Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Soccer simplicity vs Cricket sophistication ?

Ad astra per aspera

Last Friday night I had the opportunity to see a Cricket game (Australia Vs India). It was a short game (it finished the same day) and as it happens with non-British-colony descendants, ignorant in the Cricket field of knowledge, I had to ask a lot of questions to understand the game. Fortunately, my friends had enough patience to explain me the rules and after some time I could follow what was happening in the oval. Of course this sport in not simple, but I wouldn’t say it is “sophisticated” as I read in an article written by ‘A--stín’ and La Chounie’s friend. After reading that article I found that the comparison between soccer and cricket is meaningless. Following that idea I could say that English is the simplest language, maybe because someone with two or less years of training is able to read an article (for instance this one about soccer/cricket and other sports) understand it, think about his/her position and write ~500 words about it (with expectable grammar errors, of course). I’m sure that learning any other language would required many years of training before reaching that level of communication. So, one conclusion we could make would be that the most ‘sophisticated’ sport in the world is played by those that weren’t able to develop the most ‘sophisticated’ language. Stupid asseveration!

Analysing soccer’s popularity and its simplicity, and comparing it with the intricate cricket (and its poor popularity around the world*) we could say that cricket is for smart people and soccer for less-smart ones (?). Then, we could correlate the behaviour of soccer players (plus the others watching the game in the stadium) and the behaviour of cricket players and their outstanding, noble, royal and (sorry again) sophisticated figure and followers, with the simplicity/complexity of such games. And the outcome would be that soccer (simple) Vs violence (a random variable) have a R2=0.99, while cricket (complex) Vs the same variable would have a poor matching. Thus, social behaviour could be easily explained through sports and their rules (?). Sorry mates, but it doesn’t convince me.

So far, I’ve been two (and something else) years in Oz, and cricket is still looking to me very boring, where sometimes a team of chubby guys expose all their misery. As well as in soccer they insult their rivals and love to be popular and appear in TV advertisements and like any other rich sport-person they love to show all what they have (same as in soccer and others). Perhaps there is a big difference in all this attitudes, soccer players show themselves –in the field- as they are (they will offend you loudly, even knowing the consequences) and cricket players would do the same, but hiding their head underground (like emus). I don’t want to offend cricket lovers with this post, I just want to defend soccer from that article I read, and foreshadow that we can find human misery in all sports, articles, blogs and cultures.


The title of this post is especially dedicated to the soccer lovers of this galaxy!


* Quantifying soccer and cricket popularity, a non-random selected indicator as number of google results typing a) "cricket blogs", b)"soccer blogs" and c) "football blogs" showed that: a) 461 000, b) 6 260 000 and c) 12 000 000

3 comments:

La Chounie said...

In my opinion no sport comes close to the sophistication, straetgy, tactics and awesome athleticism of American football. I am sure one or two people may disagree with me though.

As for the article, I am glad you read it. Essentially it is just 'pomo' specious silliness.

Unknown said...

Do you know who is the guy in the picture?

La Chounie said...

Yeah I think that is Bob Woolmer. He topped himself after the world cup defeat in the West Indies. They found him wearing two rubber wet-suits, flippers, goggles n' mask and a dildo....ah no hang on! I think that was someone else I was thinking of! Maybe a baptist evengelical minister. Never mind.