“The U.S. women’s national soccer team won the largest margin of victory in World Cup history—for both genders—in their Tuesday 13-0 match”
Alex Morgan scored five goals, which I believe is more goals than all the other soccer players in history added together.
All kidding aside, I went to high school with a guy named Bob Cupello, who once scored seven goals in a single college soccer match.
Back when I was in high school, none of our American guys knew how to play soccer. We all grew up playing the three main American sports. Yet our high school had a soccer team. Our coach, although he was a good coach at other sports, actually had no idea how to play soccer. He learned the rules when they gave him the job.
Yet we had one of the better soccer teams in the state. One year we finished undefeated. We sometimes won games by 5-8 goals.
How could that be? The above-mentioned Bob Cupello, who was born in Italy, ran rough-shod over all of our competitors, whose American guys sucked just as badly as ours, and did not have any Italian superstars to offset their ineptness. Most of the time Bob didn’t even bother passing. He just got the ball, then did some fancy dribbling and spinning past the opponents. He was not even bothered by double and triple teaming. Imagine Magic Johnson playing basketball against a bunch of middle school kids and you’ll get the general picture.
When he was not busy scoring goals, Cupello would spend practices teaching the coach and his teammates the rudiments of the game.
Our coach didn’t exactly believe in inspirational speeches. There was none of that “Win one for the Gipper” crap for that taciturn fellow. He offered only one tidbit of wisdom and strategy to the team: “Gentlemen, there is only one thing you have to remember out there. Don’t get between Cupello and the goal.”
The Americans celebrating late goals was classless.
The rule that gives them the incentive to run it up is just as classless.
Both of you are right. Neymar would have been ashamed of some of those histrionics. But they should score as many as they can.
They missed an extra point?