soccer

While this day is surely giving you everything you could possibly need in terms of World Cup blog content, there’s much more out there to be had, particularly at the World Cup Blog itself, which is actually composed of 34 different blogs, one for each team in the tournament.

Being American, we’re drawn immediately to the USA blog – we want, need, and want and need to find out what’s happening with our squad over in Germany.

Turns out we beat Angola yesterday, although there aren’t too many details to be had out there.

Details are scarce, but the US beat Angola 1-0 in a behind closed doors game.

A spokesman said that Brian McBride scored the only goal, but wouldn’t reveal who played, what formation was used or any other details, presumably to stop nosy Group E rivals Czech Republic, Italy and Ghana from knowing too much.

Awesome – there’s no better way to excite an indifferent fanbase than by being secretive about a sport that few know much about.

Now when that first game rolls around, we can be all like “Hey, there’s…um…” and “Yes, it’s my favorite player! Go…you…”

Yeah, we know we could go watch and read about old games, but why would we do that, when there was a game yesterday we should be knowing about? This is pure and typical soccerish weirdness.

How much strategy is there to hide anyway? What, is one of them secretly using their hands or not booting it down the field as hard as they can?

Anyway, from what we can gather, our best player is this Landon Donovon guy, who…why? Why do they do that? Keep your clothes on, sir – there’s still a game going on.

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The FIFA World Cup isn’t the only thing going on right now in soccer, y’know.

There’s also the RoboCup, which is exactly what it sounds like: robots playing soccer. This isn’t some fly-by-night thing, either. It’s been happening for years, looks pretty large, and is coming to Atlanta in 2007. Their agenda is no joke.

The Dream

We proposed that the ultimate goal of the RoboCup Initiative to be stated as follows:

By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, comply with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.

Great. You’d think the nerds behind this scheme would be the types that would be all into science fiction and stuff, y’know? If they were, they’d know stuff like this is the slippery slope that leads to the annihilation of the human race. (Plus, any sort of “plan” utilizing the word “Initiative” is by nature “scary”.)

Blah, blah, blah…it’s an old story…what happens when the robots don’t want to be paraded around playing soccer like our little beep-boop puppets? We’ve all seen this in like 50 different movies, and if you look at history, most science fiction comes true eventually. Look at those old Star Trek communicators – we’re already like way past those.

If When these idiots succeed, the question then becomes…would we prefer to be enslaved and slaughtered by the mean soccer robots?

And yes, you have to choose, because it’s hard to have both those things happen to one person. Our first inclination is to go with enslavement, what with the survival instinct embedded in our all too fragile and predictable human psyche.

What one must ask next is what type enslavement are we talking about? Is it the kind where we have to work in some mine, pounding rocks to get the precious ores that fuel our robot masters, or is it the type where we serve them their oil and energon beverages, while wearing plain white jumpsuits and mental inhibition devices on our shaved and UPC-numbered heads?

Truth be told, it’s not actually a choice. Think about it – if these robots are advanced enough to overtake the entire human race, then surely they’ve built other robots that are perfectly capable of performing any sort of duties that we might do for them.

Our only shot is if the robots can use us as some sort of entertainment – perhaps the Robot King could make us a court jester of sorts, or maybe even put us in a glass cage and force us to continually mate with our (hot and glistening with sweat) female counterparts.

These options are both more attractive than our current life, actually.

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As you surely already know, there’s a bit of controversey going around regarding the new-look World Cup ball being used this year. (Here’s a pic – pop-up style!)

One of the largest names to speak out against this strange, new orb is Robbo, aka England’s Paul Robinson.

“The ball is very keeper unfriendly,” he told Sky Sports News. It is a different ball, obviously there is no stitching on the ball – it is actually glued together in two panels and it is more like a water polo ball or volleyball.

“It is very light and moves a lot in the air, it also has a plastic casing around it and so when it is wet it is not ideal for goalkeepers, but it is something we have to deal with. New balls are brought out all of the time that are not goalkeeper friendly, like this one.”

No stitching? What the hell?? Is this soccer or some weird new sport that looks just like it, but with different balls?

We can’t say we’re totally against the redesign – it does look pretty cool and futuristic. That said, this whole thing where it won’t be nice to the goalkeepers is bollocks!

The ball should be nice to everyone, not just the players who aren’t the goalkeeper. We don’t know what those players are called, but we bet they feel good when the new-look ball is kind to them. Again, we call bollocks.

As for Robinson, well – now that he’s the number one goalkeeper in all of England, you’d think he’d have the choice to get friendly with any balls he wants to. Apparently that’s just not the case. It’s a shame, but we’ll continue to cover this at least until right about…now.

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