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.

When soccer isn't soccer

The way playoff soccer matches are settled in case of a tie after regulation and overtime is, in a word, absurd.

The absurdity was on full display tonight at Civic Stadium (aka “PGE Park”).

I left the stadium with a shrug. In my view, the Timbers didn’t lose the United Soccer League Division One semi-final game, nor obviously, did they win it.

No, the soccer game was a tie.

What the Timbers lost was some anemic contest remotely related to a soccer match.

The home team lost to the Atlanta Silverbacks in a penalty kick shoot-out.

The Timbers had clearly outplayed Atlanta during the game. Portland had 23 shots on goal to Atlanta’s 12 — and that’s just for starters.

The problem was that lads in green failed to put any of those shots in the net.

So what happened? The dread penalty-kick shoot-out got wheeled in to decide the "winner." The shoot-out tests just two mano e mano skills — the ability of a striker to score a teed up ball and the ability of a goalie to defend against it.

That’s a great little match-up, but it is hardly soccer with its passing, dribbling, trapping, tackling, heading, teamwork and — grace.

If this kind of resolution were used in American football, tied games would be settled by opposing place kickers exchanging free shots at the uprights from mid-field.

So here’s my suggestion: If a soccer game ends in a tie, the teams are reduced to a goalie, two defenders and five attackers. The five offensive players could only play at their offensive end, where they would be opposed by the other team’s outnumbered three-player defense, which would also be limited to half the pitch. Likewise the opposing team’s offense would have to stay at its offensive end and be opposed by the similarly restricted, three-player defense of the other team. The ball could pass freely from on side of the field to the other.

All the soccer skills still would be involved, but the teams would be reduced in size and limited so that there would likely be a decisive “golden goal,” sudden-death score in very short order.

We would then leave the stadium knowing that the better team had won — playing soccer.

A Beautiful Game

A soccer game like the one on a balmy Tuesday night could make Portland Timbers matches habit forming.

I joined my son, daughter-in-law and two of their friends to watch the Timbers play AC Milan’s under-21 team at Civic Stadium, aka PGE Park.

We were joined by a reported 11,000 others. Not bad for a week night in the city.

The senior AC Milan club is one of the best in Europe so the AC Milan Primavera youngsters, many destined for stardom, had a tradition to uphold. The Timbers, undefeated at home this season, had a streak to defend.

At that, the exhibition match had an almost convivial cross-cultural, diplomatic feel to it.

The game was close and fluid. A dance of quicksteps and turns, feints and lunges, lobs and leaps.

So much of it is what Hemingway called “grace under pressure.”

You can see why soccer played this way is called “the Beautiful Game.”

As the sky darkened and a finger-nail moon rose over the city, the match wound ever tighter.

Portland was ahead by a goal when a red-carded Timber player put the team down a man. Milan soon scored the equalizer. The Timbers, back on their heels, fended off Milan probes, volleys and assaults, hoping to struggle to the end-of-regulation tie-breaker when the game would be settled on penalty kicks. Portland knew the shoot-out would even the teams again.

The strategy worked.

The Italian team fell into a malaise as its first three penalty shots missed the goal every which way. The shooters were like basketball players throwing bricks from the foul line in the closing minutes. While Milan missed; Portland was dead on with four goals in a row.

In the celebration that followed, the score seemed an afterthought. The Portland victory and Milan loss were laid aside as the two teams mingled and strode around the field together, waving to the crowd.

Together, they had given us a treat.