The weekend’s television menu included the Reading vs. Portsmouth game from England’s Premier League. Not a pretty sight. A turgid, labored affair that slouched to a fully forgettable 0–0 tie.

Things were no better up in Wigan, where the locals hosted Fulham in another EPL 0–0 fiasco, described in press reports as “dire — a game devoid of any imagination.”

You don’t have to look too closely to find reasons for the drabness of the games. Reading and Portsmouth are teams fixed firmly in mid-standings — with eight games remaining, they have no chance of winning the league, nor are they in any danger of falling low enough to be relegated. A place in European competition next year (in the UEFA cup) beckons if they can hold their positions. A 0–0 tie preserves that possibility for both teams.

Fulham and Wigan have a lot to play for. Both are near the bottom of the table, struggling desperately to avoid ending up as one of the bottom three clubs that will be relegated to the lower championship division. This is another recipe for poor soccer — for play sometimes described as survival soccer. An ugly game with the accent heavily on defense. A 0–0 tie — however poor the soccer — is a good result.

Caution is the watchword in such games, and soccer played without the challenge of taking risks is bound to be a wretched spectacle.

Fortunately for viewers this weekend, there was an alternative to the EPL’s no-frills diet. It came from Ecuador, where the South American championship for boys’ under-17 national teams is being played. Not for the first time, soccer’s pro game comes off second best when set alongside its youth version.

While the EPL games featured grim-faced players for whom the games seemed to be purgatory, the images from Ecuador featured fresh-faced youngsters with glowing, enthusiastic eyes and luminous smiles. You don’t look like that unless you are enjoying yourself, and these boys were clearly having fun.

That is when soccer flourishes and gets the chance to flaunt its gaudy peacock’s tail of attractions — when it looks like a game to be played, not work to be ground out.

The thing that immediately distinguishes the boys’ game is that they have no inhibitions at all about employing what is soccer’s most enjoyable and risky skill: dribbling. All 10 of South America’s countries were represented in Ecuador, and all 10 of them, from lowly Venezuela and Bolivia up to the dominant powers, Argentina and Brazil, featured an attractive style of play in which attacking soccer was the norm, with skilled dribbling at the heart of the action.

That fact is a damning indictment of the path that pro soccer is following, in which dribbling — “taking people on” as it is frequently called — is increasingly frowned upon. In its early incarnation in the 19th century, soccer was known as “the dribbling game.” It would be hard to come up with a less appropriate description of today’s EPL.

Freddy Adu, the putative whizkid of American soccer, recently gave us some wonderful 17-year-old wisdom on this topic: “Coaches take the fun out of the game for kids. They do. They coach them to play one touch, two touch. It takes the fun out of it. … I have to enjoy myself, I have to play with a smile on my face, I like to do moves, I like to take people on. I just like to express myself. I can’t play one- or two-touch every time because I’m not a robot and I didn’t grow up playing that way.”

But the transition from youth to pro soccer takes a heavy toll on things like fun, enjoyment, and self-expression. Dribbling is being inexorably squeezed out of the modern game by the brutality that defenders are allowed to get away with, even in Brazil. Four years back Robinho (now with Real Madrid) was a promising 18-year-old learning the pro ropes with Brazil’s Santos club. He was warned that he was overdoing his dribbling fakes and that if he continued to embarrass defenders he risked having his leg broken.

Actually, it sounded more like a threat than a warning and was a clear sign of how soccer’s traditional values were being stood on their head. Robinho, trying to practice the sport’s most exciting skill, was accused by an opponent of “anti-soccer.”

Referees are supposed to protect skillful players from the thuggery of bewildered defenders, but their record in this regard is at best spotty.

No surprise, then, that dribblers are rare in today’s game. Manchester has one in the Portuguese winger Cristiano Ronaldo, but his brilliant runs are frequently cut short when he is chopped down by cynical tackles. Sympathy for Ronaldo, then? Not so — Ronaldo now has the reputation in England of being a diver, of falling down at the mere suggestion of contact.

Incredibly, the International Football Association Board, the body that sets the sport’s rules, has shown much more interest in punishing the divers than in clamping down on the violent and dangerous tackling that has largely caused the problem.

But if you want to see the game as it can look with dribbling as an integral part, take a look at the boys’ games from South America. Watch Brazil’s Lula on his breathtaking runs, Peru’s Reimond Manco as he baffles opponents with his subtlety and speed, and Argentina’s Eduardo Salvio as he maneuvers the ball past the toughest of tackles. Maybe it’s unfair to single out these players, because virtually all of the players, including defenders, seem capable of turning on the dribbling style.

Sadly, we know (from statistical archives) that very few of these boys will go on to star at the pro level. That is a tragedy. But it is accompanied by a miracle: that the buoyancy and beauty of the boys’ game is keeping the game’s original spirit alive, in defiance of the coarser demands of the pro game.

pgardner@nysun.com