The World Cup Final

Well, that was kind of a bust, wasn't it?

Each team scored once in the first 20 minutes and then ... 100 minutes of the usual, highlighted mostly by a hilariously stupid assault. The French veteran superstar Zinediine Zidane is known as a good guy and sensible character, but I guess that's relative to all the other players suffering minor brain lesions, because with 10 minutes left in overtime and the score tied, Zidane goes all Bob Hoskins on some Italian, head-butting him in the chest and gets kicked out of the last game of his career. The Italians get a power play for the rest of the game, but don't even try to score, just waiting for the penalty kick tiebreaker, which they win when a French player hits the crossbar from point-blank range.

Americans simply can't watch soccer on TV without making lists of all the ways we'd fix the game to make it better. We're reformers and improvers and tinkerers by nature, and it drives us crazy to see something with the potential of soccer that is mired in primitive rules.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer