious thing is to make the goal higher and wider, I could even deal with a goal the whole length of the field even if it means scores similar to the ones in basketball. On a more serious note, get rid of the off-side rule, (it’s too hard to explain to my non-soccer readers, but my sport friends know what I am talking about.) There are a lot of players (I was one of them) who don’t like to run up and down the field, so they should be allowed to just hang around the goal for the whole game and wait for what we call in basketball “garbage shots.” The opposite of this rule is that the goalie should be required to run around like an idiot like all the other players and maybe not be allowed to use his hands, then we will see what Mr. Stand in One Place all Game is really made of. As a finally observation which kind of captures my whole feeling about the sport, why would you encourage a player to use his head to hit a ball but penalize him for using his hands? That makes no sense! You would think that after about a million generations of soccer players they would evolve into a species with huge neck muscles, enormous thighs and calves and little tiny arms that were only good for scratching their crotches. Who wants athletes who look and act like that?
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