[Sylvanfan]

It seems that North American sports viewers and Americans in particular seem to prefer a game that features short action spurts and than a pause in between plays to analyze and prepare for the next play. Baseball is a game built on drama, and they have a chance to build up the drama on every play. Football is much the same way as a play takes 5 to 10 seconds to execute and than you have 45 seconds to get the next play together. Even Basketball in the last two mintues becomes a series of 24 second possession blocks with time outs between ever play. Even when it is moving earlier in the game there is a bit of a break between most plays and teams taking their time to bring the ball up court and set things up. Even with Autoracing how many laps in a Nascar race are under the caution flag? Theres a burst of action, a crash occurs and than it's caution flag time a pit stop and than a few more laps of racing sort of thing.

A game like soccer flows with continuous action and almost no stoppages, and the ones that do happen are quite brief. The only times you seem to get any type of pause to set something up is a penalty kick or corner kick which as a North American viewer I tend to find as the most entertaining parts of the game because drama can be built up and something could happen. So I guess my answer is that when I watch a game I have a short attention span and want to see potential action on every play. A series of nice passes to establish ball control, or slide tackle are plays that happen continuously, but in the end usually don't result in goals sort of thing. Seeing as you need goals to win thats what I'm probably looking for in a game and it's tough to predict what exact moments those plays will occur with the exception of corners and penalty kick situations where chances can arise. I think thats also a bit of a reason why hockey hasn't caught on in the U.S to a large degree as it's hard to predict when the real action is going to happen.

Although I'm tempted to go check out the U20 quarters here in Edmonton. I do like watching top level calibre soccer on T.V. as the skill level in World Cups tends to really stand out to me. Perhaps I need to see a decent game live to better appreciate it.