To the editor:

When I hear people complain about soccer being boring, I remember the time my parents went to a Royals-Cardinals game in St. Louis with Buddy and Eileen Hanna. They got into traffic and arrived at the stadium in the bottom of the fourth. Eileen was a little upset about being late until she looked at the scoreboard and saw the game was tied at zero apiece. She said, “Oh, good! We haven’t missed anything!”

Eileen may not have missed anything, but a true baseball fan would have missed pitching, hitting, base-running, strikeouts, balks, fielding, anger, happiness, bad calls, errors, broken bats and a lot of other things.

True soccer fans see lots of things in scoreless games, too. Footwork, bad long and short passes, good and bad long passes, pocket picking, offsides that were, offsides that were not, good and bad goal keeping, stupid plays, good-looking women, athleticism, bad calls, and even head blows to the solar plexus.

Soccer is not boring.

Ben H. Barteldes,

Lawrence