I love the Cup, it's my favorite sporting event to watch, and I've only played soccer when I was in elementary school, but I'm reminded of why soccer is having a hard time gaining popularity here in the US after this last game and Italy's victory in 2006.
*the announcers for ABC/ESPN are Americans, yet they keep referring to the green grassy surface that the players run around on as "the pitch". It's a goddamn field, stop calling it a friggin pitch. Maybe I'm suggesting dumbing it down for the US audience, I don't care, it needs to be a field. Baseball field, football field, soccer field. When the average American hears "soccer field" while sitting in his La-Z-Boy with a Bud in one hand and the remote in the other, he can relate! While on the subject of announcers, the ABC/ESPN teams blew overall. I got to hear several games on local radio in Spanish and their announcers were 100 times better y mi Espanol es cansado y necesita trabajo.
*players took so many dives after non/glancing contact, you'd think they all take acting classes with Stella Adler. What appear to be career ending injuries if you judge by the grimaces and screaming from the players are magically healed by the "cold spray" or the "magic sponge" within 10 seconds.
*suspending players for subsequent games for questionable yellow/red cards. In most US sports, you gotta beat someone up or do steroids or smoke weed to get suspended for any game. In soccer, you get a few of those yellow cards for man to man contact (it's a contact sport after all) and you can't play in the next game. WTF? Case in point: Ghana advances out of their group and faces Brazil in the knockout round. Only their best player (Michael Essien- who is paid $40 mil per year to play for on of the best teams in England), can't play in the game vs. Brazil cause he got too many yellow cards. That is bullshit. That enables referees to influence the outcome of future games and it's just wrong.
*the announcers were commenting how the Zidane red card should not have been given to him in the final because they suspected the refs only saw the head butt on the jumbotron after it happened. WTF!?!? Replays are here to stay, embrace it! In soccer all the replay could feasibly be used for is offsides calls (if they'd had replay, the Italy goal that was ruled offsides would have counted, then there'd be no overtime, no Zidane head butt, he would have been able to take his second place medal with the rest of his team) and goals where the ball is close to the goal line and deflected out. It's 2006! Bring video into the game already! BTW, if you didn't see the head butt, copy this and paste into your browser:
http://trump.uselessjunk.org/videos/zidan_head_butt.wmv
*TV networks don't have many "avails" to sell during the games. The format- two 45 minute halves with a short halftime in between and no stopping the clock during either half- is not conducive to airing commercials. Think about how many times the clock is stopped during a hockey/basketball/football/baseball game and compare it to soccer...that means a fraction of the available inventory for commercials in comparison. I have no suggestions at this time about how to format the game differently, because I can't think of a way that won't subletly or drastically change the nature of the game. Maybe there can be split screen ads or text and graphics crawls along the bottom of the screen or something.
*there need to be some more names coined for certain types of kicks, headers, dribbling, etc. That great Argentina goal where the guy kicked the cross out of mid air into the goal vs. Mexico- that was one of the greatest goals I've ever seen! There should be a standard name for that move! The drop-kick, the Air-Gentina, something!
*the US team is really that bad and really that far behind the rest of the world. Despite what the announcers on ESPN & ABC say, the US team BLEW. That was a fluke against Italy. They only scored one lousy goal of their own making. When I watched the top teams- France, Italy, Brazil, Portugal, Germany, Argentina, etc. the US doesn't come remotely close in skill, team play or strategy. If the US doesn't hire some Brazilian coach, he can be a kids league coach, I don't care, they have no chance. I'm certain a Brazilian girls' soccer coach would be an improvement over Arena.
At least most of the time, the true sportsmanship shines through during the Cup. Kicking the ball out of bounds when an opposing player goes down so as not to have an unfair advantage, exchanging jerseys after games, that kind of thing is what American pro sports could use more of.
Despite the stuff I gripe about, I can't wait for 2010 in South Africa!