three things i loved about this year’s world cup.
1. marta scoring the second goal against the us in the quarter finals. this is a crappy video, but the goal was awesome. in general i thought this game kind of sucked. brazil played cynically, as they call it – excessively trying to draw fouls, lots of diving and acting. the us wasn’t all that convincing in this one either. their first goal was due to an error by the brazilian defense – they actually scored on themselves. their second goal was pretty phenomenal however. and to top it all off, horrendous calls by the referee. just wretched.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otceq1ZKm24&w=425&h=349]
2. watching france play their version of tiki taka. lots of tech shit going on. i love that.
3. japan winning the whole thing. it was an awesome game. back and forth the whole time. excellent playing. no diving, japan’s technical skills are way arty! superclassy!
three things i diddn’t like so much about this year’s world cup.
1. the announcers on espn being way too into the us side. even when calling other games that didn’t star the us team. it was like all they could talk about was the us. it got to be a little too rah rah nationalism for me. and it felt over the top when the us was playing. and it drove me to watch on galavision. which leads us to number two.
2. the announcer on galavision who, during the final, decided to include the first and middle names of the united states players while he called the game. additionally he decided to add -san to every japanese player’s name. this started to really piss me off as both things sounded condescending, smug and rude. what was weird was that he only started doing it during the second half. i think. maybe that’s when i noticed it. i’ve never heard him include the middle names of the men players. maybe i should listen closer. i assume he thought he was being cute, but it came across as being at worst sexist and racist and at least ignorant. prolly all of the above though.
3. in that brazil-us quarter final game. i didn’t appreciate that the entire stadium decided to hate on marta every time she got the ball after scoring on the do over penalty kick. it wasn’t her fault that the ref made a bad call and continued to make poor calls throughout the entire game. take it out on the ref, not marta. i don’t get all the marta hate. supposedly she has antics. can someone tell me what they consist of? cuz i didn’t see any on display.