When I was 6, I played in my first soccer game. I was in the first grade. Because, as throughout all of my childhood, I was very tall for my age, our teacher, a portly, tough-love kind of lady, put me in goal. Thanks to my virulently anti-soccer mother (she'd been scarred by her father's obsession with the game), I lacked even the most basic understanding of the game, unlike most of my Dutch classmates. But I wanted badly to get in a kick of the ball. It looked like good fun. So I decided the best way to accomplish this was to let the ball roll into that odd contraption behind me so that I could pick the ball up and give it a good hoof. But just as I readied myself to pick it up, someone snatched the ball away from me. He told me about "having to start over from the middle line" after a "goal."

It was the first time a soccer ball broke my heart.

I've since made strides in my knowledge of the game -- although some of my readers would protest this -- but the point stands: 6-year-olds have only a basic understand of soccer. At best.

So what about 8-month-olds?

Cristiano Ronaldo, in another splendidly narcissistic interview with Madrid sporting daily Marca, claims that his on-field performance affects the sleeping pattern of his son, who is not yet a full soccer season old.

Recalling a recent game he had played, Ronaldo boasted that, "While we were playing, he wouldn't stop crying and he didn't want to go to sleep until I had scored. After I scored, he fell asleep within five minutes."

Sounds like Ronaldo, at 25, understands babies about as well as I understood soccer when I was 6.