Football is boring

I need to gromble about football. It's boring! Having just slept through my second 90 minute England game, I've discovered a way to make the experience marginally more bearable. Live pause the programme, and play at double speed after about an hour of pause. Many advantages:

• You get no sound. No bloody vuvuwhatevers (sounds like your living rooms been attacked by bees). No pratt telling you 'if only they'd score more goals, they'd be winning'. No loud-mouthed lout on the pitch giving the ref a hard time. No gum-chewing expletives from an overpaid foreign manager on the sidelines.
• No ads... fast forward even faster through them. Even the one that flashed on our screen during England's only goal against the USA. Brilliant timing! 
• No wankers at half time lolling about on sofas telling us who's having a good or bad game (we can bloody see for ourselves).
• And most importantly, the players look a lot more skillful while the ball itself travels FASTER. At normal speed, the ball takes forever to get to the next player, who then either passes backwards (really boring), forwards, sideways or gets tackled. If you add up all the seconds of proper excitement in a normal game (England at a world cup game produce none), you probably get about a minute - max. That means 89 minutes of excruciatingly boring passing stuff - now compressed to a slightly less painful 45 minutes.

So why is footie so damn boring. Well firstly it was invented with too few rules. There's nothing to think about:

• Use your foot to kick the ball, not someone else
• Kick it into a goal more often than the others
• Don't get (and this does, I admit, verge on complexity) offside

Now I'm a rugby fanatic (rich source of future grombles by the way). Rugby is for intellectuals. It has an infinite number of rules. No-one understands them all and new ones are invented at random all the time. People with huge brains, called referees, decide whether any have been broken - and people get to hit each other really hard - legally! Plus you get scores like 65-24 and usually decent beer to drink at the grounds. Good sausages and chips too. I've just watched 90 minutes of England drawing 0-0 with Algeria (Algeria! Famous for terrorists and dates). Had this been a club game, chances are I would be writing this from a hospital bed nursing multiple stab wounds having fallen asleep on an opposition supporter's shoulder, and a wallet lighter by hundreds of pounds (well a lot more than a premiership rugby game costs to watch live).

Now I'm not arguing that footie doesn't require great athleticism, or that a few goals are truly amazing feats of genius. But oh how rarely we see them. And once you've seen one 6-packed player (bastard show-off) expertly trap and kick a ball past an opponent, why hang around to watch another do the same thing? Pass forward, pass back, pass sideways, pass, pass, pass, shoot, miss. Pass forwards,....

Sorry - Football is boring, except for the bits that aren't, and there aren't enough of them to keep me awake. Pause and fast forward... it's the only way.