[cognito20]

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When a guy fakes an injury rolling around on the ground and then hops back up and continues to play as if nothing has happened, why don't you penalize him? This is the single reason why American non-wuss sports fans will never embrace your silly game.

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I DO penalize it. It's called simulation, and it's a bookable offense. Any player who commits an action intended to deceive the referee can be shown the yellow card. If the kid's being blatant about it, I'm gonna put him in the book without a second thought, and I'm not going to particularly care about anyone's opinion regarding it. To be fair, I can more easily summon up the courage to make that sort of call since I am using dealing with college kids and youth players, not professionals, and am not going to face the same kind of jeopardy to my job (since they're desperate for referees at the non-professional levels) if I'm wrong and the guy actually WAS injured.

Just for the record, I AM American, and have been a fan of all the "big 4" American sports all of my life, as well as soccer. I'm also a cricket, rugby and Aussie Rules fan from having lived in Australia. And as far as "American non-wuss sports fans never embracing my silly game", who the hell cares what the typical American sports fan thinks? All one has to do is listen to the quality, or lack thereof, of discourse on ESPN or Fox Sports Radio call-in shows to realize that the opinion of the "typical" American sports fan is generally not to be taken seriously by anyone with a working brain. It's not going to affect my enjoyment of or involvement with the game one single bit.

Actually, the REAL reason most American sports fans don't follow soccer is that we are one of the world's most insular societies, and soccer is a sport that we didn't invent and are really not particularly good at. That, however, is another topic for another thread.