The truth is out there, and sometimes it's uncomfortable. Fair warning from the Blob, which is about to say something a certain segment of the American sportsball audience is never going to accept.
Soccer is never going to be one of our major sports. It just isn't.
Oh, lots of people love it, lots and lots, but it is never going to be the blood-and-bone thing it is everywhere else in the world. Football is. Basketball is. Baseball still is, kinda, at least if you're old enough to draw Social Security.
But soccer is not. We've been hearing since the days of Pele and the New York Cosmos that it was going to be the next major sport in America, and periodically someone will say it again. But we're still waiting. And we're pretty much always going to.
And that's too bad. Because if you watched the two World Cup games yesterday, and were not absolutely riveted, you are never going to be.
Both round of 16 matches went to PKs. Russia knocked out Spain -- a monumental upset -- when this guy did this on Spain's last attempt. Croatia knocked out Denmark, also on PKs, because Croatia's keeper was just slightly more amazing than Denmark's keeper, who not only stopped two of five PKs but had to stop another in extra time just to get it to the PK stage.
You don't often see goalkeeping like that in World Cup soccer. OK, so you never see it.
A lot of us here in the USA did, yesterday. But a lot more did not, preferring to watch Tiger Woods again play well but not nearly well enough, or stock cars drive in circles, or the Greatest Spectacle In Drying Paint, aka another interminable Yankees-Red Sox game.
It's a safe bet no one in Zagreb or Copenhagen was watching any of that. Advantage, them.
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