背包走天涯之纽约

American Football

In my desperate attempt to satisfy my cravings for soccer action I turned to Gamecast from Soccernet. If you realised that Gamecast broadcasts nothing but live minute textual updates of a match you would know how much I miss my soccer. When Gamecast didn't prove to be enough I went on to American Football. It's hard not to catch a game of football in America because they are showing it all day long on the weekends on tv. To be frank it bored me at first, for I had no idea what these big, burly guys were doing on the pitch.

It took me a few games to make sense of it. It can be very complicated if you go into each and every rule, so I chose to summarise the game in my own way. Basically a team has 4 chances, named "downs", to score points. If a team fails to score any points during these 4 downs, the other team would take over and do the attacking. A player can score points by kicking it into the goalposts or bringing it to the other end of the pitch, which is also called a "touchdown". A touch down is the equivalent of a goal in soccer because you don't really get that many. It is no less exciting than watch a soccer goal, for it is amazing when the player dances his way through a maze of oppositions and races to the finishing line.

To be frank I derive guilty pleasure from watching the big guys tumbling on top of one other. And when the referee isn't looking a player can throw a fist or two and get away with it. During halftime the concert band and cheerleaders would perform. The cheerleaders are all beautiful, but nobody can lay his finger on them for they are all taken by the big burly footballers. There was one match where a player scored the winning touchdown and in celebration he ran all the way to the sideline to propose to his cheerleading girlfriend on national tv. The next day the couple were on "Good Morning America" explaining how all that happened.

During SuperBowl it was even more spectacular, they had a stage in the middle of the pitch and a rock star was performing with exploding fireworks in the sky above. It certainly seemed more like a Singapore's National Day Celebration.

Despite all of the above I would take soccer over football anytime. Football is not a fluid game because the game is punctuated by downs and between each down the teams would have to take time to reorganise. As such a lot of commercials advertising chips and soda are shown. It is amazing how a one hour game can stretch into a 4 hour program and I wouldn't be surprised if half of that time went to commercials. Imaging having 2 hours of commercials. I don't need that many pee breaks.

posted by wayne @ 3:54 PM