toonarmy

oooh decent play there, smith with a chance

owen with a chance there, needed more power on it.

only a yellow? for that?

wasteful

HT

really have had awful set piece service today. just wasteful.

ridiculous yellow card there. shouldnt even have been a foul.

ahhhhhhhhhh another great save by james.

what a ridiculous pace to this game right now. full scale attack after 18 minutes

owen!

edit: more like off campbell. but whatever.

3-0

ridiculous goals. stunning.

2-0

jesus

fuck

nice stuff

Rugby violence and NFL violence are very different. Rugby players are tough, tough men. As ohmelads said, you have all the eye gouging, biting, stomping, teeth losing, nose crumpling and occasional bone breaking too. But in the NFL, its not just that they are tough men, (which they are, trust me you'd be terrified if you saw them up close.) It's that they have all that inaction followed by a pure head-on car crash collision every half minute. The NFL players are between 250-350 pounds on average, and run lightning fast. There was some rugby expert who said the collisions in rugby are nothing compared to the NFL ones, where they hit each other as if shot out of cannons, he used some statistics to back that up. They are basically human missiles, launching themselves at top speed, with ridiculous amounts of power and leverage at the other player. This leads to some rather gruesome injuries often if they hit each other the wrong way. So yes, while rugby players are extremely tough men who would never back down from a fight, the point of NFL football isn't just to beat each other up or prove you are the tougher man, but rather to quite literally hit the other person so hard that you kill him, or at least absolutely knock him unconscious. That intent, and the ability to do so with every hit, is why the helmets and padding are necessary. Even with the helmets, it is estimated that something like 10-50 percent of HIGH SCHOOL (14-17 year old) football players suffer major concussions, and they are nowhere near as big and violent as the NFL players.

how on earth are arsenal not ahead

well deserved for arsenal

wow. liverpool surviving.

carragher can be quite a jerk sometimes. eboue made the most of it, but still.

only a matter of time until arsenal score. can't remember the last time liverpool had the ball for more than 2 seconds

good high intensity match so far.

"Soccer"??

 

*shakes head and sighs*

 

 

I only used the word "soccer" to differentiate it from the NFL. when talking about the NFL football and English football in the same paragraph it can get confusing without using "soccer." Sorry about that.

There are plenty of passionate fans in the US to easily sellout a game or a few games, and then the teams would continue to make a lot of money as those fans newly exposed to those two teams would now start buying extra stuff and following those teams from abroad. Beckham's first game in New York in the MLS sold out an 85,000 seat stadium in a matter of hours. Think of how many European ex-pats are in the US that would love to see a meaningful game, as well as the 40 million Hispanics in the US that are all soccer crazy and would show up for any real football match. And the thing is, most of the US fans have almost zero loyalty to the MLS teams and would all rather see two foreign teams play on US soil than a foreign team play "their" MLS team. Just because all 300 million people in the US don't care about soccer doesn't mean there aren't a few million football mad residents-easily enough to support a real game in the US.

Now I don't think that they should move a Premiership game either-the season is grueling enough. Fans are easily desperate enough to want to see ANY meaningful game, even if its something like a community shield or even an early round Carling Cup match (cup matches are the best idea, that way teams don't really lose too much of the all important home-away structure in premiership play) or whatever. As long as it wasn't a meaningless friendly where none of the starters played for real, the match would be hyped and sold out extremely fast. And it wouldn't piss off English fans as much either.

Random point: The NFL also has an equal number of home-away games for each team, and with only 8 home games a year, losing one game of home revenue/home-field advantage to play a game in London would be a big blow for the Miami dolphins (if they were any good at all this year). But they were willing to (forced to) make that sacrifice, since every team will eventually make that sacrifice over the next few years. So it's certainly doable for soccer too, but whether they should is an entirely different matter.