Peter King of Sports Illustrated is taking a pounding for this tweet yesterday. He followed it up with this column. The analogy is clunky, the game wasn’t that vital, and why drag “small African country” into it? (The NY Post said the referee was “a financial auditor for the notoriously corrupt Malian government.” Ha!) Read some King reaction here; the harshest criticism for King (and Joe Posnanski) can be found after the jump:

“The World Cup is pain, princess. Which is why I’m delighted to see people like Joe Posnanski or Peter King as just the first of the many insufferable sports buffoons we’re going to be hearing from in the next few days, the first of many American soccer idiots to demonstrate that we‘ve finally arrived. I mean that: no real soccer nation can be complete without jabbering idiots believing the world is against them because they lost and the refs are totally in the bag for the Slovenians, cause you know the Slovenes, right?”

It’s a doozy of a blog post. We recommend reading it. King apologized today.

Our only issue with the referee’s call – can we get some clarity? If the foul was on Maurice Edu – which is what FIFA claims – what was the foul? Pushing? Holding? Illegal contact of some sort? Myriad replays show no foul on any American in the box; certainly not Edu. We’d just love some closure. Why isn’t FIFA coming to the defense of its referee and clearing up matters?