I don't see how soccer could be described as CaW - since your team doesn't have the option of, say, ambushing the opposing team at Hooters the night before and beating the stuffing out of them. Or hiring fans in the stadium to take potshots at the goalie.
What I'm getting at is that the difference between these two types of games is not really about the associated fiction of the game moves. That's a red herring I think. It's about how transparent the consequences are for the decisions players make.
One can imagine Combat-as-Sport
about ambushing the other team and hiring fans to take potshots. This is what refluffing powers and/or using pg 42 in 4e is like. You can describe your move however you like, but it's still Combat-as-Sport because you know what the consequences are going to be. There's no "going with your gut" involved.
A game with less predictable consequences tends to snowball into dramatic showdowns, like scoring chances in soccer, showdowns in poker, or save-or-dies in D&D. Some people really like this, and some people deride this as 20 minutes of fun in 4 hours, which I can understand. (I think you can fine-tune things to maybe 10 minutes of fun every hour, but you're still going to have the same basic rollercoaster dynamic).
Coming up with crazy schemes (eg [MENTION=55680]Daztur[/MENTION]'s example from the original thread with the bees) is definitely fun when it works, but not so much when your plan tumbles like a house of cards because of something you didn't expect. Whether or not you like this depends on whether the fun outweighs the frustration.
I think a great test for whether or not one would like classic D&D is how they feel about poker (I would say soccer but the poor physical fitness of the typical gamer is going to be a massive confounding factor there). Classic D&D is really a lot like talky fantasy poker. It's a gambling game where you nudge the odds in your favor by convincing other people to imagine things the way you're imagining them. I find this very entertaining (especially as DM) but I don't think it's a "perfect" game; I can understand not liking it.
As for how this ties into Interesting Decisions vs. Wish Fulfilment, I do think there is a connection. In CaS game you can play in more of a Wish Fulfillment mindset because you're not risking as much at each decision. You can take plays off to goof around, as it were. In a CaW there's a lot more pressure to be in win-at-all-costs mode all the time, because you don't want to be the person who drops the ball when it turns out that that decision was actually extremely important.
