I'm impulsively driven to defend it as the same criticisms are levelled against baseball which I've really started to love over the last three or four years.
out of interest, have you been to a baseball game?
I've been to 2. I enjoyed the first one immensely, but I think moreso because it was very sociable. I hated the second one. In both games I can recall very little of what actually happened. After the first game (San Francisco Giants circa 1998) I attempted to follow it a bit. It was difficult enough to do so from here with the high volume of games. American Football uses the phrase 'America's Game' but it always struck me that its baseball moreso. I'd liken it to hurling here, in terms of its place in national culture.