Sniff the air, America. Mmm—gas, gunpowder and growth hormone. But wait—is that just a hint of soccer? Take a look around. Everywhere you see xenophile hipster scum and their swanking Eurotrash same-sex lovers metaphorically pissing on Old Glory by wearing the national sports shirts of inferior nations.
Yep, the World Cup has started, and that horrendous squeaking noise is America's cultural sphincter rapidly tightening. Lovers of real American sports snarl rabidly about how soccer is a slow, boring, low-scoring, meaningless, super-sucky pseudo-sport played exclusively by lesbians, small children and gay communist terrorists. And how soccer is being forced on the American people by a sinister "global elite" secret world government as part of an Islamo-fascist plot to drain America's youth of their vital fluid. And it's gay. Did we mention that it's gay?
Yep, despite the fact that around 20 million Yanks play soccer (more than any other country in the world) and a vast array of other increasingly tedious stats that prove that America has already been conquered by the game, die-hard fans of allegedly native sports still insist on fighting an increasingly hysterical rearguard action against the Gurly, Gay, Commie Soccer Threat to the American Way of Life TM.
Give up! We already have America's women and children. Youth baseball is a rotten edifice—eaten hollow from the inside by the evil soccer wasp. Meanwhile, the soccer monkey has guzzled all the football dinosaur's eggs. The war is over. You lost. Globalization has turned around and bitten you in the steroid-swollen sportz-ass. How's that for payback?
Of course this transition to a nicer, cuddlier, bisexual sports America will not be smooth—as evidenced by The New York Times' recent publication of World Cup team "playbooks."
Excuse me while I smash my head into the keyboard for a moment. k.jdfoi;er ,.kfkwue uiodsfjjlkr. That's better. Look, there are no "playbooks" in soccer. No soccer-bugger gives a toss about "MVP's" or "assists" and all the other intensely irritating American attempts to turn the world's simplest and most elegant game into a stats-crippled, time-out-hamstrung and hideously complicated semi-martial mindfuck. Seriously, soccer is a game so thrillingly easy it could be taught to dogs. You don't need cleats, you don't need goals, you don't even need a ball. In the Third World, a typical game will feature a howling pack of barefooted, rickets-ridden, teenage gangster crack addicts kicking a bundle of shit-stained rags around a needle-strewn patch of cracked asphalt.
In short, it's not your granddad's American "football" except it's played with the feet.
A fall evening somewhere in middle America. I watch Coach Pete take an under-12 soccer team through their paces. And then, in ones and twos, the soccer dads arrive. One of them is carrying a dry-erase marker pen and a wipeable tactics board. He grabs the coach's arm.
"Hey, I was was thinking if we used the two man-in-motion half-wingbacks as bump 'n' run super-springboards and allowed both central guards a free-roaming eligible-receiver role, then that means we could switch from a blitz-diamond to a backfield Christmas tree on the 15th and—pow!—game over!"
Coach Pete's eyes glaze over. He wants to take that wipeable tactics board and snap it two. He wants to ram that dry-erase marker pen where the sun don't shine.
But he just smiles. He has his orders from the Homo-Islamo-Commie Soccer junta that secretly runs the UN.
Coach Pete will bite his lip and bide his time. One day—one day very soon—this barbarian nation will be his.