Stop me if you’ve heard this one

As promised, I've been watching a lot of the World Cup. I'm starting to see why soccer is called the beautiful game. It's mesmerizing, really.

One of the biggest reasons for this has very little to do with the game itself, though. At least during ESPN's World Cup coverage, there aren't any commercial breaks (except during halftime). This fact makes it very hard to turn away (or, say, write a blog) while watching, especially considering the 0.8 goals per team per game could come at any time.

But there could (and maybe should) be commercial breaks. Soccer has plenty of breaks in the action that could be used to build in TV timeouts.

Instead, each half of a game (and the clock) continues uninterrupted for roughly 45 minutes. This leads to one of the most bizarre and, frankly, annoying concepts in sports: stoppage time.

Stoppage time is basically the head referees' guess as to how much of the 45 minutes of the half was wasted on stops in play: dead balls, injuries, substitutions. The officials then round that estimate to the nearest minute and add that much time to the clock (which counts upwards for some reason). Then, the refs simply end the game somewhere in the vicinity of that rounded number.

At a time when most sports are expanding or simply instituting instant replay technology to help eliminate some of the vagaries of refereeing, the biggest sport in the world is still relying on human beings to evaluate something that doesn't even need instant replay, just simply a stopwatch.

And it's not like stoppage time is that exciting. Soccer goals are too rare for that. In fact, since I've started this blog, the goals per team per game average dropped to 0.78 with the conclusion of the Spain/Switzerland game. They played more than five minutes of stoppage time, and nothing happened.

Stoppage time is one of the most widely disappointing and anti-climactic concepts in sports.

And it happens twice in every match.

Quote of the Week:

"We're used to being in must-win situations," Bryant said. "The way we look at it, [Game 7] is just a game we've got to win. ... I don't mean to be a buzzkill. I know what's at stake, but I'm not tripping."

-Kobe Bryant, pulled directly from ESPN's recap

I'm not really sure what Kobe meant there: tripping acid, tripping the rift, tripping like Bryan when he walks anywhere?

I reviewed Joe Danger at one of my other blogs. You might read it.