Gordon McLauchlan: Soccer's a great game - for morons

France is playing Denmark in a crucial soccer World Cup match. Frenchman Thuram is dribbling the ball when a Dane challenges him and in the process swings his hand out to maintain his balance. The hand hits Thuram somewhere near the throat. The soccer team player becomes Thuram the Thespian with a solo performance on registering agony.

The commentator, who seconds before was in full-throated emotion like a chorister in Handel's Messiah, mutters that the referee obviously didn't realise how badly Thuram had been hurt and mentioned a stretcher. Is the man so stupid he hasn't noticed what's going on around him?

Of course, Thuram is soon back on the job and plays the game out.

Instead of the first and second halves, they should be called Act I and Act II.

That small event expressed what I hate about the culture of soccer at the top level. The game itself is essentially boring: in what other international tournament would a report say of a team (Ireland) that it had two "impressive draws" (against Cameroon and Germany).

Almost no one retains possession of the ball for more than a few seconds and a breakthrough that ends in a goal happens, on average, about once every 45 minutes. Most games are drawn. When possession is lost, it is often followed by a player falling over and engaging in one of two forms of play-acting.

The more common is the leg-clutch, with serious writhing, grimacing and miming of agony. It is followed by a mock limp or two when getting up and back into the game.

The second is the drop-dead move in which the player drops and lies utterly inert for several seconds. This is followed not by a funeral, as a new spectator might expect, but by the Lazarus-like resurrection of man fully restored to health by some miracle.

Histrionically, though, the leg-clutch and drop-dead are off-Broadway compared with the orgasmic goal-scoring routines in which the whole team turn terpsichorean. I suppose it's natural enough that players go berserk at goals when they're as rare as finding a gold nugget or winning Lotto.

But the jumping, attempted flight with arms extended, frothing at the mouth, taking off of jerseys, cuddling and clumping together like mating termites is the worst example of deluded hubris in world sport. Mindlessly, the goal is an end in itself so the celebration comes whether the team are winning or losing - or just drawing yet again.

The players seem to have twin motives for these performances. The first is that their egos have been so inflated by adulation and money that they have become fragile flibbertigibbets who mentally collapse on challenge. The second, even more wretched, is to get an advantage over an opponent and possibly have him penalised.

Or maybe it's just the result of banging their heads on the ball all the time.

So why is it the most popular sport in the world? At the top level, the game develops a very narrow range of skills to a high level. Because it is so simple, morons can play it and most of them do; and it has so few rules that morons worship it - something, at last, that they can understand.

I must say the only players I warm to at all are the goalkeepers and the death-or-glory role that so many seem to fill so well.

Something about the game brings out the worst in people, probably because a nasty nationalism hovers over it.

The Russians lose, so back home they riot and kill one another. In South America, crowds have been known to kill people and burn down grandstands when their team lose.

In Britain, hordes of the young ratbags beat up each other and anyone else within reach. Whole countries become manic or depressed or, in some cases - Argentina, for example - both, simultaneously.

What distresses me is the way soccer commentators further demean the word "passion", bandying it about all the time, using it to describe the lunatic antics of crowds and players. They're too superficial to understand that passion is not about mass hysteria or about getting the glands pumping, or about temporary enthusiasms - it's essentially selfless, about one's personal sense of truth, about determination, about endurance.

I remember when rugby degenerated into a rigidly boring game of interminable scrums, lineouts and penalty goals. The authorities fixed it. Nowadays most matches between top international teams are complex, vibrant, combative, exciting and demand courage and tenacity as well as a wide range of skills, from running, sidestepping, passing, tackling, winning the ball from lineouts, scrummaging, mauling, rucking, and strategic kicking.

One-day cricket, baseball, yachting and other team sports demand a wide range of skill and intelligence. Only basketball is as narrowly boring as soccer, simply demanding of its players that they be terribly tall and throw with reasonable accuracy.

Footnote: Why did television journalists call the boy who invented the cat-scaring device a budding entrepreneur and not a budding scientist? Is nothing worth doing for the intellectual challenge it offers?

nzherald.co.nz/fifaworldcup

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