All in All: A Somewhat Disappointing Cup

Paul Mirengoff entitles his post: "Unsatisfactory World Cup ends unsatisfactorily. I agree. I've got to say, when it comes down to it, I was a bit disappointed by this Cup.

• I hate ending matches on PKs. It's just stupid. And you go through this entire tournament - more than a month of such high intensity games, with billions of people watching, and it ends like that - with something that isn't even the game, but rather something tangentially related to the game. It's like the NCAA tourney or NBA finals being decided by a three-point shooting contest. Asinine. I fail to understand why they haven't figured out a way to fix this.

• The Zidane build up by everyone (ABC/ESPN especially) and then the let down with his inexplicable head butt.

• The Final was NOT a great game. Average at best. You would have loved to see a good game in the Final - like Italy-Germany, or France-Spain, or Agentina-Mexico (the three best, IMO). Instead, we got a sloppy game with tired players.

• Not enough goal scoring. There just wasn't. This Cup was the soccer version of the '99 NBA Finals. I don't know how to fix it, but they need to go in with some rule changes like the NBA did. And it was made worse by so many coaches going with 4-5-1 formations. It's like coaches are allergic to playing attacking football. Instead, we've got a ton of Pat Riley clones as football coaches. I hated it. And it exacerbated the problems created by the next point.

• The referees sucked. Too many cards. (And for a lot of ticky-tack fouls - like the ones that put Essien out of the Round of 16, and the one in the group stage that could have cost Zidane.) Moreover, too much inconsistency.

• Too much diving and whining. Normally I don't care. I said several places that it's all part of the game. But I guess the Portugese just got to me in their last two games, I dunno. Or maybe it was reading about it so often. But yeah, compared to US sports where players would never fall over and whine and writhe in fake pain all the time, it made these guys look bad.

• The USA sucked. Took a lot of ooomph out of it for a while - basically from when the USA was eliminated until the France-Spain game, for me. (Secondarily - the other teams I liked, Holland and Spain, also disappointed.)

• I'm just going to repeat it: NOT ENOUGH SCORING. The number of really great goals in the tournament was in single digits. The leading scorer had 5 and no one else had more than three. Disappointing.

(That all said, the WC is still the WC. I'm still looking forward to 2010.)