When we were eliminated by Ghana in 2006, I remember former
ESPN personality and (at that time) MSNBC liberal demagogue Keith Olbermann
joking that the US could go back to "not caring about soccer for the next
four years." Harsh, and not what anyone involved with US soccer wanted to
hear. But it was probably true. Major League Soccer remains a nonfactor in TV
ratings; American viewership of European football leagues is limited to ex
patriots and a few enthusiasts. Ditto
for the 2010 edition.
Maybe
this time is different. For sure, the
interest in our national team seemed to be at the highest which I can remember
in my lifetime. Perhaps our sense of
public interest was inflated by social media, which really had not come into
its own by 2010. Maybe the perception
was fueled by ESPN's aggressive marketing of the US's games in order to drive
up overall World Cup ratings. Maybe the
next few years will see nothing change in regards to American interest in
soccer. But for a few weeks at least it
felt real.
Which
makes the way it all ended even sadder. In
a lot of ways it was a very American way to lose a soccer game. We saw one man, Tim Howard, raise his game to
an almost unfathomable level. We love
that kind of storyline in our sports. We
love watching the one basketball player take control and just pour in shots,
singlehandedly keeping his team afloat. We
love the quarterback who puts the team on his back when the defense just can't
seem to get it done. We loved watching
Tim Howard take one Belgium virtually by himself. It reinforces our American love of the
individual, the one man who can rise above and in turn elevate his peers. It seemed almost in rebellion to many
Americans' (I'm looking at you Anne Coulter) wrongheaded notion of soccer as a
sport which devalued the individual.
Of
course, all team sports remain team sports, no matter how good one man plays. Tim Howard was able to make up for a slow and
overmatched defense, at least for a while, but not for the disorganized and
sloppy midfield and forwards. If you
can't score goals, you can't win games. As
a team, Belgium had us on our heels and severely outplayed us for most of the
match. If not for Howard, we might very
well have lost 5-0. But for one moment,
it looked like we were going to steal it.
That's one more thing we like in American sports: the clearly inferior
team taking one from the greater. Even
after a century as one of the two or three most powerful countries on Earth, we
still hold a fondness for the time when we were an upstart rebel colony that
managed to land a sucker punch on then-superpower Great Britain, and that
fondness mainly manifests itself in sports.
If Chris Wondolowski doesn't shank an open shot on goal in stoppage
time, then I'm writing an entirely different article. Belgium deserved to win, but for that one
second, we deserved to win in a messed up kind of way. We totally should've won that game.
I'll
still watch the rest of the World Cup.
I'll enjoy it. But it won't be
the same. It certainly won't be the same
for ESPN's domestic ratings, much to their dislike. Now we can treat ourselves to Germany trying
to overcome the flu to beat France, Argentina and Belgium doing nothing for 80
minutes before one of them decides to get it together and win the game, and
Brazil trying to block out the knowledge that losing will lead to their deaths
by mob and the likely dissolution of their government. But in the end it's
going to be a punchout between the major European and South American football
powers, unless Costa Rica can avoid the pitfalls of Arjen Robben falling over
in the penalty box.. The US has the
potential to be the biggest game changer in the World Cup. All it takes is one North American, African,
or Asian side to win, and the floodgates might just open for all others. Over the last four cups, the US has been the
closest relatively speaking. We've got
the resources and population to have staying power. We even have a German coach. I don't know what else we need, but we're
gonna need to wait at least another four years to find out.
No comments:
Post a Comment