NFL v 'Soccer' part two

This is part two of a post which began over a week ago and which we hadn't got round to completing, distracted as we were by the opening volumes of Churchill's volumes of Estonian history, but since then we've had a renewed interest, not least since Pittsburgh have gone three and oh (meaning they've won all of their first three games of the season, one of only two teams to do so), so let's pick up where we left off...

Scorelines
This relates somewhat to the variety aspect outlined last time, i.e. that American Football has a lot more of it. There is always a scoreline in the NFL. No doubt at more amateur levels, results might be either exceptionally low or exceptionally high-scoring, but in any event a draw/tie is so rare that it's worth commenting on (there has been a grand total of 17 in the NFL in the last 36 years and the last one came in November 2008 when the Philadelphia Eagles and the Cincinatti Bengals tied 13-13).
Compare that with some of the 0-0 thrillers that you get in soccer and have you losing yet another 90 minutes or so of your life...
Admittedly the scoring system makes a difference, there are several different ways to score in Amercian Football and most of them carry more than one point for a team's efforts, but that's just the point, don't make the method of scoring such a rare event that the world's population will have changed markedly in the time elapsing between each episode..

Supporters
I once went to a pre season game between the Washington Redskins and the Pittsburgh Steelers, drank copious amounts of beer, shouted 'Pittsburgh dogs' numerous times (this was before I liked them) and the worst thing that happened was that someone looked at me. Compare that to mass crushings, burning stadiums and police cavalry charges, all for the sake of a little game...the English football fans are animals, make no mistake. Even since the 90s when the premiership went all middle class with people like David Baddiel pretending to like it, it still brings out the worst in human tribal instincts, as anyone who has been anywhere near England during their biannual summer embarassements in international competitions.
OK, football is played elsewhere, better, and not necessarily accompanied by the same degree of aggro, but England is it's home turf surely, and sets the scene as a kind of style barometer even as it fails to produce the goods on the field.

Commentators
The American game tends to have more than one (usually two) commentators (or announcers) covering the game itself. Not only this but they're often real experts, and former players of the game. Contrast this with the monotonous drone of Jon Motson or some other non-former-playing non-entity as he proceeds to mis-pronounce every foreign-named player one by one and regale us with a succession of utterly meaningless 'interesting coincidences' and facts, that England haven't won on  the second Wednesday of any November, whenever the manager has an 'r' in his surname etc.

Glamour
Let's face it, Americans are better than the rest of us. They are, as a whole. Yes, I expect you can find pretty sorry instances of humanity, and not just in the much-maligned trailer parks, but even the crap cities like Detroit could manage to be a fairly convincing backdrop for a police series, movie etc (or just compare Birmingham, Alabama with Birmingham, West Mids). Compare the broad, expansive nature of the people there with the little, little folk of  the Thames estuary or wherever - they even pronounce our place names in a less farty way when they're transplanted to sunnier and/or leafier climes (so it's War - sester, not Wooster). And without being unkind, a brief look at the Cheerleader roster of any NFL team that has them (they don't all, I assume the 49ers don't anyway) and compare it with the Sky girls...the difference is just pitiful.


There are other areas we could mention - the absurd payscales in the upper reaches of the English premiership, compared with the lower leagues (a player for second division Wycombe Wanderers had to make do with my one bedroom flat in the crap end of town that even I wouldn't live in, compare and contrast with 'Beckingham Palace'), the educationally subnormal level of the majority of Association Football players and their inane pundits that prevent them for making the connection between subject, verb and object, the list goes on....

...but we'll cut it short there, because it's not that important really, just some ideas now that we have time to actually have them, away from the dreariness of the round ball game..