Just repeating the news, as I can't say I follow futbol like I follow football...
The United States defeated Germany 2-0 on Tuesday, and last night the Japanese were able to get past England thanks to an English player kicking the ball into her own goal (accidentally, of course) just before the end of regulation time.
How heartbreaking must THAT be? In most sports, you can't even SCORE for the other team. Baseball, cricket, golf, and so forth - it's impossible. In American, Canadian, and Australian football (the sports of choice 'round these here parts), it's possible to score one or two point scores for the other team, and most of the time it's done intentionally, as a strategy to either get the ball back or prevent a larger score by the opponent. In basketball, it's entirely a bad thing, but it's one basket out of 40 or 50, and very rarely has any part in deciding the game.
But in soccer, where only a couple of goals are scored in the entire match in most cases, an own-goal can and usually does decide the entire game when it occurs. It seems unnecessarily cruel, but then much of soccer is cruelty - the tension that builds in a scoreless game, the thought that a World Cup championship can and often does come down to penalty kicks, and the outside pressure that major club and national teams feel from their fans, who often place an inappropriate amount of importance on the outcome of a fickle game.
Every time something like this happens, I think back to the 1994 Men's World Cup, when a player from Colombia cost his team the chance to advance with an own goal and found himself dead within a month or two of returning home We'd all like to think England's more civilized than that - because as Americans we come from that stock originally - but I sure don't want to see their tabloid sports sections today...
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