I hope those of you in the US have cool Memorial Day plans in place! I’m kicking back by the lake with a drink in hand … and posting to my blog. This is SO wrong, yet so right.

I’ve camped most of my life. Sleeping in a tent in the fall buried in a sleeping bag or even camping in a trailer in the dead of winter to go snowmobiling. You might have had a little of the real world along with you, but not like today. My buddy has a 27 foot trailer which is no big deal. But he also has a 17" widescreen TV, two satellite receivers (one is a PVR with tons of recorded shows), two laptops, and Internet access via cellphone. I myself have a pop-up trailer, but am still connected with my laptop and cellphone via Bluetooth. The kids have the GameBoys and portable DVD players on hand as well.

Some people might scoff at that, but who says you ALWAYS have to rough it when you’re camping? We aren’t living in the trailers 24×7 and we’ll be canoing around the lake to do a bit of GeoCaching (gotta have technology involved somehow) Nature hikes and romps with the puppies we brought along are on tap as well. Most of the time the technology stuff gets used at night or if it’s raining. But hey - we’ll be watching the US v Venezuela friendly tonight on satellite. Sweet!

Hope you all have a great Memorial Day holiday!

Who Ate All The Bratwurst (mmmmm bratwurst!) has a top ten list up highlighting the Top Ten signs that America will Pay Attention to the World Cup. This was in response to a fairly bleak article from the BBC where they felt Americans weren’t in a fervor about the World Cup yet. Geez. Let us get past Memorial Day first. I know I’ve noticed a LOT more excitement about the World Cup than in previous cups. In advertising alone there is much more activity. Check out WAATB for the full list. His #1 reason is true enough…

Flag-waving. If there’s one thing America does well, it’s mindless patriotism. You can’t walk down the street without seeing stars, stripes, spangled banners and ’support our troops’, so once the pressure is on the US team, the flag-wavers will emerge and support their country regardless of what sport they’re playing.

I think the US will actively support their national teams in any sport. But I take exception to it being mindless patriotism. Look, there’s nothing wrong with being patriotic and supporting your country’s team. Just because we Americans are proud of our country and flag doesn’t mean we all support this guy. HAHAHAHA, I think The Daily Header is going to have to become a daily read!

It looks like some of the World Cup keepers aren’t thrilled with the new Teamgeist World Cup Soccer Ball. As I noted in an earlier post, the Teamgeist is a radical change in soccer ball construction. It is supposedly rounder than other balls and has a new coating that helps resist water absorption.

Over the World Cup Blog, they note that the German keeper would rather be playing with a Nike ball:

Germany number one keeper Jens Lehmann says the world’s roundest ball favors outfield players and that it isn’t fun to use in poor weather. "When it rains it’s not going to be very comfortable for us. It gets very slippery. It also moves a lot in the air. The Nike ball feels more like an old fashioned leather ball. The Adidas one is more plastic."

I think the ability to repel water is a good thing. Soggy balls aren’t going to help shooters very much, though I can imagine a surface that keeps water out might be slippery (though my understanding of the Teamgeist information was that the water seal was a sub layer, not the outer layer.)

As Bob notes at the World Cup Blog…

It seems that part of the job description for keepers these days that you have to be able to complain about the modern footballs while maintaining a straight face. It is, of course, a convenient excuse if you let in a lot of goals.

Of course it’s the balls fault! Though I can imagine the new balls move more in the air. There’s a research project for you physics types out there. As soccer balls get rounder, do they get more unstable in the air if rotation is low? I wonder what effect the new panel design has on airflow over the surface of the ball compared to a normal hex/pentagon stitched ball. Any takers?

UPDATE: The Guardian has some more feedback from England’s keeper, Paul Robinson and he’s not happy at all:

"The players these days are top quality. They can do anything with the ball and this one moves all over the place. It’s a difficult ball for goalkeepers, full stop. There’s no stitching whatsoever. It’s two sections glued together and it’s a lot lighter than the Premiership ball. Every ball is going to move unless you go back to the old-fashioned bricks that we used to play with on frosty school mornings, but this one moves everywhere.

"There’s a plastic coating around it and when it’s wet it’s even worse. We just have to live with it, but it’s not at all goalkeeper-friendly."

I, for one, think this is a GREAT thing. Intead of changing the sacred laws of the game trying to boost match scores a bit, turns out we just needed a new high tech ball. It will be interesting to see how thigns pan out and if the scoring overall is higher this time around. Keepers beware! (Hat Tip The Fan)

Steve over at The News Blog has a great post up about why he loves the game. It got me thinking about my reasons for the love of the game. What about you? What turned you into a soccer fanatic such that you write and/or read blogs about soccer?

My reasons are likely a bit different than most. Growing up, there wasn’t a youth soccer league that I can recall. I played baseball (badly) and that was it. I made it to a few Cosmos matches (still have a pennant somewhere) but that was long ago. We had soccer teams in middle and high school, but I ran track instead (hurdles). I didn’t hate soccer, I just didn’t KNOW it because it simply wasn’t prevalent in my childhood.

Flash forward a few decades…

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In Part 1 of our Roster Assignment series, I highlighted how a fairly flexible system of roster assignments was great for making soccer easy on parents schedules, letting kids play with friends, but also allowed the gradual creation of farm systems which over time became powerhouses. In this post I’ll cover all the options the officers came up with during a recent brainstorming session and also look to you all for ideas that you know to work elsewhere. Got that red pill? OK then, here we go…

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The excitement is building. You can feel it. On TV, in the bars, on the street. The World Cup is coming, and some sports writers continue to fight the good fight. Mike DeCourcy has a great article up called ‘Give the World Cup a Chance‘:

The media here have enough to keep them busy, with football, basketball and basketball, plus the occasional trek into tennis and golf. They were happy that hockey chose to excuse itself from the small piece of the national consciousness it previously occupied. They don’t want to think about another sport. So they make fun of soccer’s nil-nil draws and occasional fan violence and dismiss the game’s beauty and appeal.

Well, too bad for them. But you can break free from this, the way I did four World Cups ago. In 1990, just for the heck of it, I decided to watch the Cup and see why it was a big deal, why it was considered to be the world’s greatest sporting event. It took a very short time to learn the rules, which turned out to be part of the fun. It was not all that hard to figure out who were the great players. A great athlete stands out no matter what his or her game. I’ve been hooked ever since, and my addiction has only grown worse - to the point a mere commercial or two can get me choked up.

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Though news for Juventus keeper Gianluigi Buffon hasn’t been good lately, he still is a hell of a keeper. I stumbled across this compilation of some of his best saves on YouTube and thought I’d share.

In case you were asleep yesterday, the Champions League final was on. Foul, Red Card, No Goal, Arsenal’s keeper sent off, Barcelona wins 2-1. Even more exciting, however, was how many people in the US showed up in the middle of a weekday to watch the match. Triangle Soccer Fanatics had a decent turnout:

Thanks to all that turned out for the match viewing today. I hope you had as good a time as I did. It was great to meet all the new faces and see some old ones again. We had a total of 24 folks show up today which I believe is a new record for TSF.

24 may seem small but we’re talking about a moderate sized southern city where many folks work in a huge research park. Youth Soccer there is big, but still, we’re not a metropolis in any sense of the word. Of course, those of us in central NC are pretty psyched the USMNT is in town to get ready.

Things in NYC were even more exciting

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World Cup 2006 News has a great post about being a ‘Real Fan’

You claim you´re a real fan? Prove it. Take your kids to get a new haircut, you probably need to set an appointment for the dentist as well for the perfect Ronaldo-look.

The picture is hilarious. But WHY is that kid in such a horrible cape thing? They do make black and blue ones!

My son asked us if he could get a mohawk because some other kid at school had one. We obviously told him all about Hell and freezing over. But maybe now is the time to let him shave it all off (HT TriSoccerFan).

I posted earlier this month about an experiment using Google AdWords to advertise this blog. I hadn’t logged into my account for a fews days and when I did, I was floored - ’soccer’ had suddenly gotten a LOT more expensive.

A quick primer on how AdWords works. Advertisers pick a set of keywords or search phrases that will trigger their text ads, both on the right hand side of Google search results and also in the AdSense advertising bars you see on websites everywhere (including this one). You set a maximum price per click you are willing to pay for each keyword you have. Keywords are constantly assessed for ‘Quality’ and are assigned a minimum price for them to ‘activate’ and trigger your ad. If the minimum bid per click is less than your maximum cost per click you are willing to pay, that keyword will trigger you are for display.

So what happened?

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Sorry for any trouble you had getting to the site. We had another severe storm roll through that ended up frying our cable pair. The uplink was bouncing every 5-30 minutes making access intermittent for the past couple of days. We’re on a new pair now and all is well so far. Back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow!

If you’re involved in coordinating a soccer league and have anything to do with roster assignments, I bet you have some gray hair. Especially if your league allows some flexibility or special requests. It’s hard enough to try and create balanced teams when you only know some of the players, and parents are scrambling to get their kids on teams coached by coaches they perceive as good. It’s enough to make you want to throw all the forms in the air and let them fall where they may. This is exactly what some leagues do, but is it the best thing? Take the red pill and follow me down the rabbit hole of youth soccer roster assignments. I bet you never knew it could be such a scary place!

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MLS Fangirl has a post up about one of ‘those’ arguments about why soccer is called soccer here and football everywhere else. While describing it, she has come up with the Best. SportsWriter. Description. Ever.

Never mind that the main voice in this debate is a kid from Finland who thinks that the US is going to become a huge football powerhouse and start dominating the world game, simply because he thinks we have a ton of money and interest in the game over here. I’d like to introduce him to the cadre of sportswriters in the next room who, if they woke up in bed after a one-night stand with soccer, would chew their own arms off to get away from it. Yes, in the US, soccer is the coyote ugly of the sportswriters’ world.

I laughed so hard I woke up the baby. Oh well, it was time to eat anyway.

What was FIFA smoking when they decided to make Anheuser-Busch the sole supplier of beer at the World Cup? (HT Steve Gilliard) Take the most American of beers (but nowhere near the BEST beer), considered swill by most of the host country, and make it the only beer available during the World Cup. Genius. Nice to see Anheuser-Busch caught a clue that this wasn’t going to win them friends and allowed some German beer to be sold - Bitburger Pils. You know the USA team is going to be under enough pressure - do we really need to piss off every World Cup beer drinker even more for forcing Bud into their hands. Smart move AB. As if America hasn’t ticked off the rest of the world enough already!

Have you all seen the ‘It’s a Whole New Ballgame’ commercial from Gatorade yet? Saw it during CSI last night and I got goose pimples. It’s happening folks. The advertisers know a big event is coming up and they’re pushing it in their ads weeks ahead of time - here in the US. I expect it’ll only get more interesting as new ads come out. Up until now, the Nike ads have set the standard, but this has my vote, so far, as the best ad yet for the World Cup in the US. Setting it to take me out to the ballgame - priceless. Wonder if that clip in the snow was from the match against Poland.

UPDATE: Looks like some baseball fans take offense at the use of Take Me Out To The Ballgame. Josh at ThroughBall.com asks some questions of his readers:

Amy says that, as a baseball fan, she’s offended by Gatorade using what is essentially baseball’s national anthem, Take Me Out To The Ballgame, in their soccer advertisement. I’m not sure her offense is warranted; however, her point is well-taken.

My questions to you, gentle readers, are these:

1) Do we have a distinctly American soccer anthem?
2) Do we need one?
3) What should be included, e.g., what is soccer’s response to peanuts and Crackerjack?

OK, I’ll bite. First, Amy needs to lighten up. I thought Gatorade’s use of the song was perfect. It showed that there is a ‘new’ ballgame coming down - not a replacement. Just something new. The whole idea was to get people thinking the commercial was about baseball and then surprise them with soccer. Very slick ad IMHO.

As to the questions… Do we have a soccer anthem? Not that I know of. Do we need one? No. Take Me Out To The Ballgame isn’t an anthem as much as a romanticism of the game and its place in American culture and history. That makes it unique. But I’m not sure it brings anything new to the game. That said - I bet we could have a lot of fun writing one.