1.) Fans actually get passionate about football and don’t sit like mannequins in their seats chanting like they all have downs-syndrome2.) The skinny white guys can get in the team, as well as the odd skinny Maori or two (interestingly there were five Maori players on the field against Italy at the end of last nights game and only two playing for The All Blacks on Saturday, no calls a Maori version of the national anthem either)
3.) When you play a meaningless international game of football they call it for what it is – a ‘friendly’ and not a ‘test’.
4.) The 76th ranked nation can draw against the World-Champs (imagine The South African Rugby team failing to beat The Cook Islands!?) A bird-bath has more depth than International Rugby.
5.) The World Football Cup is a ‘World’ Cup and not a beefed-up Commonwealth Tournament.
6.) New Zealand Football doesn’t need to raid The Pacific Islands for its players.
7.) Rivalry in sport generally means some sort of historic competition between two players/teams, rather than miss-matches eg. Everton versus Liverpool. Wales last beat New Zealand at rugby fifty-seven years ago meaning most New Zealansers weren't even born when the term 'rivalry' had any significance in the context.
8.) When New Zealand Football team plays at The World Cup the team over-performs pundit’s expectations. When The All Blacks play at a World Cup Tournament traditionally they under-perform.
9.) You can actually understand the rules of football and the basics of the game don't change season by season and one hemisphere plays by one interpretation and the other by another.
10.) Football is an international language and at this very-moment most people on this planet will know New Zealand is in The World Cup and doing bloody well! It’s currently one of the head-line stories on CBS Sport, ESPN, Telegraph, Guardian, The Sun etc. How many would know about the so-called 'test' in Dunedin?
5 comments:
that might all be true, but soccer (i'm an american, please forgive me) is WAY boring, and rugby is way not as boring so much.
Here's another American, I'm afraid. I agree that football is better than rugby. It's way better than soccer, too! ;-)
Sorry guys, if you’ve traveled overseas you’d know no-one outside the U.S gives a rats-arse about a third-world sport like gridiron, nor the so called ‘World Series’ – where a code is so desperate to try and legitimise it’s lowly status on the global stage, it audaciously uses the term ‘World’ in the title.
Why not graciously accept The Football World Cup is the biggest sporting-event and most popular televised event on the planet and get behind your football team, rather than running down the code loved by billions?
Oh yeah, a history-lesson - the founding sport was Football from which came Rugby Football and then Rugby’s offspring/off-shoots included American Football, Rugby League Football and Australian Rules Football. So American Football owes its very existence to Football and more importantly Rugby Football.
football haz a bigger crowd yer but they r mostly drunks that dont hav a life at least rugby doesnt hav chavs starting riots at our games
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