Ann Coulter Knows Nil about Soccer and Proves It!

           Ann Coulter wrote a column disparaging soccer claiming that somehow it shows America’s moral decay because it has ties to liberals.  I have previously suggested Ms. Coulter’s caustic approach leaves much to be desired.  I suppose her effort here arose because of the World Cup and while she may be trying to be tongue-in-cheek, her column isn’t funny.  You can read her June 25 column here if you’d like: http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-06-25.html.

            First, in order to poke fun at something you have to understand it.  That’s how satire works.  Ms. Coulter has no clue about soccer if she thinks individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer.  Messi, Ronaldo, Mueller, Benzema, Dempsey – soccer fans know these names and why they are a big deal.  Poor Michael Bradley, America’s best mid-field player, has been beaten up by fans and the press because his “individual” achievement in the Cup has been below his normal standards.  Since Ms. Coulter doesn’t know enough about the game to understand how individual performances matter, maybe she should re-think commenting.

            Second, her analysis about boys and girls playing together shows her further ignorance of how soccer is played.  Most obvious is that men and women have a their own world cups because, well, let’s just say Mia Hamm would have never made the Men’s National Team and leave it at that.  If Ms. Coulter doesn’t know who Mia Hamm is, she only further proves her ignorance.  According to Ms. Coulter the sport requires so little “athletic expression” (whatever that means) that boys and girls can play together and, thus, liberal moms love it.  No, Ms. Coulter, you’re wrong.  As a veteran of two boys who both played a great deal of recreational co-ed soccer, girls’ participation falls off precipitously around the age of 10 or 11 where even these "co-ed" teams become dominated by boys.  Ms. Coulter appears blissfully unaware of this reality.  Better players go on to club soccer, where the boys and girls NEVER play each other on co-ed teams, except perhaps for fun. 

            The rest of her so-called explanations for why soccer is somehow a liberal sport don’t even make sense, so I won’t waste too much space contending with her on them.  Suffice to say, she stretches all credulity by taking enormous leaps trying to link soccer to the New York Times, France (which she, I guess, uses as a euphemism for all of liberalism - maybe rightly so), and the metric system (which she claims liberals love – she may well be right on that, too).  I guess I'm to dull-witted to understand the brilliance of her analogies here.

            I would, however, challenge Ms. Coulter to think about the following features of soccer, which may commend it to her as having more “conservative” qualities than she seems to understand.  First, coaching takes place during practice, so when players are on the field they have to make decisions for themselves about what to do and how to do it.  Contrast football where, despite players supposedly spending  bazillions of hours of watching game tape and studying playbooks (according to the ESPN football jockocracy), most of the game is spent with coaches relaying plays into the players.  For crying out loud, quarterbacks have a wristband full of plays on them at all times!  About 11 or 12 minutes is actually spent playing the game out of the 60 minutes while the clock is running.  Soccer matches run 45 minutes per half, with very little let up and no time outs.  Seems more liberal to me to have people constantly telling you what to do versus teaching you what to do, then letting you do it.  But then again, what do I know?  I’m just a bush league blogger compared to Ms. Coulter, who is a brilliant thinker and pundit, right?

            Ms. Coulter also decries that soccer matches can end in 0-0 ties, as if this is the end of the world.  I have heard it argued the hardest thing in sports is to hit a baseball.  I think the hardest thing in sports is to score a goal in soccer.  As the old saying goes, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.  If something takes enormous skill, discipline, and dedication to accomplish, doesn’t this suggest when it happens it is an extremely valuable commodity? In other words, aren’t soccer goals, then, much like a valuable good or service which someone, by the sweat of their brow and ingenuity brings to the market place and gets rewarded?  If so, doesn’t soccer, once again, prove itself a conservative endeavor?

            Ms. Coulter’s woeful attempt at satire failed.  I’m sure when Clint Dempsey had is nose broken while playing in the match against Ghana, his first thought while the blood was gushing out was how much he wished Ann Coulter were there to remind him that he’s really playing a sissy sport that any 10 year old girl could do while eating a croissant, reading her New York Times, and measuring the blood flow in milliliters.