The Finesse of Soccer Versus the Roughness of Football

It was my first day in school. I was very nervous and shy as I entered my first class. I could see none of them were Asian or Indonesian. They were all Australian instead. Contrary to what I thought, they were all very friendly. They started to talk about my favorite sport, so I told them that I liked football and then asked them whether they played football or not. Later I was asked to play football with them, but I was startled to discover that my football was different from theirs. What I meant by football was soccer and what they meant was Australian football. After one my Australian friend explained the differences between soccer and football, I started to realize that football and soccer are different in tactics, rules and also styles.

The most significant difference between soccer and football is the tactics. Formations are the most essential part of a tactic in almost every sport. There are lots of different formations that are usually used in every sport. In soccer, team formations are really applied in the game. We often can see a soccer team which plays with a very neat and tidy formation will look more unite as a team. Another important part of the tactic is the team instruction. Usually, a good manager will give instructions to players on, for example, what kind of passing the player should do and a good player will follow the instruction. Types of passing are also really important in a soccer game. There are three types of passing: direct passing, short passing, and long passing. However, a good soccer team usually uses a mixture of them. Moreover, defending is also a key tactic for the game. There are lots of different shapes of defending, for example, man mark, zonal (players defend their own territory), and straight line. Offside traps usually apply in a straight line defending. Thus, it makes straight line defending really strong but highly risky. Unlike soccer, in football a win is largely determined by the skills of the players in a team, not by the team formation. There were also differences in other fields of tactics between soccer and football. In contrast to short passes in soccer, long passes is more likely used in football. Whereas there is not much different in team instruction, types of defending are totally different between soccer and football. "Man mark" or "Man to Man" is always used in a football game.