Why are American Sporting-Teams so Fucking Useless?

Why is it, that by-in-large American sports-fans are so insular?

Why don’t American sporting teams take pride in representing their country – is it because no one back home gives a rats-arse even if they do well?

More importantly why are American sports teams, with their vast financial resources, so fucking useless?

Whilst most of the planet is embracing The (one true) Football World-Cup, the whole scope of tournament has typically escaped vast tracts of America.

The easy, glib answer to this is of course ‘Football (ooops ‘soccer’) is not a big sport in ‘the states’ even though in reality there’s 18 million players, and it’s the largest participant sport for kids.

By the way neither is football it a ‘big sport’ in New Zealand, but yet the whole country still gets behind its team.

Now go & ask yourself - "what are the ‘big team sports’ in America?"

Well there’s basketball, which it has to be said is a global sport, and with all those NBA players, billions of bucks floating around, surely the U.S should clean-up at every international tournament they turn-up at?

Boy, have I got news for you - the current world-champions are Spain and the tournament before that it was Yugoslavia. The U.S hasn’t been World Champs at basketball for 18 years!

Ice-Hockey, now that’s a popular team-sport in North America.

It goes without saying The U.S must be competitive at The World Ice Hockey Tournament - right?

No, they have performed abysmally and last made a final fifty years ago!

What say Volleyball, another global sport, popular in American schools and colleges?

In the sixty years, no American team (men’s or women’s) has even made the finals at a World Champs.

So what other global team sports do Americans play to any great degree?

Sorry I can’t for the life of me think of any?

Baseball does have a World Championships – but it’s similar to running a so-called World Series - played amongst such a small gene-pool to be unworthy of the mantle ‘World’.

Don’t even suggest American Football – probably one of the worlds least played sport when it comes to countries who participate. Is there even a American Football team as such?

So the only conclusion one can make is Americans don’t care about World Championships and their athletes, teams aren’t interested in succeeding on the world sporting stage at events every-other country takes seriously

They are too interested playing amongst themselves.

What do you call playing with yourself again?

PS: From Saturday on I’m taking a sabbatical for 10 days to catch-up on some things on the home-front. Comments will be cleared when I get other projects finished.

Why Football is better than Rugby

1.) Fans actually get passionate about football and don’t sit like mannequins in their seats chanting like they all have downs-syndrome
2.) 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?

Desperate Diego dials D for Deity

The weight of expectation of a great foot-balling nation Argentina has clearly affected the already frail mental-health of its coach, South American legend, Diego Maradona.

Just four years ago he spent time in time in clinic treating his addictions to alcohol, smoking and excessive eating (the later issue resulted in a gastric by-pass)

In what is a veiled-admission “I’m not up the job” Maradona has sought divine intervention in an effort to improve his under-performing side's chances of reaching next year’s World Cup finals.

His team currently lies fifth in the continental group, one place below the final qualifying berth.

Grasping at straws Maradona is quoted telling an Argentinean radio-station “The bearded one (God) saved me many times before - and I hope he will do so this time”.

This of course isn’t the first time Maradona has sought and subsequently claimed his nameless Gods assistance.

The 1986 world champion famously dubbed in his first quarter-final goal in that year's competition the work of the “hand of God” after he punched the ball past Peter Shilton in the England goal.

In a nut-shell; he engineered the goal by cheating.

Argentina’s next ‘must-win’ game is at home against Peru, who sit bottom in the group, on October 13th.

I’m putting my money on a draw.