Well, the entire world knows what the beef is in this post, but the shocking upset of the night is that FIFA apparently plans to do something about it. Which is fine, as it goes, but it presents a problem: if Koman Coulibaly (a.k.a. Osama Bin Whistlin’) is defenestrated from the tournament, it will concede to all and sundry that the United States was jobbed out of three points – which would have essentially guaranteed their passage to the second round. If they can put the wood to Algeria, this will all be water under the bridge, but there’s still no way to figure how good the Desert Foxes are based on what we’ve seen in South Africa.
What this gets back to is the ongoing problem that soccer has in this country. Premier League games are now popping up in the early hours on ESPN, certainly, and Setanta (RIP) and Fox Soccer Channel show a lot of international games, but for Bubba P. American, the World Cup is probably the only sustained exposure he gets to international football at the highest level. And when he sees it, he sees a steady diet of flopping, whining, and officiating decisions that suggest the use of a dog and a white cane.
More than anything, this is the thing that FIFA needs to do if they really want to crack the American culture. In every other team sport in America, if a player commits an infraction, the ref names that player and that infraction right in front of everybody and usually over a microphone. There’s no debating what the ref claims to have happened – it may be a good call, it may not, but at least you have the ref asserting that #12 traveled or #56 false-started or that there was a two-line pass, and you can judge from there whether the call was justified. As far as I know, nobody has yet been able to ascertain what penalty Coulibaly was calling, and nobody has been able to get a public explanation out of him.
Sports depends on one thing and one thing alone: the integrity of the contest. WIthout it, you might as well watch wrestling. That’s why the Black Sox scandal devastated baseball and why Pete Rose is still suspended. That’s why the NFL was hounded endlessly about the Seahawks-Steelers Super Bowl and why Tim Donaghy was the NBA’s nightmare (and why many people still believe the 2002 Western Conference Finals or 2006 NBA Finals were worked). As long as Bubba P. American thinks that international soccer is a game officiated on the basis of bias, partisanship, nationalism or just whether the ref’s bowels were acting up that day, he will dismiss it. And he will be right to do so.
It’s 2010. We have replay. We can afford to pay more than one man to watch the 22 players. FIFA needs to straighten up and fly right well before 2014.