When I was five years old, my father walked into my room one evening and gave me a choice, baseball or football. I chose football and that was that. I was too small to play American football so football suited me better. There were only a handful of teams back then and the skills of the players left something to be desired. I spent summers at training camps on university campuses to learn more and improve my skills. By the time I was a teenager, I was trying out for one of the two local teams because that was all that was available at the time. Now, on any given Saturday, you can find tons of American kids and teenagers making long trips and spending lots of time playing football. I talked to one of my best friends back home recently and we discussed how much we were looking forward to this World Cup. For us, this year’s Cup has more significance to us because the guys on the US team are our age. They grew up playing in the environment we did, without too much to go on and trying to make yourself better. The kids who played football back then weren’t the cool kids at school; we were kind of odd because we played a game no one else really understood, nor wanted to understand.
Every four years, many Americans packed into bars to watch our team let the nation down or be cheated by the Germans in 2002 and they validated the thinking that basketball, American football, and baseball are the only sports worth caring about in the US and to some extent, they had a valid point. It’s hard to continually vouch for a sport and a team that is only good at failing. I know for many, the Confederations Cup wasn’t that big of a deal but for many Americans, it was. It started out in the usual fashion, the American team being outclassed by the likes of Italy and Brazil. It seemed the Cup was over for us before it even started but then the Italians were man handled by Brazil and we put on a resurgent show against Egypt, good enough to put us through to the semi-finals to take on world number one Spain. I’ve heard many excuses about how the Confederations Cup means nothing, and that’s fine, but you can’t deny that Spain fielded its best starting eleven and we beat them. For many people, it was a wake up call back home. Finally, the American football team is worth watching. A few days later we lost the final to Brazil in a heartbreaker, but the first half showed more promise than we’ve ever seen.
So for me, this game with England can bring some validation to a country that is still written off by many as not being a worthy football opponent. I can’t argue with that logic, our track record is terrible, especially in big competitions. But now we have a team full of players who have grown up playing football and most of them have careers in Europe, some on some really good teams. So how can I not be excited about this year’s World Cup and a game against England? This is our chance to prove to the world that we can play, and we can beat big teams. For me, England is a good team but it’s a team full of many egos and personalities. I believe Capello has done a good job at trying to create some cohesion and a sense of togetherness and if he has succeeded, we will have a very tough road to beating them. I’ll wrap up this entry with one final thought. One of my English friends tells me all the time that the English media loves when the national team fails and to that I say, keep up the good work to all the English media outlets.
- El Guiri
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