Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on April 15th 2006, 8:13 pm | Email
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Filed under: Ramblings
Have you ever heard of Chinlone? If you’re a soccer nut who loves to watch people with elite ball juggling skills, you should get to know it…
Chinlone is a game similar to soccer. The ball is weaved with a material a bit like Kung Foo, called taing. Myanmar people play it with their hands, their feet, and their head.
Chinlone is a cane ball composed of wicker-work. Cane or rattan is a wild creeper which grows profusely in many forests of Myanmar.
Chinlone is played basically with foÂot and other parts of the body - head, shoulder, elbow, knee, heel, sole etc. except for the hands. There is no goal to shoot in and no fixed number of players needed to play it. The main object is to keep the chinlon in the air as long as possible without touching it with the hand. It may be played by a individual or by a team of players in circle, catching the chinlon as it comes to them and keeping it as long as possible in the air. Players usually played with bare feet and had their waistcloths tucked up close round the middle. But today both men and women players wear shorts and canvas shoes.
Players stay in what looks like an elevated circus ring, but smaller. Teams usually play in a circle with a skilled handler in the center. While you may be thinking that any decent soccer player can juggle a ball 1000+ times so it is no big deal, you have to see it to believe it. They don’t just keep the ball aloft. They use very acrobatic moves with a lot of behind the back ball contact to keep the ball aloft.
A new documentary is premiering in May called Mystic Ball which chronicles the sport of Chinlon. They have released a short reel of the movie which will give you a good feel for how amazing the ball control is. Think ball juggling crossed with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. The sequence of the lady in the red outfit is very impressive. Give it a look (you need Quicktime) Hat tip to WorldCupBlog for passing this on!
UPDATE: Here is the updated Chinlone Wikipedia article mentioned in the comments, though the updating author unfortunately wiped out all the previous information instead of adding to it/correcting it. All references to it as a sport vs a type of spiritual dance have been removed.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on April 15th 2006, 9:58 am | Email
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Filed under: Ramblings
The folks over at The WorldCupBlog got a cease and desist letter from FIFA recently asking them to remove the FIFA trademarked World Cup logo and other insignia. In typical legalese the letter was pretty hostile like most C&D letters are. Bob wasn’t too happy:
If by promoting the World Cup, getting fans excited about the event and providing news about the teams that you can’t find elsewhere in English is materially damaging FIFA, Budweiser, Mastercard, et al., then we plead guilty.
I’m normally the last person to stick up for ‘the man’ but in this case FIFA was right to do this. Those logos are theirs and their appearance on any site can lead people to infer an endorsement or approval of the content by FIFA. I’ll admit the first time I went to the WorldCupBlog, it was so well designed including the logos, etc. I wondered if FIFA had actually setup a blog for the 2006 World Cup. This is what trademarks are for and infringing on them, no matter how noble the cause, can’t be allowed.
Does that mean FIFA had to be so hostile out of the gate? No. But lawyers seem to think hostile C&D letters are the best option - I’ve seen the exact same form letter sent to many webmasters, often in cases where the company didn’t have a leg to stand on. They bully you into submission hoping you’ll do what they want even if legally they can’t force you to. But in this case it was a clear infringement and FIFA was right to ask that it stop.
Of course if FIFA really wanted to show the fans how much they care about them, they’d have setup Bob in a nice office with a sizable stipend to officially blog the World Cup. Yeah, like they’d ever let on how much the fans mean to them *cough*.
at about age 10, something happens to the children of the United States. Soccer is dropped, quickly and unceremoniously, by approximately 88 per cent of all young people. They move onto baseball, football, basketball, hockey, field hockey, and, sadly, golf. Shortly thereafter, they stop playing these sports, too, and begin watching these sports on television, including, sadly, golf.
The abandonment of soccer is attributable, in part, to the fact that people of influence in America long believed that soccer was the chosen sport of communists. When I was 13 - this was 1983, long before glasnost, let alone the fall of the wall - I had a gym teacher, who for now we’ll call Moron McCheeby, who made a very compelling link between soccer and the architects of the Iron Curtain. I remember once asking him why there were no days of soccer in his gym units. His face darkened. He took me aside. He explained with quivering, barely mastered rage, that he preferred decent, honest American sports where you used your hands. Sports where one’s hands were not used, he said, were commie sports played by Russians, Poles, Germans and other commies. To use one’s hands in sports was American, to use one’s feet was the purview of the followers of Marx and Lenin.
Don’t decide games on penalty kicks: Even though they make for great drama, penalty kicks always leave us feeling like we’ve been cheated from seeing the best result. We say let the teams play until someone wins or their players’ legs fall off.
Play a two-game final: What is better than a thrilling final? How about a two-game aggregate affair! Over 180 minutes the best team will usually win.
More qualifying play-in matches between federations: Anybody who watched Trinidad and Tobago play Bahrain and Australia play Uruguay for the right to advance to the World Cup will tell you how dramatic those home-and-away matches were for everyone involved. Not sure how it would work, but we’d enjoy seeing some European teams playing African teams, for example.
Don’t give an automatic qualifying spot to the host country: We know that the home fans want to see their team, but they should have to qualify like everyone else.
Make the seeding process more relevant: The top eight seeds before the draw are determined by a complex formula that rewards historical performance more than current form. It shouldn’t matter how a team played eight years ago in the World Cup.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on April 10th 2006, 3:19 pm | Email
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Filed under: Coaching
As a youth soccer coach, I have learned a lot, but also have a LOT to learn. This spring has been a frustrating year for my U10 team and I’m working hard to ‘bring things together’ in the few matches we have left. "There is no I in team" is such an abused cliche, but sometimes it’s very hard to get young kids to really understand what it means.
My U10 team is a talented group of kids. We are VERY young (nine 8/9 year olds and three 9/10 year olds), but also have a diverse set of skills. I have two talented keepers who also play tough on offense, one with a blistering shot. I have a talented ball handler who often can get by numerous opponents and still land a ball in the net. A defender who can almost score from mid field and another who is one of the most tenacious players I’ve seen who will hassle an attacker endlessly until he disrupts the attack. The rest of the team have solid skills they build on every week, giving our team a depth some opponents may lack.
Yet we’re struggling. My team, while individually talented, is struggling to play as a team and it is holding them back. As a coach I’m having a tough time getting them to understand that their losses are NOT due to playing a more skilled opponent, but instead an inability to use their skills together.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on April 10th 2006, 2:37 pm | Email
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Filed under: Tough Call
One of the hardest things to get our parents and spectators to understand about offside is the concept of advantage and how a player off to the side that isn’t interfering with the keeper and isn’t part of the play, is not ‘offside’ Its a VERY fine line and a tough call to make in the rush of an attack. I personally know that I tend to lean towards interference/distraction more than I should. When a play is rushing the goal to the left, offside, while the ball handler rushes up on the right, how can the keeper NOT be distracted? If they don’t shift as far right as they normally would afraid the right attacker will get a pass, etc - that’s advantage. But it a VERY hard call to make.
Thrown in by: Soccer Dad on April 10th 2006, 1:50 pm | Email
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Filed under: The Pros
This article by Jamie Trecker was sent on by one of our league officials and I found it interesting…
Why will none of the referees at this year’s World Cup be from the USA?
It’s a good question and a vexing problem for both U.S. Soccer and MLS. This past week, the lone American in the FIFA pool, Kevin Stott, failed to make the cut of 23 officials for the 2006 tournament.
While both have made great strides in the past fifteen years in developing American players and coaches, it is widely agreed that the weak link remains the men in the middle.
