I don’t follow soccer closely (previous posts here), but I’ve come to appreciate the sport during this World Cup season and I particularly enjoyed Chronicle sports columnist John Lopez‘s World Cup reports from Germany.
Now, Bill Simmons passes along this video of star Liverpool, P.C. midfielder Steven Gerrard‘s ten greatest goals, which is well-worth the seven minutes it takes to view it. Gerrard is the English soccer equivalent of Reggie Bush, so take a moment to marvel at this wonderful talent.
By the way, the comments of the British announcers are priceless!
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There’s no easy comparison to American Football (as I’m sure you are aware). To me, Gerrard is more like Tom Brady. Solid, but unspectacular style of play, efficient, and steps up on the big stage. He does score some great goals though.
If you want to see the Reggie Bush of “soccer” (frankly, Reggie’s still untested so let’s call it the LaDainian Tomlinson of soccer), look at this guy:
I promise you’ll never see a player that just glides like he does. Shame France played him in such a restricted role during the World Cup.
The thing that always amazes me about high-level soccer is the variability among strikes. As we see above, they are capable of putting the ball in a two foot square from 40 yards away. But then half the time they miss the goal by dozens of yards. It’s amazing. You’d think they would either stink or be good, not be both. I suppose that’s a result of the bouncing ball and a million other factors (similar to baseball, actually). Besides, it might make the game more interesting. If you always knew what was going to happen, why watch at all?