world cup's not til next year in south africa. these are just qualifiers. but anyone beating spain is a bit of a deal.
Qualifiers are going on at the moment but this wasn't one of them, it's just a random cup (The Confederation's Cup) with teams like Italy, Brazil, New Zealand, Iraq, Spain etc... and the USA have made it through to the final against Brazil.
No, USA faces the winner of the Brazil vs. South Africa match tomorrow. Yeah, Brazil should win, but do not underestimate the home team advantage. This cup is all about the underdog, so don't count S.A. out!
so unbelievably frustrated right now, as I set the DVR to record this, saw that recording had started before I left for work, got home and recording wasn't there. Guess I'll have to settle for watching highlights and the final.
world cup's not til next year in south africa. these are just qualifiers. but anyone beating spain is a bit of a deal.
Qualifiers are going on at the moment but this wasn't one of them, it's just a random cup (The Confederation's Cup) with teams like Italy, Brazil, New Zealand, Iraq, Spain etc... and the USA have made it through to the final against Brazil.
No, USA faces the winner of the Brazil vs. South Africa match tomorrow. Yeah, Brazil should win, but do not underestimate the home team advantage. This cup is all about the underdog, so don't count S.A. out!
Yes, many congratulations on an outstanding result.
It is now to be hoped that some of you dudes (more usually attuned to Hand-Egg and Skate-broom) might visit us every so often in the nebulous EPL thread, where about 5 'pastey white folls' parley shite with a bored euro timezone Kiwi and a handful of your enlightemed countrymen such as jlee and DOR.
The co-opting of US sports commentary jargon into the world of soccerball is radical, sick and awesome.
When I saw the result this morning I assumed that it was some second rung Spanish team but a quick check of the team list confirms all stars were on show.
Lose 3-1 to Italy and beat Spain 2-0? It's a funny old game.
And Duder you're forgetting about our amazing victory in the U-21 the other night in front of a crowd which had to be at least 3,000 people. Onwards and upwards.
appropiate piece by Steven Wells, who I just read died of cancer on Tuesday.
Americans are soccer-savvy ... and that scares little Englanders
David Beckham is going to the LA Galaxy. Hurrah. Let's all laugh at American soccer. Again.
Modern Englishmen are in two minds about Americans playing proper football. Some think it only right the poor benighted heathens be gifted the game historian Eric Hobsbawn rightly described as an artform. But others fear it'll make Americans more like us and therefore much more difficult to despise.
I am firmly in the former camp. Public toilets, atheism, publicly funded radio and association football - these are all things of which no society can have too much. Witness the fact that soccer-playing America is massively liberal, loving, caring, socially conscious and nice. While soccer-hating America consists of increasingly isolated gangs of Bush-supporting, bible-bashing, gun-crazed, dungaree wearing, banjo-playing[/b], quasi-fascist chicken-lovers and their twelve fingered, pin-headed, cyclopic, drooling monster children.
Alas, Englishmen who live in desperate fear of an American soccer planet are legion. As the recent spate of stories about US businessmen buying British clubs and Goldenballs relocating to LA proved, there's no shortage of stuck up limey soccer snobs who still think it's frightfully funny the ghastly Yanks play the round ball game at all.
Like most prejudices, this hatred disguises fear. Recently a leading English soccer journalist told me he "really hopes football fails in America". Others are less blatant but they make their loathing plain through sarcasm, satire and snidery.
You know whom I'm talking about. Reader, I am about to piss on my chips. I will not only bite the hand that feeds me, I will take the arm off at the shoulder. For no one has mocked American soccer more consistently or with more vigour than the sneering, primly moustached, stiff-lipped cads of the Guardian Unlimited Sports desk.
It's always been thus. In the 1970s, when the star-studded New York Cosmos were filling stadiums during the first American soccer revolution, Roy of the Rovers found himself playing Stateside for the Pine City Pirates. Roy was appalled by the shallowness, ballyhoo and sheer incompetence of American soccer. "I thought I was going to learn something by coming to the States!" he moaned. "I didn't dream I'd have to teach them how to play the game!"
And who could forget the 2002 World Cup and Gary Linker reading from a typically and hilariously stoopid Yank match report: "Wolff procrastinates over a sideline handpass and is ref-charged for clock abuse" and "he top-bodies the sphere into the score-bag, and Mexico have a double-negative stat!"
Oh those pig-ignorant cack-gobbed Yank wankers! How we laughed. What more confirmation could we possibly need that these gibbering, thumb-fingered mouth-breathers will never understand the beautiful game?
Of course, it turned out Gaz was reading a marvellous Guardian Unlimited spoof. Hell, I laughed. And so did Lawrence Dallaglio when he repeated the quotes the next night on a different TV show. And so did the studio audience. Which is when the penny dropped. This isn't just how Brits think Americans perceive soccer - this is how Brits need to think Americans perceive soccer. And that, actually, is a little bit sad.
During that same World Cup, before the US v Germany game, a British TV crew stopped folks in Time Square and asked them (oh hilarity!) if they even knew a game was taking place (lol!!!!!! rotflmao!!!!!!!!!!). Unfortunately almost everyone said yes. One dude in a soccer shirt even invited the reporter to watch the game with him. "We thought there was apathy," muttered a deeply disappointed Gabby Logan back in the studio.
The rest you know. The "USA!" chants at Manchester United games. The MU Rowdies gags in the Fiver, The Guardian Unlimited design-a-new-hilariously-Americanized-MUFC-crest competition that was then ripped off by The Sun so the whole nation could join in the yanks-don't-get-football yukfest.
Then Bex signed for the LA Galaxy-and the whole sad circus started all over again.
Trouble is, the joke tells us nothing about America or American football (or "soccer" as those crazy, propeller beanie-wearing goofballs call it!!!!!!!!!!!!). And it tells us everything about us.
We - a substantial chunk of us, anyway - are desperately scared that association football will succeed in America. That the USA will become a footballing power. That the yanks will develop a version of the beautiful game as irresistible as jazz, rock'n'roll or the amazing American language (and unless you've checked the English/American phrase books handed out to GIs in 1942, you probably have no idea how much American you speak, limey).
Why are we scared? Because as a nation we have a desperate need to feel superior to the vibrant barbarian culture that's replaced us as top global ass-kicker.
Face it, feeling superior to Americans is about all we've got left. But the list of things we actually do better than the Yanks is slim and getting slimmer. Did you know that the bastards even brew decent beer these days?
So what have we got left to be smug about? Wensleydale cheese, Ricky Gervais, Theakston Old Peculier and Helen Mirren. And, oh yeah, football.
Sorry, the Yanks get it. Not all of them. Not even most of them. But enough of them. Even if Bex bombs. Even if the MLS collapses, American soccer isn't going away.
And Duder you're forgetting about our amazing victory in the U-21 the other night
Yeah, but like I said, I don't think the U21 is a good indicator of where Spain & England are really at. Spain's current crop of senior players are what you might call 'late-developers' (read: short guys). England is still with the mentality that values power and athleticism over technique... so I feel that at under 21 level, our team of large sprinters will out-muscle Spain's ball-players, but once Spain's squad has fully matured and they aren't so easy to knock off the ball, their possession tiki-taka business will make our lads look like idoits & folls chasing shadows.
In England, Lionel Messi & Iniesta would've been told to forget football unless they wanted to be mascots
But anyway, well done Team America, good luck against Brazil:
Doesn't bother me either, but I know some Canadiens that really REALLY like to think of themselves as a separate country. Makes 'em feel special, I guess.
Yeah we get the same with the rest of the British Isles - always griping about how they want to be treated like individuals etc etc. I don't blame Canada though, after all they are part of The Almighty Commonwealth.
I may be missing something but am I wrong in thinking that the only point of the commonwealth these days is that it lets us have an athletics competition without the US winning everything?
Doesn't bother me either, but I know some Canadiens that really REALLY like to think of themselves as a separate country. Makes 'em feel special, I guess.
That's why they have little Canadian flags on their backpacks I guess.
Comments
The US just beat Spain 2 to NIL[/b]
Did you see that coming? Sayin...
Woah.
"more game than a game cock"
my new location in 5....4.....3....2...........1
maybe if the bus carrying the Brazil team to the stadium got hijacked.
Cool. Wish England could say we've managed to beat Spain in the last decade.
It is now to be hoped that some of you dudes (more usually attuned to Hand-Egg and Skate-broom) might visit us every so often in the nebulous EPL thread, where about 5 'pastey white folls' parley shite with a bored euro timezone Kiwi and a handful of your enlightemed countrymen such as jlee and DOR.
The co-opting of US sports commentary jargon into the world of soccerball is radical, sick and awesome.
When I saw the result this morning I assumed that it was some second rung Spanish team but a quick check of the team list confirms all stars were on show.
Lose 3-1 to Italy and beat Spain 2-0? It's a funny old game.
And Duder you're forgetting about our amazing victory in the U-21 the other night in front of a crowd which had to be at least 3,000 people. Onwards and upwards.
Yeah, but like I said, I don't think the U21 is a good indicator of where Spain & England are really at. Spain's current crop of senior players are what you might call 'late-developers' (read: short guys). England is still with the mentality that values power and athleticism over technique... so I feel that at under 21 level, our team of large sprinters will out-muscle Spain's ball-players, but once Spain's squad has fully matured and they aren't so easy to knock off the ball, their possession tiki-taka business will make our lads look like idoits & folls chasing shadows.
In England, Lionel Messi & Iniesta would've been told to forget football unless they wanted to be mascots
But anyway, well done Team America, good luck against Brazil:
Corrected
Isn't DOR Canadien?
Doesn't bother me either, but I know some Canadiens that really REALLY like to think of themselves as a separate country. Makes 'em feel special, I guess.
I may be missing something but am I wrong in thinking that the only point of the commonwealth these days is that it lets us have an athletics competition without the US winning everything?
Why, did we win something?
Old habits die hard. Fixed.
That's why they have little Canadian flags on their backpacks I guess.
woo hoo!