Many people will know the tremendous George Carlin routine about the differences between baseball and football, based on the US usage of the word “football.” Over at a sabermetrically-oriented baseball site, Alex Remington compares baseball with (world) football relative to the claim that both sports are “boring.” As a lifelong baseball fan and a new recruit to being a football fan, I read the article with an eagerness born of my fascination with both sports, neither of which seems boring to me (in fact, I’m much more likely to be bored by the things that promoters do to “enhance” a sporting event: the sausage races, over-amplified music, ceaseless contests and advertisements, and so on). But Remington makes a delightfully apt comparison between World Cup football and the NCAA’s annual tournament: “World Cup has an added dimension beyond regular soccer: it’s a single-elimination tournament with excitement fueled by nationalism. It’s like March Madness, if the universities had armies and navies.”
Do add cricket to the list of sporting obsessions – far and away the best of the lot, honest.
Sorry, son, I’m one of those people who thinks it’s boring. I gave up on it after the summer it seemed as if we spent our whole vacation in Forbes Field. It’s boring to me unless it is a World Series involving the Red Sox. I make sure I have a good book handy!