Now What About Ghana?My younger son walked in the room and asked that after he heard me & my older son talking about the World Cup. Yes, what about Ghana? It's another fun idea from soccer that you can play like crap, tie, then beat up on Africa's Oregon, and still advance. Seems fair.
Every four years (is it 4? I don't honestly know) the World Cup also gives my older son the chance to lambast me yet again for my one season of inglorious soccer coaching, and my advance on goals differential coaching blunder.
One of the baseball guys I coached with doubled as the soccer recruiter. He comes to me one day with, "I see your son is signed up. We're going to need you to coach a team."
To which I quickly reply, "I don't know a damn thing about coaching soccer."
But he's ready for me with, "You don't need to know anything. You're coaching Americans, and better yet their parents are Americans too."
Which sounds reasonable, and also which is why he was the recruiter. So away I go. I do the requisite cram session with soccer books, but it doesn't buy me a good ten minutes of soccer practice. In no time I've got the worst thing in the world, bored kids. My practices quickly degenerate into playground sessions of soccer baseball and soccer home run derby with no practical instruction because I have no practical knowledge.
This works for a while. The kids are having fun. I dump them out of practice tired, a positive for the parents. Nobody seems to mind that we're getting beat like cheap rugs every Saturday. It starts to get bad for me at practices. The practice facility has three adjacent fields with me in between a) an Englishman and b) a Brazilian. The English guy is running like a
Bridge on the River Kwai soccer boot camp. The Brazilian's got some kind of Soccer Carnivale thing going on that looks like so much fun I want to go down there and play. Worse is their kids are getting better, and having fun. Mine? You can only kick a ball over a fence & scream "Gooooaaalll!!!" so many times. The season can't end soon enough for all of us.
We get to the playoffs, and through some miracle win our first game. Actually, it's not much of a miracle. We beat the team with the only other baseball guy/soccer coach. It's no particular joy to me other than to be able to say to the parents, "Hey, you could have had him."
Our next game is a more formidable opponent, but now, in true miracle fashion, we find ourselves deep in the second half tied. This is where, to my son's perpetual consternation, I screw up. I never expect us to advance, so I never gave more than a cursory glance at the playoff rules to advance. I think I know them, and I think a win and tie is enough. I had two kids, my kid and another one, who were good athletes, not soccer players, but athletes. So I pull the air out of the offense, stick those two back on defense, and try to stall it out for the tie. My kid spends the last ten minutes of them game clearing balls out of our end and yelling things at me like, "Are you sure?", and, "We can win this game!!", and, finally, "ARE YOU SURE!!!???" It was really cute coming from a ten year old.
Over the years, I've tried to tell him I tanked it on purpose. I tried to tell him it was better to go out like that than advance, and take another 10-0 beatdown. I tried telling him that a win, a tie, and the parents not lynching me were the three miracles needed for sainthood, and more than anyone could expect from that team. And I tried, "I had us & 3 goals, so, hey ho, who got the dough?" He believes none of that.
Thank you World Cup...On Father's Day.
