Soccer Issues

I can't recall having two soccer-related mini-posts at the same time before, but it just happened.

Here's an interesting essay on Scottie Pippen on his hoop HOF entry.

Scottie Pippen was a basketball genius, and in nearly 13 years of covering this league in written form, I don't think I've ever used the phrase 'basketball genius' in any way that wasn't the opposite of sincerity. Scottie couldn't articulate it. He probably couldn't draw it up for you, because how can you approximate momentum and attack and improvisation with a dry erase board and pen? He couldn't tell the teammate where to go in the next dead ball, because the 'where to go' and 'what to do' don't matter when you're not stopping or working in a set position.

One of the reasons I think the US is good but not great at soccer is that we don't have those instinctive playmakers like Pippen or any number of great point-guards in basketball. Since most soccer in the US is done on an organized level, you don't get as much playground soccer action where kids can learn by trial and error improv of what works and what doesn't work.

I watched a lot of John Wall last year at UK; he would often go one-on-three on a fast break, but he had the moves to wiggle past everyone. You do that in an organized practice and your coach has your butt in a sling, but Wall knew that he would get the ball in the net more often than not. That was likely learned by thousands of hours of unsupervised pickup games rather than lots of coaching.

What I see in the US team is a lot of fundamentally sound players, but no one that has that playmaking flair. Jozy Altidore has some neat finishing flair as a winger, but they have no equivalent of a point guard that can break your ankles with a killer crossover move.

We have a few soccer fans in the Peanut Gallery. Am I off-base on that?

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I recalled the tail end of the comments here on how British sports allow ties while US sports avoid them like the plague. Baseball and basketball play OT until you have a winner, hockey now has shootouts (and the alien one point for losing in OT); the NFL is the one major pro sport that allows ties, and then only after a scoreless fifth quarter of OT which happens about two or three times a decade.

Soccer is going American, at least in the World Cup. They have OT and shootouts when they get to the single-elimination round where somebody has to win, but the pool-play round has allowed ties as of late. FIFA's boss, that Blattering fool, noted that FIFA will be looking at having some sort of tie-breaking setup for group play come 2014.