Soccer been very very good to Me

 Baseball this year, at least so far, holds little interest for me.

  It’s the never ending bullshit of all the ‘warming  up’ that drives me crazy. It’s like watching your dog pick the exact right place to take it’s dump in the yard 

  

 as every damn pitch needs never-ending, habitual crapola before the ball is actually thrown, 150 times a game. 

 Relief pitchers  are probably the only guys in the world whose wives are always ready before they are when they go out to dinner.

 Sexual foreplay must be an excrutiatingly long experience for their wives … as she wanted a lover with a slow hand, but not that slow.

 

And that’s not to mention every batter going through every habit in the world like clapping his hands, spitting into his batting glove, wiping his bat ,scratching his balls, taking 38 half swings, standing in, moving out, he’s not ready, he’s ready, he needs more time, now I’m ready, not quite yet.

Ok, now I’ll move on to the next thought…see my point!

  Just as Ed Norton drove Ralph Kramden nuts with his never ending ‘warm-ups’ to everything  ( “Will you come on!” screamed Ralph as he’d slap at him), I’ve had enough.

 

  It takes less time time for dinosaurs to evolve into birds than it does to throw a pitch. Boil baseball down to people moving and its about 9 minutes long.

 

So I’ve moved away from baseball to SOCCER, or “Football” as the rest of the world calls it, which is a game with a continuous clock, marvelous strategy on a large field with talented athletes from all over the world….and for some reason, even my wife likes it.

 For me , it’s the The English Premier League

I am hooked to it like “fish and chips” are to a British fisherman’s rod .

 For example, over this weekend,  in the last 10 seconds of added time to the 90 minutes that they already played , Manchester United

  

beat Manchester City (Think Mets / Yankees) 1-0 on a header by 36 year old Paul Scholes.

He’s so old to be playing that his head actually came off as he flicked his neck for the winning goal. The goalie for ‘City’ accidentally blocked the head… and let the ball roll in.

Find that in baseball !

England is a small country, yet there are four large divisions of professional teams, the premier league being the highest. You’d think there’d be nobody in the stands because, considering the number of teams, everybody in the country would have to be a player.

 

 But somehow even the tiny hollow of “Semen upon Sheets”, just outside the larger town of “Eggs over Easy” , manages to have a stadium and a team in Division 3 or 4 ……and fill the stands with people who actually sing songs in support of their team like

“I’m a football fan and I’m OK, I watch all night and I puke all day” . 

 Quite a game. Quite exciting. Quite.