Americans Should Like Wee Version of Soccer

It is a beautiful Saturday afternoon, Day 1 of the United Scottish Society’s 59th annual Highland Gathering and Festival, and the Orange County Fairgrounds are alive with a wild assortment of sights and sounds.

Over here is a 40ish-looking couple, husband and wife, and you know right away who wears the pants in the family. Hers are a nice pair of shorts. The husband, meanwhile, is clad in a tartan-plaid kilt, yellow knee socks and, for that special businessman-on-the-go kind of look, black wing tips.

Over there is a brightly colored flag bearing a coat of arms. It waves above a booth for the “Clan Campbell Society,” a rather lousy excuse for a fan club. No copies of “Wichita Lineman” anywhere.

Bagpipe music and the smell of bangers and onions fill the air, leading you to another group of kilted men, who are attempting to balance long, heavy telephone poles in their clasped hands, run and then fling the poles far distances, end over end, if possible. This activity is known as “caber tossing,” caber being the Scottish term for hernia.

Then, suddenly, you spot something unusual.

It’s a soccer game.

People are moving.

People are scoring.

There are no penalty kicks, there is no stalling, there are no smelling salts being applied to the fans in the bleachers.

It’s a soccer game, and if you stick around for half an hour, you’ll get to see two of them, both played out to completion, from start to finish to start to finish.

A 14-minute soccer game?

Who is the inventor and what can we pay him to do something about baseball?

Colm McFeely is the name and seven-a-side “speed soccer” is his game. No, for you viewers of World Cup ‘90, speed soccer is not an oxymoron. It actually performs as billed--a speedier version of the global pastime, scaled down almost everywhere (team size, length of field, length of game) in an overt attempt to appeal to the incredible shrinking American attention span.

If this country can deal with the concept of faster-format newspapers, faster-format soccer just might be an idea whose time has come.

“Soccer is my life,” says McFeely, a 41-year-old Irish transplant now living in Granada Hills. “I can appreciate a soccer game with no goals, I can see the niceties of defensive tactical play. But most of the American public has not played soccer since the age of 5. They watch the World Cup and say, ‘We get to see 26 points in a football game and 100 points in a basketball game and now we’re watching this dreary stuff?’ I can understand that.”

As a lifelong player, coach and advocate of the sport, McFeely has dedicated himself to educating the American masses before the World Cup hits them at home, in the face, in 1994.

We might not be able to play it, but McFeely feels we can get to the point where we might be able to watch it.

McFeely’s game plan: Make the field smaller (100 yards long by 70 yards wide, down from the standard 120-by-80). Make the teams smaller (seven players instead of 11). Make the games smaller (14 minutes long--two seven-minute halves--down from 90 minutes, not counting overtime and penalty kicks till dawn.)

Make all of these smaller, McFeely asserts, and the numbers on the scoreboard, by and large, will be larger.

“It opens the game up to more goals,” he says. “We’ve eliminated the offsides penalty, so play doesn’t bog down at midfield. It’s more of an attacking game and with a shorter field and shorter games, players can go all out all the time.”

Ideally, McFeely wanted to showcase speed soccer at the Scottish Festival as a 35-and-over event--”for players who are a wee bit tired, who have been doing more of that (McFeely chugs an imaginary beer) than that (he kicks an imaginary soccer ball).” But pioneering can be difficult work and McFeely could barely scrounge together enough players of any age to field four teams, so Saturday’s exhibition reluctantly developed into an all-comers affair.

Did speed soccer play in Costa Mesa?

Let’s say it has potential.

Fourteen minutes is not a long time--it took longer to park than to watch a game--so no one got bored. In 104 minutes of soccer--six 14-minute prelims and an expanded 20-minute final--15 goals were scored, which beat the standard 90-minute World Cup output by about 15 goals.

And something has to be said for a sport in which the most out-of-shape guy on the field can wind up the star. That happened to Jim McConnachie of Westchester, all 5 feet 9 and 195 pounds of him, who transformed himself into a roly-poly Pele, scoring four goals on the afternoon--three in a 4-1 triumph for Fubar United in the final.

“MVP! MVP!” shouted Fubar Coach Peter Glennon as McConnachie trudged off the field after his third goal and was handed a silver trophy--an icy can of Coors Light.

“I told you, ‘No alcohol,’ ” McConnachie joked as he eagerly accepted. This can and McConnachie, they’re old friends. After a few minutes and a few swigs, McConnachie was ordered back into the game. He laughed. “You can’t even enjoy a beer and play this game,” he said.

Socially and athletically, speed soccer bears a family resemblance to slo-pitch softball. When a reporter asked where Fubar United was based, someone pointed to an ice chest in the back of a sideline pickup truck. “Around that cooler.” Anyone can play and that’s the idea, McFeely says.

“I’m 41, I like to get my old knees going and kick it around for a while, but I can’t go 90 any more,” McFeely said. “With speed soccer, you can sweat a bit, you don’t have to pace yourself and your skills don’t totally deteriorate.”

McConnachie called it “a lot of fun. There’s no offsides and you’re constantly moving, so you get a lot of (scoring) opportunities. I usually play 11-a-side on Sunday and I’m always getting beaten up, but here you have room to move. It’s not difficult.”

Purists, however, were less moved. Martin Stringer, who grew up on soccer in England and now coaches it at Mater Dei High School, tried speed soccer Saturday and shrugged it off as “a novice thing. It’s just something to get people together for a fun tournament maybe once a year.”

Martin Smith, president of the Queens Park Football Club, the oldest soccer team in Scotland, watched awhile before his players took the field for an exhibition of the real thing. “It’s different, it’s different,” he said. He frowned at the field’s puny dimensions. “If you can play soccer, you should be able to play it on any size surface.”

McFeely is planning to stick with it, to schedule more events, to spread the word of soccer among Americans with the Cliff Notes version. World Cup ’94 is a mere three years off. Time is short.