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USA Plays Italy to a 1-1 Draw

Man, we were lucky to get away with that one.

I know nothing about soccer. So it was with some surprise that I found myself watching the USA vs. Italy today. However, it was a good match – the USA played EXTREMELY well compared to their effort before, and certainly rose to the challenge that faced us in this game.

The referees were much too eager to bring out the cards in this one. Very quickly in the second half, the US found themselves going from one man up to one man down thanks to two very quick uses of the red card (well, Eddie Pope was a quick use of a second yellow card). Playing almost the entire second half one man down, we were extremely fortunate to keep the Italians from scoring – no team with 9 men has ever scored in World Cup history, and we didn’t buck that trend. But the fact that we didn’t let Italy score either was an amazing effort on defense by our side.

In order to advance, the USA needs to beat Ghana (which may be tougher than it looks) and also needs to root for Italy when they play the Czechs. That would put Italy up on top with 7 points, the USA in second with 4, and the other two teams would have 3. We can’t tie with our current horrid goal differential, as we will probably lose that without scoring a huge number of goals against Ghana.

We have to wait until Thursday to discover our World Cup fate.

 

Ghana beats Czechs 2-0 in World Cup

The United States team got some help from an unlikely source, as Ghana stunned the Czech Republic in World Cup play.

Photo Ghana Beats Czech Republic World Cup Group E soccer match between Czech Republic and Ghana, at the Cologne stadium, Germany, Saturday, June 17, 2006. Ghana won 2-0. The other teams in Group E are Italy and the United States. (AP Photo/Murad Sezer) Ghana pulled off the biggest upset of this World Cup and might have helped the United States along the way. The first win for Africa in this tournament was a stunner, 2-0 over the same Czech Republic team that routed the Americans in their opener. Asamoah Gyan scored in the second minute Saturday and the Ghanians peppered star goalkeeper Petr Cech before getting the clincher in the 82nd.

With the victory, Ghana assured that the United States would not be eliminated from contention even with a loss later Saturday against Italy. A U.S. win would put all four teams even at three points in Group E.

Quite bizarre.

OTB

 

Monks face World Cup defrocking

From Reuters

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) – Phnom Penh patriarch Non Nget has told Cambodia’s 40,000 Buddhist monks to remain passive while watching World Cup football games or be defrocked.

Non Nget said on Monday monks should not watch the games in public, cheer or bet on matches as such actions were against Buddhism.

“It is very difficult to ban them because new technology means the games can be aired live and seen everywhere,” he said. “They may watch, but must be calm.”

“But if they make noise or cheer as they watch, they will lose their monkhoods,” Non Nget told Reuters.

Non Nget seems to have forgotten Buddhist monks are people too. Isn’t the world just full of nuts?

 

USA Serious Contenders for 2006 World Cup

For the first time in decades, Team USA enters a World Cup competition with a legitimate chance to go deep.

In his polo shirt, pleated pants and loafers, Bruce Arena might have been an executive exhorting the troops on a corporate retreat. Instead, he was pacing the tiny locker room at the SAS Soccer Park in Cary, N.C. On this April night, the United States men’s national team would play a friendly against Jamaica, its last match before Arena, the coach, named his 23-man roster for the World Cup this month in Germany. The dressing area bore the reek of men huddled in a cramped space, the players lightly sweating after warm-ups and desperate to catch the boss’s eye, to win his approval in this final audition.

Rhythmic clapping began reverberating off the cement walls. “Let’s go, boys,” someone shouted, then “Come on, boys,” and Arena stepped into the middle of the shouts and the perspiring hopefulness and the discarded warm-up shirts. He did not yell or embrace a football coach’s us-against-the-world paranoia; rather, he spoke with the calm assurance of a coach whose team is ranked No. 5 in the world, a team that could have — should have — reached the semifinals of the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan but lost, 1-0, to Germany after a grand, improbable advance to the tournament’s quarterfinals.

“When we’re in possession early in the game, let’s open up the play,” Arena, who is 54, told his players before they left to take the field. “We want to pressure them early. Make sure we’re talking. Be smart. Let’s not give away stupid fouls in the defensive third of the field. Be prepared to make adjustments. Let’s be aggressive, let’s attack them.” Arena told his players to exert themselves all night in front of the goal. “Pressure,” he continued. “We’re looking to be very aggressive. Our outside backs must join in attack. Our midfielders, figure out where you need to move to be dangerous.”

These plans for the match went awry when Jamaica scored in the fourth minute and then turtled into a defensive shell. Eventually the game ended in a 1-1 draw. But Arena’s pregame speech serves as a useful blueprint for how he expects the United States to perform in the first round of the World Cup against the Czech Republic (June 12), Italy (June 17) and Ghana (June 22): by applying defensive pressure, counterattacking and playing aggressively; by relying on speed, fitness, athleticism, competitiveness, teamwork and intelligence; and by drawing on the professionalism that results from having a domestic league, Major League Soccer, reach its second decade and from having an increasing number of American players gain experience at European clubs.

The glue binding all these qualities together is the perseverance and determination that Alex Ferguson, the coach of Manchester United, in England, has called “that American thing.” It’s a method of commitment that Jürgen Klinsmann, Germany’s national-team coach, told me is born of optimism and confidence, of “how to deal with people, how to look at things, how to believe in yourself, how to focus on things and also to take risks, to say, ‘Let’s go for it.’”

In late March, the day before the United States played an exhibition against Germany in Dortmund, Arena was asked at a packed news conference whether, as a sort of guru, other coaches come to him for advice. Implied in the question was Arena’s résumé: five National Collegiate Athletic Association titles at the University of Virginia, two M.L.S. titles with D.C. United, a record 69 victories with the American national team and the quarterfinal appearance in the 2002 World Cup. Among the 32 countries participating in the 2006 World Cup, Arena’s seven-plus-year tenure as a national-team coach is unmatched.

Still, Arena smiled and parried the question like a goalkeeper punching away a free kick. “I don’t think there are too many coaches in Europe who are looking at me and are very impressed, believe me,” he said.

Indeed, no one considers the United States a top-five team. The ranking, determined by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, is inflated by American dominance in the mediocre North American, Central American and Caribbean region. As Arena notes, American names are unfailingly absent from FIFA’s listing of the top international players. M.L.S. is a middling league, and with the exception of the midfielder DaMarcus Beasley, who is at PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands, the European-based Americans are not playing regularly with the continent’s biggest teams or forging their skills in the furnace of soccer’s premier club competition, the season-long Champions League tournament.

But don’t be fooled by Arena’s answer. He is supremely confident in his abilities. And he has done a remarkable job elevating the stature of the United States in international soccer. Partly this is because of his strategic and tactical skills in putting the right people on the field in the right place. At the 2002 World Cup, for example, he took a chance on the callow Beasley and Landon Donovan, when both were 20; he put Brad Friedel in goal instead of the equally experienced Kasey Keller; he started a less-than-fit Clint Mathis against South Korea and coaxed a goal from him that produced a draw; and he switched to a somewhat unfamiliar alignment with three defenders on the back line for a second-round victory over Mexico.

I don’t know that soccer can become much more than a niche spectator sport in the U.S., even though it has become a major participant sport for our youth. It may just be too low scoring for our tastes. Certainly, though, making a legitimate push at the world championship would help.

 
 


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