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When I was growing up there was no soccer on TV, now with Fox Sports, Setanta and Gol TV you can watch nearly every country play, from Australia to Colombia to Japan to La Liga and the EPL. Before, it was maybe Soccer Made in Germany on PBS, and for kids it was the videos and then the World Cup, but even the Copa Mundial was hard to come by where I lived. I remember going to a pizza joint to catch the US versus Trinidad & Tobago, where Caligiuri scored the goal that put the US into the World Cup. What a great goal – beating the defender with a fake shot and then the volley! Paul Caligiuri’s goal vs Trinidad & Tobago
We all new and memorized lines from various highlight videos, didn’t have to try to memorize the lines, we’d just watched the tape so much it was etched in our brain. Quotes from the video Tor, the Euro tournament where Van Baston led Holland to the final, lines like, ‘the fat is in the fire and a whole is in the wall’. I can remember that but not any of the Shakespeare I studied in college. What’s more, now you don’t have to rent videos but can usually catch highlights from games on YouTube, DailyMotion, or MetaCafe. And, now most leagues have their own sites, as the MLS does, where they show highlight clips from the weeks games. What’s the effect of all this soccer on TV? Watch and learn they say. I don’t disagree. I think I learned how to play by sitting on the sidelines of all my older brothers games when he was a youth player, now you can go to games, like Brazil versus the US, and catch all the goals online if you can’t make the game itself.
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