The ultimate "Beautiful Game"

I do love soccer. I played a bit in high school and college though never on a varsity team. I coached my son’s youth team until the players hit the sixth grade and became, for me at least, uncoachable.

At its best, soccer is spacing, triangulating, feinting, pacing, racing, passing and skill.

So I’ve been following the World Cup along with the rest of the world. Football, as everyone else calls it, is indeed a “Beautiful Game” . . . except when it is decided by a third team of referees and linesmen.

There have been far too many of those matches in this World Cup.

I suppose the most beautiful game in the world is one that doesn’t require referees, one in which the players work it out on their own somehow. Impossible. I can’t think of a single professional, competitive sport that doesn’t require a “third team” to make calls and, inevitably, play into the outcome.

We allow referees and umpires because these games are, after all, only games.

Unfortunately, serious human endeavors that do require rules to be enforced are often ungoverned. The economic meltdown of financial institutions in 2008 resulted from both a lack of regulation and regulators looking the other way.

Likewise the destruction of the environment.

And then there’s war, which shouldn’t be just regulated but outlawed. For that to happen, we’d need all kinds of regulations and enforcement. We’d also need a common, agreed upon definition of justice — economic, criminal and social.

The hope — and it can only be that — is that after years and years of regulation, education, experience and acculturation, we might not need rules. We’d just know what is right and do it.

It would be the ultimate “Beautiful Game” and we'd all be playing it together.

Don't ask about winners and losers. The play would be all about the game and doing it beautifully and right.

World Cup runneth over with trivia

And I thought the pursuit of baseball trivia was nuts.

The World Cup is churning out statistics and tidbits that only the pathologically obsessed could love.

Here are just three examples catering to the US audience, which is hardly the most soccer-crazed. (We, of course, still call it “soccer” in a world gone mad over “football.”)

Landon Donovan’s 91st minute goal against Algeria made him the only American player to score multiple goals in two World Cups.

Tim Howard posted the first shutout by a U.S. goalkeeper in the World Cup since the famous 2-0 victory against Mexico on June 17, 2002, in the Round of 16 in Korea/Japan.

American fans should not forget the quarterfinals in 2002, when the United States lost a 1-0 match to Germany, the ultimate finalist, after an obvious handball by a German player was missed or overlooked, by the referee.

“Should not forget”?

If I remembered stuff like this, I’d forget to eat breakfast.

Before this World Cup ends, I wouldn’t be surprised to read something along these lines:

“The goal was the first scored off the left foot of a divorced, tattooed striker parting his hair on the right and owning a second home in Majorca, since Italy’s third goal in the 1977 match with Brazil.

Such a glut of fact, figures and trivia could only be technology-driven.

Search "striker," "left foot" “bald,” “Majorca,’” “divorced,” “hair.”

Commentators and sports journalists seem to be saying: We are sharing this absurd fact because our computer is able to generate it. Aren’t we clever for having such a clever computer so cleverly programed to impress you with how clever we are?

Well, not really.

Save the space. Save our time. If you are so clever, tell us how to cure cancer or end war.

Now that’s worthy of a real World Cup.