Tag: American

Guest Post: 7 Reasons That American Football is Better Than Soccer

It’s the first weekend of the Six Nations, so who better to hand the 7 Reasons sofa to than blogger, occasional 7 Reasons guest poster and sports nut, Richard O’Hagan. And what more appropriate subject for him to write about than…oh…the Super Bowl? Which is also happening this weekend. Apparently.

It’s Super Bowl weekend. What do you mean you hadn’t noticed? How could you not notice? It’s the biggest single sporting event in the world. No other event makes an entire country grind to a halt like the first Sunday in February does in America. You want to know how special it is? It’s one of only three days in the year when Americans actually manage to eat MORE than usual – no matter how impossible that might be to imagine.

Yes, all over America, football fans will be doing their best Mr Creosote impressions, barbecuing as if their very lives depended upon it and convincing themselves that they have room for just one more giant pretzel, before settling down in front of the television for the sporting event of the year. Meanwhile, people like me attempt to stay awake until stupid o’clock in the morning, because despite all of the above the Yanks haven’t yet worked out that there are people elsewhere in the world who like to watch the game, too, so they start the game at somewhere near midnight UK time.

And why do I put myself through this every year? Simple. American Football knocks just about every winter game into, if not a cocked hat, then a football helmet. And that particularly includes what Americans call soccer, because:

1. Fat People Can Play This Game, Too. Come on, when was the last time you saw a fat guy playing what, to avoid confusion, we shall also call ‘soccer’? A really fat person, the sort of guy who would make the 1980s Jan Molby look anorexic. I’ll tell you. Never. Even William ‘Fatty’ Foulkes, the fattest man ever to play professional football, was only average size for an American footballer. It’s an all-inclusive sport, you see, and for some positions on the field being 300lb-plus is a minimum requirement. And it is not just being over 300lbs that counts, because every one of those guys can run 40 yards in less than 6 seconds, and most of them do it in close to 5. Go and try that for yourself. Most of you won’t even come close.

2. And The Players Are Educated, Too. There’s one unbreakable rule in American Football, and that’s the one that says that you can’t play it professionally unless you have been to university for at least three years. Proper university. No going to the Mail Order University of Chipping Sodbury. And no studying nonsense degrees such as ‘The History of Popular Music Since the Spice Girls’. There are guys playing football with degrees from Harvard, from Yale and all of the other elite US universities. Compare that to a sport where Frank Lampard is regarded as educated because he has more than one GCSE.

3. Cheerleaders. Yes, I know that some soccer clubs have tried this, but frankly they are rubbish and wouldn’t even make a high school cheerleading team in the States. Football teams have proper cheerleaders, most of whom have also gone to university to train as cheerleaders. When it comes to grinning inanely, clenching your butt cheeks and waving pom-poms, you have to say that football is the best.

4. Lingerie. Sepp Blatter famously wanted female soccer players to wear skimpier kits. Americans have already embraced that idea and the women’s football is played indoors in little more than lingerie and protective pads. Google ‘Lingerie League’ and you’ll see what I mean. You might think it wrong and you might think it demeaning, but it gets a heck of a lot more television than the women’s premier league does and pays better, too.

5. Adverts. One of the biggest whinges about Football is the number of ad breaks, but in fact you hardly notice them (and see reason number six anyway). But look at the players’ kit. Notice anything? Takes you back, doesn’t it? Back to the era before every soccer team sullied their shirts with advertising. Every kit is pure and unadulterated and you can wear your team’s shirt without in some way providing your own endorsement for some evil corporate monolith and their tax-dodgy, peasant-exploiting ways.

6. Beer. You can drink alcohol at football matches. In most stadia they even bring it to your seat. You can’t do that at a soccer match. And even if you don’t have in-seat service you still need something to do during the ad breaks, and what better to do than getting another beer?

7. Hardness. Every time I see a soccer player lying sobbing on the pitch because an opponent breathed on him, I reach for the sick bag. You want to see proper hard men, watch the US game. And do it without whinging about the helmets and padding, because that just proves that you don’t know why they are worn (the explanation is too long for here). Instead, think of someone like kicker Nate Kaeding, who in 2008 played three games without realising he had a broken leg. That’s ‘leg’, not ‘fingernail’, soccer fan.

So go on, give the game a try. Take Monday off work, stock up on pretzels, doughnuts and tasteless beer, and settle down for some American action. It’s better than football.

February 5, 2011
7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Watch The American

The new Anton Corbijn film – The American – starring George Clooney is out in the UK right now. I saw it on Saturday, here are seven reasons that you shouldn’t. (and don’t worry, there are no spoilers)

1. The Unconcious. The pace of the first half of The American is slow. It’s so slow, in fact, that if anyone had said “so slow”, it would have come out as, “sssssssssssssssssssssssssssooooooooooooooooooooooooo sssssssssssssssssssssssllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww”. Someone may even have said it, but I’m not sure, as I was dozing. Not a deep and satisfying slumber, but the fitful sort where you find yourself alternating between brief bouts of consciousness and unconsciousness, with occasional forays into semi-consciousness and thoughts of what the hell is happening to me, is this what old age is like (ness). So, I’ll sum up what I saw in the first half of the film (without spoilers). I saw George Clooney living the soporifically mundane daily life of a hit-man. In a series of slowly cut shots with no dialogue I watched him: Counting his bullets, drilling a series of small holes in some tips, oiling his mechanism (not a euphemism), polishing his barrel (nope, nor this), adjusting his sights, rearranging his small change on a table, lining up his fish fingers in size order, adding up all of the telephone numbers on his mobile and dividing them by four, testing the accuracy of his oven timer against his wristwatch (an Omega Speedmaster Professional with a black dial and black leather strap: model number 3870.50.31, I had time to note), comparing the shapes of his fingernails with his toenails, dusting his light bulbs, and staring into an empty fridge while over his head a strip-light buzzed (I may be wrong on some of these, but if they weren’t there, it felt like they were).

2. The Conscious. That’s not fair, you’re probably thinking, if you’d been awake, it probably wouldn’t have seemed that dull. But I wasn’t the only person that was sleeping during the first half. Because when I was in the toilet after the film, a man standing behind me said, “You were asleep during the first half” and, as I prepared to answer him, the man at the urinal next to me replied, “I know, it was really slow”. It turned out that they were friends and that I wasn’t being addressed at all. So there you have it. Based on the available evidence, there are two distinct types of human-behaviour that occur during the first half of The American. There are the Sleepers, who sleep, and then there are the Sleeper-Watchers who, while they have remained conscious, aren’t watching the film either; they’re watching people sleep so they can tell them about how they slept later, in great detail; “You kept leaning forward, and then you fell back, and then you leant forward, and then you fell back, and then you leant forward, and then you fell back, and then you said “chopsticks”, and then you fell back…” was my personal Sleeper-Watcher’s epic account of my movements. So, during the first half of the film, 50% of the audience are sleeping and the other 50% are watching them sleep and compiling a dossier on their movements, their utterances and their dribbling. Which means that 100% of the audience are not watching the first part of the film. That’s how dull it is.

3. Lust. And then the second half of the film begins. It begins with Violante Placido in bed with no clothes on and, in the words of my personal Sleeper-Watcher, “…you sat bolt upright and stared at the screen while breathing rapidly, remaining in that position for the rest of the scene, before you settled back in your seat and stayed awake for the rest of the film”. So not only do you get a full report on how weird you are in your sleep, you get a full report on how lecherous you are when you’re wide-awake too.

4. Clooney. And then there’s Clooney. Now I understand that George Clooney’s playing an emotionless, calculating and reserved man. But we see his bottom in The American, and I can state categorically, that his arse has a greater number of expressions than his face in this film. Here is his full range of facial expressions in The American (sorry if you were hoping for an arse montage, though we do have one of those on the About Us page):

7 Emotions : 1 Face

5. References. During the film, in a scene where Clooney is counting the grains of salt contained in a salt cellar before he thinks about Switzerland for five minutes in a bar with formica tables, something distracting happens in the background. There’s a film on the television. It’s Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. God, I love that film, I thought. It’s in my top ten films of all time. Why aren’t I watching that? Why in God’s name would you taunt the viewer by placing an iconic piece of cinematic brilliance within your own, not brilliant, movie. So, he’s made me fall asleep, he’s made me appear lecherous, he’s made me watch a man iron his vast collection of handkerchiefs with a lukewarm spoon, and now Anton Corbijn is actually taunting me. He’s showing me a bit of a film that I love that’s better than the one he’s made and that I’m watching, I thought. While screaming inwardly.

6. The Pants. And then there are the pants. Violante Placido, for reasons I won’t bore you with, decides to disrobe (except for her pants) and go swimming in a river. But why would anyone take all of their clothes off except for their pants? Then they’d be wet once they got out of the water. And they’d have to go home wearing wet pants. And who wants to wear wet pants for an afternoon? And I know that you’re thinking that it was for the sake of modesty, but it wasn’t. Because they became completely transparent the moment they got wet, a fact that my Sleeper-Watcher noted later, before he informed me that I, “…sat bolt-upright and made some sort of involuntary tongue noise. And didn’t blink for eight whole minutes” in reaction to this scene. Three days later, after a great deal of thought, I still can’t fathom the pants.

7. The Ending. Again, I won’t tell you what happens, but there’s a moment of awareness when someone alters the thing. And when that person – whose gender I won’t digress – alters the thing that I won’t name, I had a moment of clarity. I knew, in that instant, that the character that was going to do the deed would be thwarted by the one that altered the thing and that the other character that I also won’t name would eventually have to do the deed – not with the broken thing that had been altered, but – with another thing but that we hadn’t been introduced to, and that the deed would end badly. Not only for the character who had been forced to do the deed with the new thing, but also for the character to whom the deed was being done, that countered the deed with his own thing, having previously sparking this chain of events by altering the initial thing in the first place. And it was just bloody obvious that was going to happen a long time before the end.

So, to summarise: During the first half of the film you will fall asleep or resort to watching someone else sleep to keep you entertained; you will then be branded a pervert, be partially baffled by facial expressions, taunted by the director, and then wholly baffled by pants before eventually spotting the blatantly obvious ending many minutes before the film ends. I don’t think ungoing is an actual thing, but I want to do it. Right now.

December 1, 2010
7 Reasons That A Drawn First Test Was The Best Result For The Ashes

1. England. For England, a draw in the Brisbane test is certainly a good start to proceedings. We’ve already made certain that there will be no repeat of the 5-0 whitewash in 2006/7 (that I can’t remember) and we’ll be all the more confident as a result of that and, with the monkey off our back, we’ll be able to play more freely; without protests from animal rights activists angered by our wearing of the back-monkey.

2. Australia. For Australia, despite being the home team, and despite the stunning manner in which they won their last home series, a draw isn’t a bad start either. Now that many of their cricketing greats have retired, to devote more time to highlighting their hair and creosoting themselves – leaving Australia with players in their team that even Australians have to google – it was always going to be a tough series. A loss would, quite simply, have been devastating for them. At least with a draw the Australian public will retain some hope and confidence and will continue backing their team; whoever they are.

3. Andrew Strauss. A draw’s a good result for Straussy personally. It means we’re still in the hunt for The Ashes and, while this test can be seen as a positive in terms of his captaincy, will give him much needed time to work on his abysmal batting form. Strauss was England’s lowest scorer in both innings at Brisbane scoring 0 and 110 runs respectively, which is 192 runs fewer than his opening partner. A poor show indeed.

4. Ricky Ponting. A draw, for Ricky Ponting, is no bad result. He’s already received a lot of criticism from his countrymen and a draw is unlikely to add to that. Despite him being the most dislikeable man in the history of Australia, I almost felt sorry for him earlier today (? Yesterday? I just don’t know any more) while he was being booed by both of his own crowd. And I would have done. If I were mental. Or he wasn’t Ricky Ponting.

5. @theashes. Yes, the Twitter user with the best name on Twitter will also benefit from the draw. The feckless American who decided to give herself the name @theashes without checking Google or Wikipedia first and now has over 5000 new followers and more Twitter mentions than…er…the actual test match got (remember the cricket anyone?) now has a few days (I still haven’t worked out how many, I have no idea what day it is and am also surprised to note that it’s now light outside) to choose which team she wants to support as the two teams are still level. Then, when a Twitter-mob quickly forms to campaign to send @theashes to The Ashes, she can choose sides without accusations of glory-seeking, before payment is required for a plane ticket and the Twitter-mob dissipates even more quickly than it was formed.

6. Spectacle. The draw leaves the rest of the contest evenly balanced and, as history has shown us, the best, the absolute best Ashes series are the closest fought ones. Was the 2006/7 Ashes series actually exciting? I asked someone who actually remembered the series and he said “No.”… “Mate”. But the 2005 series and the 2009 series were both epic, close-fought affairs in which both teams gave their all and that everyone remembers fondly. In fact, most right-thinking cricket-fans don’t mind their team losing in a close and exciting contest at all.*

7. International Relations. Because of the draw we can continue to talk to Australians and they can continue to talk to us with pride and dignity intact all round. We can pretend that Finn and Swann didn’t get knocked around the park a worrying amount in Australia’s second innings and that South Africa is just west of the Isle of Wight, and Australians can pretend that there were people in the stands on Monday and that they were just very small. And quiet.

*Did I mention I haven’t slept since…Tuesday?

November 29, 2010
Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Be Happy That She Hates That You Love Sports

If there is one thing you know about us, it is that we are British. As a result the website is full of British humour. So it’s always interesting when we get comments from abroad. We know for instance, that the Dutch find us quite amusing, while the French…erm…well let’s put it this way, we are never going to have a French Guest Writer. So far, all of our guest writers have been British. Or at least half-British*. Today though, that is changing. Because, in the first of what we hope will be many international escapades, we are all off to Iowa. Or, more accurately, Iowa is coming to our sofa. And with Iowa comes Sandra McAubre, a lady who writes on the topic of Sports Management Degrees over at SportsManagementDegrees.Net. She also very much welcomes your comments, so when you’ve finished reading her post please do send her an email and ask her what a ‘brickbat’ is. Then let us know. Thanks.**

There are some men who would read this title and think I was nuts, and they’re justified for thinking so. They’re the ones who always seem to be at the receiving end of the wrath of the fairer sex for their obsession with sports. Every time there’s a big game on, they’re faced with a combination of excitement and apprehension – the latter because they’re worried about the brickbats that their significant other, be it spouse or girlfriend, is going to be throwing around. Yes, there are women who enjoy a game as much as the testosterone-fueled men seem to do and others who are understanding and even accommodating during games, but then, every other man I’ve met is of the opinion that they’ve missed out on meeting specimens of these rare breeds. Even so, I still persist with the opinion that you must take satisfaction in the fact that your woman hates that you love sports. Because:

1. You Can Hate That She’s Too Sappy. If your girlfriend/wife is understanding about you watching sports when there’s a game on, then you can bet your last dollar that you’re going to have to reciprocate the favor in kind – just when you’re in the mood for some love, she’s going to be bawling her eyes out watching a sappy love story and you’re going to have to keep your mouth and much more zipped up!

2. You Don’t Have To Reciprocate In Kind. Worse, if she watches the games with you, you’re going to have to summon up some tears during that oh-so-boring movie (with nary a bang-up fight) too; but then, I think the idea of keeping more than your mouth zipped up should bring on the waterworks naturally enough!

3. You Have Genuine Reason To Hang Out With The Guys. If sport is banned at home, then you (can hope) you don’t get into too much trouble when you stop over at a bar to catch the last quarter of the big game before heading on home!

4. Christmas And Birthdays Become More Fun. No more boring ties for you in return for all the sparklers you love to (you’re forced to?) buy for your girl; rather, you’re awash in season tickets with premier seating (after you give her an infinite number of not-so-subtle hints of course) for the best games in town.

5. You Don’t Have To Tolerate Her Friends. If your game buddies are banned from your home, then it’s only fair that she can’t expect you to lock yourself into your room when her girlfriends are over for whatever it is that women do when they get together; and on the bright side, you could sneak away to watch a game on your friend’s big screen TV when the female brigade comes calling!

6. Your Beer Belly Is Under Control. With a supportive wife/girlfriend, you’re going to guzzle bottles and bottles of beer and continue eating countless chips when watching your game, little realizing that they’re all heading straight for your gut and on the road to making you fat and unhealthy. So maybe the disapproval can help you stave off the food and drink you seem to push down when it’s game time and save your health in the process.

7. You Get Some Quality Time Alone. And finally, no matter how much you love your significant other, there are times when you prefer to watch your game in solitude (if you can’t enjoy the company of your beer buddies, of course) without being interrupted by questions and remarks that you have absolutely no interest in at the moment. So if she hates that you’re into sports, maybe, just maybe, she’s going to be sulking till the game’s over, after which you can do some crawling to get back into her good books!

*Or completely Australian, which is not in Britain at all.

**Apparently I’m the only one who had never heard of the word brickbat. I feel a bit silly now.

July 17, 2010