"Pete" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Major ChrisB wrote:
As a Brit who's not a big sports fan but will watch the occational
"soccer"
came I would like to comment on two of the US's favourite past times.
Baseball: i have seen one baseball game live in my life. The Atlanta
Braves
vrs the Yankees at Yankee stadium. We got there at the top of the second
with a 0-0 score. Two and half hours later it was about 4-2 to the Braves
and only in the bottom of the 7th.....bored ****less we all left. the
most
exciting thing about the game was when the guys came out at half time to
sweep the gravel on the diamond and did a little dance....oh yeah and our
discussion about how Major League made baseball look so much more
exciting.

As a (mostly) Canadian who grew up in England, I think if you're going to
diss baseball, you can't ignore cricket! (:-)) I was forced to *play*
the bloody game at school. Talk about being bored out of one's mind...
['Course it didn't help that I was pretty hopeless at it.] Fortunately
I soon escaped to the tennis set. (And Fives in the winter instead of
equally unpleasant Rugby. Fives? .. Like handball, except that the ball
is more like a teeny tiny baseball. Great game, though.]

I've never heard if "fives" but I agree with you that Cricket is very
boring. We dont play it in my neck of the woods, it's a very english thing
to play - I'm in Scotland.

As for Rugby, I'm not a fan but thats mostly coz again, in Scotland, it's
not played at any major level. We have a good national squad but at local
Club level it's all amature leagues....England and Wales are much more into
their Rugby which is the original American Football (only the pussy yanks
put in 150lbs of pads and changed to rules to avoid getting hurt)


Football: or as we brits call it "American Football" (we call Soccer
football - coz you actually use your feet a lot) Now I've never mustered
the
courage to go to a live game but from what I've seen on TV you get about 3
minutes of actuall play in about 4 hours....which is pretty ****.

Agree totally on this one. Can't stand the game.


[...] Soccer is hands down the better game, much more enjoyable and I'd
say
it equates to watching the season finale of 24 vrs watching the season
finale of 7th heaven

Agreed, but I like *playing* soccer even more!


a 0-0 draw doesn't happen too often and it's all part of the game.

The 'low-scoring' argument people make against soccer, I just don't get.
Beaseball scores can be just as low [except for last night's 16-0 blowout
by the A's over the Giants! (:-)]. And American Football scores are only
high because so many points arrive in a lump. Basketball is almost the
reverse because it's the *missed* baskets that are significant; otherwise
each team seems to score almost every time they have the ball.


Now I know there is strategy with both
hockey and soccer but it just doesn't
translate well to an American audience for some reason.
Americans are are all slow and half-tards?

Nah... it's almost entirely the 'Not_Invented-Here' thing. And the fact
that the nets can't insert all those commercials easily. (But most kids
play the game, so all hope is not lost.)

Nothing was invented there. Everything (and i mean everything) in american
culture was invented somewhere else. From the British and Irish (who
populised the US) to the Spanish (who discovered the US) to the Africans
(who were dragged to the US) there is nothing "american" about anything in
"american" beyond what they've got from other races and *******ised to make
it seem like an original idea.