World Cup finals

I watched the World Cup finals today. France seemed to deserve the win, they were dominating the game in the end. But Italy came up the victor after the game was tied and went to penalty kicks. That's fine with me, because that means I win the bet I had with my wife.

A lot of people think penalty kicks is a horrible way to decide the World Cup. I agree, but am not sure what the alternatives are. Lengthening the game might raise the chance of injury happening as the players become more tired and play sloppier. Some people sugget removing players from the field until someone scores. That might be the way to go. But it seems that no matter what the rules are after 120 minutes of play, there's really no great way to decide the winner, but no one would really be happy calling it a draw either.

Zidane's headbutt was definitely disappointing. The situation reminded me of something our high school soccer coach taught us. One day he pulled us all aside and said, "Ok, today I'm going to teach you how to fight in soccer. When you feel like you want to get in a fight, just get in the guy's face and say the meanest, dirtiest things you can to him. Keep at it until he throws the first punch. Once that happens, he'll get the card because that's all the ref will see." Something similar must have been happening with Zidane, though it doesn't excuse the penalty at all. It will be interesting to see if we get any explanation of what happened over the next couple of days.

I guess this means we go back to not hearing about soccer in the news for 4 more years... a few years back I actually followed the European Champions League - they had a nice show on one of the sports networks that would compress the games into 10 minutes of highlights and made it easy to follow along. But more likely than not, I won't be watching much soccer until 2010.