Bill Learns About Soccer
Apparently, you can watch the entire Ted Lasso series and still not know anything about soccer. I learned this last night at my first Austin FC match. That is the first thing I learned. It is a “match” and not a game. That seems a bit pedantic to me, but I’ll play along. The Verde lost 0 – 1 to the Houston Dynamo in a game that I can truly say was exciting despite the lack of scoring.
I thought I understood the game. After all, I am undefeated as a soccer coach. My daughter’s team went 13-0-1 in two seasons when she was eight and nine years old. Since I knew nothing about the sport, we played basketball on grass. The girls learned the pick-and-roll and the give-and-go, and we had a heck of a corner game. What we really had was a ringer named Megan who could score at will, but that wouldn’t give enough credit to me as the brilliant strategist of the club.
There is still so much I don’t understand. There were lots of whistles, fouls, penalties, and arguing that went over my head, but here are a few things I did learn:
They water the grass during halftime. I don’t know why.
They seem to randomly add time to the end of each half.
It is no Australian Rules Football, but it is an extremely physical game.
Getting kicked in the shins is a real probability.
It is really hard to score a goal, and when you do, it is a big deal.
I think that the goalie can only use their hands inside the big box.
Jacob can look up soccer rules on his phone faster than me.
Everyone seated close to us seemed to know what was going on.
The vibes in the stadium are real.
There are no cheerleaders.
The biggest takeaway from the experience is the action. You can’t look down at your phone without missing something important. The game does not stop. If you measure the elapsed time from snap to whistle, the average NFL game has eleven minutes of action. Baseball averages eighteen minutes of total time that the ball is in play. There is so much dead time. Not so in soccer. It is 90 minutes of poetry in motion. I can’t say that I am hooked, but I will be back. I might even get myself a cool green jersey. Do they call them jerseys? Something else that I do not know.
