Fat Eck’s World Cup Build-Up (part 4: Ame-e-e-e-ricaaa - F**CK, YEAH!!!)

USA? Don’t have a lot of time for that George Bush, for all that right-wing fundamentalism and for a few other zillion political aspects of the home of the brave and the land of the free. Culturally, however, we have Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pollock, and, most importantly, The Fonz. But, football wise, how can the most powerful nation on earth deserve our admiration for being the “pluckiest”?

Well, with this summer’s feast of footie in mind, let me explain …

For a nation of Scotland’s size, it’s an achievement to qualify for the finals of a major tournament. This has been the SFA mantra for decades, lest we Scots soccer fans actually start to rail against our national team’s continual failure to do anything at a major tournament, far less qualify. But, if it’s all about population size, why have China not won every World Cup ever played? Football doesn’t work like that. It’s all about infrastructure, all about the depth of feeling for the game in any one country actually being allowed to effect the development of that nation’s footballing ability.

Argentina and Brazil have never been two of the world’s most democratic, stable or economically sound nations, but they’re veritable gods of planet football. Switzerland is the most fiscally sound country on earth yet has never done anything THAT noteworthy in football other than hosting everyone else’s big games. Football is no respecter of population size, land-mass, Gross National Product, military might or any anthropological demographic. Football’s the great leveller. Football is all about how much the country wants it. This is why Uruguay, with a population even smaller than Scotland’s, has won two World Cups and this is why the national side of the USA - everyone’s favourite global superpower - has become one of soccer’s most amazing over-achievers.

The states sent what was virtually a B team to Hampden a few months back for a friendly. They outplayed the hosts for long periods and while Walter Smith viewed the 1-1 draw as a good get-together before the qualifying for the 2008 European Championships, visiting boss, the hugely affable Bruce Arena, saw it as a good workout for his squad players before Germany 2006. This year’s is the fifth straight World Cup finals in which the USA will compete. Scotland might have managed a similair feat without having hosted the tournament as the States did in 1994 but Scotland made no progress between 1974 and 1990. The USA on the other hand have gone from potential whipping boys at Italia 90 to dark-horses to win Gemany 2006 outright. Given the context in which it has been achieved, this is a feat which ranks with anything Wimbledon did in the FA Cup and Pramiership and far outweighs anything the likes of Chievo, Villarreal, Ajaccio or Mainz have managed in the other big four leagues.

Okay, yes - the USA’s female footballers have been a superpower for years. They’ve won the olympics, the women’s world cup, the lot. Middle-class American kiddies, of both genders, seem to love playing the game a soon as they stop toddling. We’re always told that soccer is the number one participation sport in the States. Well, fishing is the number one participation sport in Britain and I don’t recall watching too many European Angling Champions League finals on ITV or Sky. The numbers taking part is important but so is the numbers watching. When those legendary “soccer moms” get their youngsters home from practise, they’re not switching on to ESPN and watching the big live FA Cup or Copa Libertadores tie. They’re not even switching onto the channel which shows the USA playing in a World Cup qualifier or Chicago Fire facing Kansas City Wizards in the Major Soccer League. The middle-class and most working-class Amercians are only interested in throwing dollars, TV and otherwise at Gridiron, Basketball, Baseball and Ice Hockey.

The USA’s most famous victory remains their 1-0 defeat of England at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil. Haiti-born Larry Gaetjens scored the goal in Belo Horizonte which rocked the footballing world - but when the American squad arrived back home there was not one fan to greet them at the airport. The big four sports had afforded their monumental triumph absolutely no media coverage. When Scotland merely qualified for the 1978 fnals in Argentina we lined the road from Glasgow to Ayrshire to cheer the team bus from Hampden all the way to Prestwick airport and their flight to South America. When the US team returned from the last World Cup finals, having been a whisker away from making the semis, their big reward was appearing on the David Letterman show, where Landon Donovan and Claudio Reyna were made to kick a football from the roof of one building in Times Square New York to another, so as to give the Average Joe some sort of context in which he could relate to soccer.

Against this lack of enthusism for the male version of the game, the US Soccer Federation would be up against it at the best of times. Yet, as well as having no discernable support back home, the USA team find themselves becoming everyone’s derby whenever they play away. In the 1998 World Cup finals in France, the USA faced Iran - memories of the hostage crisis two decades earlier did not help concentrate minds on the game. Football attracts militant crowds and with America’s place in world politics always controverial, left-wing fans love to hate them. At Hampden, in the aforementioned friendly, even some Scotland fans booed through the Star Spangled Banner.

Even the right-wing reactionary - the other traditional extreme which football attracts, has problems with the USA’s threat to the traditions of the game. The very act of “franchising” the World Cup to the USA was seen by many as the ultimate mercenary selling-out of football’s soul by FIFA. In a crude attempt to get the mighty US Dollar into the beautiful game, the world’s governing body had hired out our crown jewel. The recent Budweiser advertising campaigns weren’t as hilarious as they’d have liked to be but they were certainly on-the-money when appeasing the fears most non-American football fans harbour about the potential US effect on our religion: No matter that the US world cup was the best attended of the modern era and that the US public supported it far more than the “calcio-crazy” Italian public backed Italia 90 or the “real fans” English population attended Euro 96 - all the we think of when we see the US national team doing well is the potential for a game of four quarters, widened goalmouths, two footballs on the pitch, more cheerleaders than offside traps and more padding all round

The politics of both sport and global affairs, however, coincided in the last World Cup to show just how brave those eleven men wearing the USA badge have become. Facing the hosts is always difficult but, in Daegu on 10th June 2002, the USA must have felt as if they were playing against the entire poulation of South Korea. 60,000 hysterical home fans rejoiced as potential Jambo, Ahn Jung-Hwan scored and then led his team-mates in an “ice-skater” celebration which alluded to a previous controversial defeat for a Korean girl against America’s Tonya Harding in a sport which we wouldn’t think has a big crossover football following [NOT TRUE!!! IT WAS A BLOKE SKATER - SEE THE THREAD BELOW, ED]. See, countries tend to remember when the USA have got one over them, in any context. Yet this goal was only a late equaliser after the States had played with heroic application and concentration amidst such hostility. Brad Friedel saved a penalty and pulled off more than one brilliant stop either side of that tone-setting moment. As the creators of South Park have recently shown in puppet-form, Team America have learned to be brilliantly insensitive to the hopes of other nations.

At Japan and South Korea, the USA had already made their intentions known with a brilliant 3-2 win over much-fancied Portugal in their opening group match. Progress to the knock-out stages saw them win yet another derby as they ousted Mexico by two goals to nil. Mexico’s captain was dismissed near the end for a vicious kick AND head-butt on Cobi Jones and this deepened the animosity felt on both sides. Before a 2004 Olympics qualifying game between the nations, Landon Donovan urinated on the Mexican training pitch and after a group-winning US victory over their southern neighbours, in the CONCACAF qualifiers for Germany 2006, Donovan declared “They suck. I’m so happy. Hopefully that will shut them up for the next three or four years”! Hardly “have a nice day”! It’s clear the USA players aren’t just becoming hardened to the rancour their country attracts but may actually be using it as a weapon.

Such “old world” footballing attitudes are seeping into the US team because so many of them now play in traditional soccer hotbeds. Claudio Reyna, the team captain, as well as being a great performer in his time at Ibrox, has also worn the armband at Manchester City and Bayer Leverkusen. Serial genuflector, Brian McBride - scorer of a goal for every three of his 90 caps - was central to Fulham’s Premiership survival. DaMarcus Beasley, easily the best player on the pitch at Hampden that day against Scotland, was a minute away from the Champions League final with PSV Eindhoven last year. The MSL is another failing attempt at establishing a coherent, effective domestic league in the states and Bruce Arena actively encourages his players to get out of their country and learn their trade in nations where soccer is king. In the USA, despite what Europeans would consider bucket-loads of money being thrown at it, it’s very much a pauper.

Ironically, the second-oldest football club in the world was founded in the USA. Before Queens Park or Notts County - but after Sheffield FC - there was the Oneida Football Club of Boston, founded in 1862. Much like William Web Ellis at Rugby School, the students of the famous Harvard University were in the midst of what would be a two-legged soccer match against McGill University of Montreal in 1874 when they decided to start handling the ball and a different code took root at this trend-setting Ivy League establishment. Ever since that pivotal moment, despite the USA and Canada contesting the first association football international to take place outside the British isles, in 1885, despite a USA team full of ex-pat Scotsmen reaching the semi-finals of the first world Cup in Uruguay in 1930 and despite the arrival of Pele, Best, Cruyff and Beckenbauer for the ill-fated North American soccer League of 1968-1984, soccer in the states has bedded itself in only at college and metroplitan ethnic population levels.

But remarkably all this seems to have done to the USA’s national eleven is make them stronger. At Italia 90 they lost all three of their group games, including a 5-1 thrashing by Czechokoslovakia. In 1994 they became the first host nation not to make it to the quarter-finals but they did make it out of their group and they only lost their second round match by one-goal to the eventual winners, Brazil. At France 98 the States again lost all thee games but again they were playing in a different continent and, this time, their heaviest defeat was 2-0. The 2002 World Cup saw some dodgy decisions by one Hugh Dallas (maybe Shug was trying too hard to prove his impartiality - “I’m not from Texas, you know!”) and some brilliant saves by one Oliver Kahn the only things which allowed Michael Ballack’s goal to remain the winner for Germany in the Ulsan quarter-final.

After that game, player of the tournament Kahn commented on how the fitness of the USA side had amazed even the meticulous Germans, especially given that the Americans had played their bruising second-round game against Mexico two days after the Germans tame win over Paraguay. This summer, in Germany itself, despite being in one of the finals’ two “Groups of Death”, it’d be foolish of anyone to underestimate the all-round toughness of the confirmed Crazy Gang of international football. Uncle Sam is ready to serve up plenty of mom’s humble apple pie.