Ross Douthat: “For Want of a Goal”

Where I grew up we didn’t play much soccer.  Indeed, we suspected that soccer wasn’t too far from good old fashioned communism.  Still, we are in Europe for a few weeks and my family is getting into the World Cup spirit.  Switzerland is ecstatic about their win.

But, we were all mystified today as to why the third goal was disallowed.  It didn’t help that we were listening to German announcers.  I’m sure they knew what they were talking about, but we don’t speak German.

All of which is to say, I can really relate right now to this post from Ross Douthat.

I am not a soccer fan, particularly. I hated playing the game as a kid, I’m easily exasperated by the ties and the low scoring and the penalty-kick finales, and I loathe what Jonathan Last calls “the ritual attack of the soccer scolds” every World Cup season. (Also, I had college roommates — and dear friends — who insisted on referring to the game as “football,” even though they were Americans going to college in America, for crying out loud.) Buttoday’s United States-Slovenia match was a beautiful, remarkable, riveting thing to watch — and a game seemingly perfectly engineered, in its stakes and scoring and sudden reversals, to hoist me on my own soccer-hating petard.

Until, that is, what should have been the winning goal, capping an astonishing American comeback, was disallowed by a flagrantly awful and entirely mysterious referee’s call. And suddenly all my bright talk from a couple weeks back about the virtues of living with bad officiating seemed like so much pompous dreck. I wanted instant replay for the World Cup, and I wanted it today.

Over to you, Joe Posnanski:

When you are watching a sport you don’t often watch, things happen that you don’t quite understand. Why didn’t that play count? Oh, the offensive lineman was holding. Why was that basket disallowed? Oh, that guy was standing in the lane for three seconds. Why was that home run taken away? Oh, the umpire said it went foul. This happens in every sport.

But what made Coulibali’s Call-of-Folly so maddening is that even soccer experts could not tell us why it happened.

Here to read more.