There is something called the World Cup taking place right now. It is like the Super Bowl for the entire world, except for the United States, which only accepts a long-pointed ball as a real football, and not a black and white volleyball. The World Cup is a soccer championship, and soccer is a strange game. I’ll try to explain it to you.
For starters, in order to play soccer, young men have to have really neat haircuts. The barber shaves your head above the ears and then forms your hair into something resembling a head of broccoli on top. If you don’t have cool hair, you can’t play soccer in the World Cup.
There are also personal size restrictions. No one with a waist larger than 28-inces is allowed to play. I think it’s a health precaution. Anyone with a 36-inch waist and a small gut would be dead after running 816 miles in a normal soccer match. So just skinny guys compete.
Soccer is played on a really long football field, but instead of goal lines and goal posts, there are two small nets at each end, guarded by tall skinny guys with arms as long as an orangutan. They are called goalies and it’s their job to keep the volley balls out of the nets. And they do a good job. A team that gets 40 or 50 kicks on goal usually comes up with zero, but whichever team happens to get the most goals, wins.
In soccer, you are not allowed to use your hands unless you’re the goalie or if you see a guy with a bad haircut and poke him in the eye. That’s frowned upon but allowed. Each team has fifteen or twenty players (no one knows for sure) who run up and down the field trying to just get one good kick at the goalie, but they usually don’t. The volleyball is often intercepted by the opposing team which then runs up the other end of the field, only to have the ball stolen and returned to the other end where it is once again stolen and returned to the other end. This goes on for several hours.
There is not a lot of scoring in soccer. Many games end up tied at zero, and nobody loses except then guy who got poked in the eye. A 1-0 game is common, where one team (with the one goal) clearly dominates. A 3 to 1 game is considered a blowout. Imaging, scoring three goals in one game?
A soccer game is divided into two halves of an uncertain amount of time. It depends on the referees and how they are feeling at the time. When they get tired, the game is over. Referees also have the power to hand out cards, like a blackjack dealer at Vegas. If they give you a red card (like for biting the leg of a guy about to score) you’re in deep doo-doo. Sometimes, if a player has really bad haircut or weighs more than 130 pounds, the refs give you yellow cards and kick you out of the game entirely.
So now, knowing and understanding the game of soccer, you can turn on your television and watch a World Cup soccer match in action, which is every bit as exciting as watching paint dry on your kitchen ceiling.
