Well folks, it's time for that magical event that only comes around once every four years, and you KNOW I'm not talking about the pussy Olympics;  I'm talking about an Earth-shattering event that makes strangers kill each other and Americans actually think about watching a soccer match.  I'm talking about the 2006 World Cup.

My current work situation has been very conducive to following all the hot World Cup action this year.  Nobody is ever in my office over the summer (as you know, I work at a university) so I pretty much have all day to follow the live matchcasts from the FIFA website, keep up on all the scores and watch the video highlights after the matches are over.  The time differential shit works out perfectly for me as well.  I get to work at 9AM EST, there's a game on.  The games end, I go to lunch, I come back and the new games have started.  At 5PM when I go home the last games of the day are ending.  I try to catch some of the replays on Telemundo late at night but it generally involves flipping back-and-forth between the Red Sox and La Copa Mundial, which is ultimately a let-down since I already know who's going to win the matches.  I did get to watch Argentina KICK THE ASS of Serbia-Montenegro while I was flying South last Friday morning.  Man that was an embarrassment.  About halfway through the match you could see half the Serbian team was preparing to commit ritual suicide by stabbing themselves in the heart with their cleats.  I think this was about the time the Argentine backups were scoring their second and third goals.  But I digress.

What I'm getting at here is that most Americans have at least a waning interest in the Cup if nothing else than by virtue of the fact that every other country in the world is more worked up about it than Denise Richards at a husband-stealing party.  Unfortunately, no Americans actually ever watch soccer at any point other than during the World Cup so we generally have no fucking clue what the hell is going on.  It's like making your March Madness pick-'em selections without having ever watched a game of collegiate basketball (though that did work out pretty well for Evan in this year's Stupid Website Tournament).

Well have no fear, my dear friends!  I'm here to Americanize the foreign world of international fútbol and tell you about all of the stuff that you really need to know about the World Cup.  I have also enlisted the services of Sexx to help me in case I missed anything, so I'll also try and feature comments by him in this article as well.

"At the Copa... Copa Mundial..."

Rules of the Game

• Run Around and Kick the Ball:

It seems that the best place to start would be a brief discussion of the rules.  As I mentioned in my soccer riot update, my knowledge of the game of soccer is far from encyclopedic and more or less stems from my experience playing in the Under-12 boys traveling league for my city.  And not to brag, but the kids from the tiny podunk town of Parkland, Florida won the South Florida Regional Tournament back in 1991.  We defeated Fort Lauderdale for the title, which was pretty impressive considering that we had about one one-hundreth of Ft. Lauderdale's population.  Winning that tournament got us the honor of playing in an international tournament in Miami where our first opponent was the goddamned Peruvian Boys National Team.  Obviously we got our asses kicked royally.  I played Fullback and made the mistake of positioning my stupid face in front of a wicked shot on goal and let me tell you I've never been hit harder by anything in my life.  I dropped like a sack of meat potatoes and had to come out of the game in like the fifteenth minute like a little bitch.  I think we lost by like sixteen goals or something.

Despite my prestigious international soccer career pretty much the only thing I can really tell you about with any degree of certainty is that the point of soccer is simply to run around and kick the ball.  This probably stems from the fact that I was a defenseman and my only objective was to run up and either boot the ball as far as I could whenever it came anywhere near me or slide tackle anyone that could run faster than me, so I never really learned anything else about the game.  Watching the World Cup however has taught me that there really ISN'T much else to it.





Look out!  They're breakdance fighting!




• Oh Yeah, You Can Also Hit It With Your Head:

You're also allowed to hit the ball with your head, which seems like a pretty retarded thing to try and do.  First off, your objective is usually to stand near the goal and wait for the ball to sail by so you can smash it with your rock-hard skull at a velocity great enough to give yourself serious irreparable brain trauma.  I have no idea how you can be accurate at all when it comes to directing a ball with your head but these guys are out there every day bashing their faces into this plastic ball trying to get it where they want it to go.  I guess they must practice by cracking stuff with their heads all the time, like using their foreheads to open doors or headbutting watermelons in half at barbeques or intimidating their girlfriends or something.  Beats me.  All I know is that if I got really good at header-ing (is that even a word?) then I would have the phrase "EAT THIS" tattooed backwards across my forehead.





Goosh!




• No Kung Fu Allowed:

I don't care how many times you've seen Shaolin Soccer, you can't just go around beating the shit out of everyone on the other team with your crazy monkey-style thousand-fists kung fu because you'll get booted from the game faster than Tara Reid in a spelling bee.  Trust me on this one.  Just make sure that your flying side kicks and supercharged diving headbutts are limited to knocking balls and not caving in other peoples' brains, or you'll get slapped with a yellow or red card like some kind of two-dollar bitch.

For those of you who don't know, a red card is awarded for a flagrant foul.  Upon receiving a red card, a player is immediately ejected from the game.  Furthermore, his team is not allowed to replace him, essentially giving the other team the soccer equivalent of a Power Play for the duration of the game.  Not only this, but the player is also not eligible to participate in the team's NEXT game either.  On the other hand, Yellow Card is one of those incredibly shitty bands where the mere mention of their name can cause grown mens' asses to pucker from everywhere within a three mile radius of the speaker. They take the most contemptuous of all modern musical genres - four-chord whiny self-absorbed bubblegum emo slapfight wannabe faux punk bullshit - and then rehash it until I'd rather jam Iranian-produced U-238 fuel rods into my brain than listen to ten seconds of any song on any one of their shitty albums. In a desperate attempt to gain some semblance of credibility or validation for their presumably meaningless existence they try to pass themself off as "punks" despite the fact that actual punk rock was dead before any of the band members were even conceived.  To further insult the general music-listening public, the average listener is also apparently supposed to take their angsty prep-school suburban teen angst schtick seriously despite the fact that you can't turn on the television or open a magazine without seeing those assholes hocking cell phones or tampons or some other such irritating bullshit. They're like, "Dude, fuck the system, unless of course the system in sponsored in part by Verizon in which case maybe the world's largest wireless network isn't so bad and you should just learn to deal with it and maybe buy something from us."

Their music sucks harder than a fusion-powered military weapons-grade dustbuster in a black hole, and if they were to all choke to death on their own barf the government would award the Congressional Medal of Honor to vomit.  Hot Andrea, who went to high school with them, has also just informed me that she "hopes they all get syphilis and watch their hamster-sized dicks fall off".  Now what the hell was I talking about?





This picture is just begging for some wacky sound effects.
Maybe like a slide whistle or something.




• Taking a Dive:

Since color cards, penalties and free kicks are awarded as a result of fouls, it's important for every soccer player to remember that any time someone goes so far as to step on your shoelaces you want to do your best impression of a Nicaraguan terrorist in a bad Chuck Norris movie getting shot in the face at point-blank range with a double-barreled shotgun.  No flying, arms-flailing flop is too gratuitous either - even casual observers can see that you merely got tripped up and fell over, the sort of fall that your 80 year old grandmother could easily recover from, but you need to play it up to the referee like you just had both of your legs run over by a tractor trailer filled with lead bricks, sumo wrestlers and refrigerators full of granite.  Roll around on the ground screaming in agony.  Bawl your eyes out like a ten year-old girl who just learned there's no such thing as unicorns.  Call for the medical team to come and cart you off the field in a body bag.  Then, when the ref awards your team the penalty kick, miraculously "walk it off" and come back into the game like nothing happened.  It's foolproof, and not at all unsportsmanlike!

An Italian midfielder doing what Italian midfielders do best.

Notable Teams

• The United States of America:

It may shock and horrify many of you to learn that most of the fastest, strongest and most talented American athletes forsake the glamorous and lucrative world of professional soccer, instead deciding to settle for the pitiful chump-change offered by lesser leagues such as the NFL, the NBA, Major League Lacrosse and Major League Baseball.  It's truly heartbreaking to see such bright, promising young stars turn their backs on "America's Game", instead opting to settle for obscure sports with little to no fan following.

As a result of this tragedy of modern civilization, our national soccer team is comprised of the true cream of the crop when it comes to mediocre American athletes.  As Sexx oh-so-delicately put it, "our team suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks."

But there are still true patriots across the nation remain dedicated to our brave boys in the red, white and blue.  Stadiums across Germany are blessed by the presence of American fans in all of their arrogant, foreigner-hating, "U-S-A!"-chanting glory.  It almost brings a tear to your eye.





"U-S-A!  U-S-A!"




• Africa:

Everyone seems to go into the World Cup talking about how much "potential" the African teams have, and most of the half-assed American sportswriters will pick one of their teams to go on to the final four (presumably for no reason other than that he doesn't want to exclude an entire continent from the semifinals), but they never really seem to live up to their high expectations.  However, their fans are awesome and it's hard to root against them.  Plus, the Angolan flag is probably the most badass flag in the world today.

The rule goes that if you've never heard of the country before or you have no idea how to find it on a map, then it's probably in Africa.  If the country is in Africa, it will probably only win games against other teams from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and of course the United States.

Sexx:  I don't know what to say about the African teams.  I rooted for all of them, except when Ghana was playing us.





A Ghanamanianese striker goes for the Tornado DDT.




• Asia:

It may surprise you to find that Asia is in fact NOT a world soccer powerhouse.  That doesn't mean that the South Koreans and the Japanese don't love soccer, it just means that they aren't all that good at it.

Sexx:  I think that the reason that Japan and Korea aren't soccer powerhouses is that the sport doesn't involve violent porn comics featuring 12 year old girls with cat ears or panty vending machines.  That's about all I have to say about Asian soccer.  I don't really follow Asian sports that don't involve Hee Seop Choi.





This is what chicks in China do for fun on rainy days.




• The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia:

Sexx:  I read somewhere that there is a standing reward system for the Saudi team wherein any player who scores a goal can expect to come home to a new house or a new Mercedes or something, courtesy of a Sheik or a Prince.  I sat in front of the TV the other day, fists clenched, rooting for them to score ten goals.  I don't give a crap whether they advance.  And they won't;  they scored no goals.

When I first told Andrea that the Saudi team was going to be playing in the Cup, her first question to me was whether or not they play in their traditional garments.  Apparently she had immediately concocted some sort of crazy, Monty Python-esque sketch in her mind with a bunch of dudes dressed up like King Saud running around on a soccer field in Benny Hill-style fast-motion kicking a soccer ball at a goal and falling all over the place while some sort of wacky music plays in the background.  Now I can't even think about the team without that image coming to mind.









• Trinidad & Tobago:

Sexx:  Most awesome side in the Cup: Trinidad and Tobago.  They have a defender named Avery John, which means his jersey reads A. John to distinguish him from striker Stern John.  While Stern John is clearly a cooler name, Avery's name starts with A and he was the first man sent off the field in the 2006 cup, which is awesome.






Sexx:  Another reason Trinidad kicks ass:   they appear to have raised George Plimpton from the dead and made him their coach.




Plimpton

Beenhakker




• Brazil:

The Brazilian team is made up of a bunch of guys with one name who beat the shit out of everyone, and its fan base is comprised of legions of hot babes who love soccer almost as much as they love low-cut shirts and singing that Olé Olé song.

Sexx:  I love that Ronaldo is constantly and ceaselessly being called "fat" by people who have never been in the same area code as the shape he's in.  I bet he loves this too.  Also, Brazil has incredibly hot women.  Really, anytime you get a camera shot of some player's wife or girlfriend in the stands, it's a treat, but the Brazillian babes are a cut above.






Here's a somewhat-related tale.  Once upon a time I was hanging out with some of my friends outside a movie theater doing typical teenage bullshit like smoking cigars, talking about music and yelling obscenities at passing skateboarders when all of a sudden my girlfriend of about two weeks showed up with one of her long-time guy friends.  She came over to me and we did the standard flirty shit that you do when you've only been dating for a couple of days and eventually the two of us went off to talk for a while, leaving her friend at the mercy of my asshole crew.

Once I was out of earshot, my friend Mike proceeded to tell the following story to this kid he just met, and who had been friends with my new girlfriend for several years:

Mike:	So Ben says that your friend gives good head.  (Note:  Not only had I not said this, but I hadn't actually even received any head from her at all)
Friend:	(Nervous laugh) Uh... I wouldn't know.
Mike:	Ben would.  He's what I like to call a "head connoisseur".
Friend:	(Looks around anxiously) Uh... OK...
Mike:	He's gotten head all over the world, you know.
Friend:	Look, I'm not really comfortable talking about this with-
Mike:	He says Brazilians are the best at it.  We all took a cruise around South America one summer and he said that the Brazilians, hands-down, gave the best head in the world.  They teach that shit in school there... did you know that?  Fucking school.  Starting in like 8th grade, I think.  That's probably why they're the best.  Ben said it's not quite the same quality as your friend gives, but it's right up there.
Friend:	(Looks horrified, says nothing)
Mike:	All I'm saying is just keep that in mind.









• Europe:

Europe, particularly Western Europe, is the birthplace of the glorious art of soccer hooliganism.  Win, lose or draw, here's nothing soccer-related that won't inspire Europeans to bust out car windows, set fire to their neighbors' lawns and crack beer bottles over the heads of anyone wearing the wrong colors.  It is truly a glorious sight.

Sexx:  On the symbolism front, France and Switzerland played to a scoreless draw.  Isn't that just perfect?

Sexx:  It's sort of off topic, but there is a professional club in Switzerland called Young Boys.  Check it out.  I heard about it when one of the heads was talking about one of the Togolese players and where he played professionally.  And check out these two headlines.  I have no idea what that shit is about.  On the subject of great headlines, check this one out (in the picture).  Awesome.

Sexx:  I don't know if he speaks any English, but if he does, Zinedine Zidane has a lucrative post-soccer career ahead of him as a movie villain. Check this evil motherfucker out:









Sexx:  His balding pattern is like none I've ever seen.  The centermost portion of his forelock absolutely refuses to cooperate and recede along with the rest of his hairline, so he's left with this extraordinary widow's peak.  Lugosi and Vincent Price would have killed for that shit.  Then he's got a huge bald spot on the back of his crown which, if it continues to expand, will eventually leave him with hair on the back of his neck, over his ears, and a big triangle on his forehead pointing at his nose.  You take that and combine it with his facial bone structure and a French accent and you have the potential for superb villainy.





I wonder if she actually speaks English,
or if some wily Brit just tricked her into writing
the word "nasty" on her pelvic bone.




P.S. Here's a picture of andrea's imaginary boyfriend David Beckham, which will hopefully alleviate some of the shit i'm going to get from her for posting about ten pictures of half-naked foreign babes:









• The Non-Portuguese-Speaking Latin Americans:

South Americans take it the next level up from soccer hooliganism;  they fucking murder their players who don't perform up to snuff, then burn down their houses, run their families out of the country and destroy any documentation proving that the player ever actually existed.  But with great risks comes great reward, and one of the advantages of playing a sport with a very low probability of sustaining permanent facial scarring (and that makes you a national hero) is that you have the opportunity to score some incredibly hot girlfriends.  The South American babes are certainly top-notch, on par the quality of their soccer teams.

Getting the Most out of Your World Cup Experience

• Watching the Matches

This shit only rolls around once every four years, so you had better seize every opportunity to get everything you can out of the brief time you actually give a crap about soccer.  Here are some tips for getting the most out of your viewing experience.

First off the Spanish Channel is the place to rock for Copa Mundial coverage, because their announcers are ballz-out 100% of the time.  Like when nothing's happening and the US announcers are completely fucking silent the Spanish dudes are shrieking and yelling, even if it means just excitedly repeating one player's name over and over again.  Also because their half-time shows consist of nothing but a bunch of hot chicks with giant racks wearing patriotic multi-national bikini tops and bouncing up and down for a half hour.





"Oh fuck a trophy!"




Sexx:  When giving commentary for soccer matches, the verb tense for a country changes from the singular to the plural.  i.e. it's no longer "Togo is getting the shit beat out of them", it's "Togo ARE getting the shit beat out of them."  I get a real kick out of this.

Sexx:  ABC has Brent Musburger leading the pre- and between-match studio shows, which is absolutely ridiculous.  He made it clear about ten minutes into day 1 that he has NO idea what is going on in the games. I don't follow soccer at all except when the Cup rolls around, when I jump in when both feet, but even with my VERY limited expertise it was clear to me that he was speaking from total ignorance.  I want to kick him in the face every time the show comes on.  Alexei Lalas is also obnoxious and, while knowledgeable, a doofus.  Eric Wynalda is a total, total smartass bitch and it really makes for great TV, like right after the second Brazil match when he muttered something about "never sticking up for that fat waste of space again" regarding Ronaldo.  Great stuff.  I bet everybody hates him off the set.  Julie Foudy is excellent, and not just because she's hot, though she is.  She seems to know more just as much about the dynamics of the men's game as the male commentators do.  She also has blindingly white teeth and the other day she said that Swedish fans were "apoplectic."  I think I love you, Julie Foudy.

Sexx:  I made a list the other day of my favorite names from the cup:

Otto Addo, Ghana
Stern John, Trini
Xabi Alonso, Spain (say it out loud, it's fun)
Bartosz Bosacki, Poland (raise up off of him)
Titi Buengo, Angola
Didier Drogba, Cote d'Ivorie
Torsten Frings, Germany
Joao Jamba, Angola
Antonio Lebo-Lebo, Angola
Jerko Leko, Croatia
Per Mertesacker, Germany
Dare Nibombe, Togo
Razak Pimpong, Ghana
Dan Quaye, Ghana (seriously)
Libor Sionko, Czech Republic
Vahid Talebloo, Iran
Henk Timmer, Netherlands
Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, Netherlands (that's all his name)
Gilles Yapi Yapo, Cote d'Ivorie

My personal favorite is the guy on Brazil's team who just goes by "Fred".  There's no telling if it's his first or last name or whatever;  sort of like how Wolverine's real name is just "Logan".  Awesome.





The official mascot of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
Seriously.




• Drinking

Unfortunately, no amount of regular watching is going to make soccer enjoyable for many Americans.  When it comes down to it, booze is the only thing that takes the World Cup from being you along in your living room watching Telemundo at 10 in the morning and and turns it into a patriotic and inspiring world event.  If you're really interested in being patriotic, you should make sure you drink a true "American Drink" like Miller High Life or fermented 10W-30 motor oil.





Too bad you could never do something like this
with the good ole' Stars & Stripes.




• Fighting/Rioting

As we all know booze is the cause of (and solution to) all of life's problems, so of course a bunch of drunk rowdy fans are only capable of cheering loudly, booing loudly, vomiting disgustingly, fighting and rioting.  And these are ALL part of the international World Cup experience.

Sexx:  It appears that the experience of being at these matches is sort of like when we went to that Hertha match, only multiplied by about a thousand.  I watched the match between Croatia and Brazil during the first week.  Late in the match, the Croatians were down 1-0 (one-nil... I love that too) and were not really showing any great signs of life.  But with about ten minutes remaining, it was like somebody injected every Croat in the place with speed and they went bananas.  They were singing and screaming in full throat for the remainder of the match, and people started setting off road flares in the crowd.  The Croat color is red, and so there were these blinding brilliant flares everywhere, turning everything and everyone in the vicinity red and glowing.  Amazing.





Achtung!  Moose playing soccer!




Sexx:  I read that, prior to the Poland/Germany match, some hooligans from each country got together and planned a pre-match fight in the woods somewhere near the stadium.  Sort of a friendly, in the parlance of the game.  The polizei got wind and broke it up, which is a damned shame.  They have to get their practice in or the actual brawl after the game is going to be all sloppy.  Come on now.  I don't imagine I need to tell you who won a match between Germany and Poland.

Sexx:  Somebody asked me the other day how, if these world cup fans are so rabid, they aren't constantly storming the pitch.  I told him about our experience with the moat and the eight flavors of police in increasing thicknesses of riot gear.  I imagine that all of the big stadiums have similar moats, and the number of security guards at those matches, particularly between big rivals (like when Germany played Poland the other day) must be mindboggling.  Also, I bet they have German Shepherds, and if there is one thing you don't want to fuck with, it's a German German Shepherd.   You know goddamned well what the great- grandfathers and great-great- grandfathers of those dogs did for a living.





"BRINGEN SIE MIR DAS DEUTSCH SHEPHERD HUNDE!"

Final Thoughts

For as much as soccer sucks, it's tough not to get caught up in World Cup fever.  Sure, a good part of that spawns from my unparalleled talent for procrastination at work and my uncanny ability to avoid any and all things work-related, but it is truly difficult to avoid paying attention to something that makes grown men cry and European fans beat the ever-loving shit out of each other.

Sexx:  Best and most disgusting post-goal celebration of the cup:  late in one of the matches, some guy on a yellow team (Sweden?  Ukraine?) scored and went sprinting toward the corner flag, where he proceeded to pull a yellow spiderman-ish mask out of the FRONT OF HIS SHORTS and put it on his face.  This was in minute 70-something or 80-something and he'd been running around like an idiot the whole match.  It was a full-on self-nut-sweat-face-drenching.  Epic.