One of the things that’s special about playing England in soccer is that you get to play a very good team whose press you can actually understand. In this particularly instance, a sans Landon Donovan U.S. team got easily handled 2-0 in New Wembley. In truth the game wasn’t as close as that scoreline. As a result, the performance of the U.S. team did not exactly earn rave reviews from across the pond. Now granted the English press these days tend to throw compliments around like manhole covers to the English team, so they had to come up with a reason to explain away an otherwise impressive performance from them. It’s tough to say though that they’re not exactly wrong.
My personal impression is that U.S. Soccer is essentially satisfied with where it is in the grand scheme of things: the folks in charge make a comfortable living doing what they do and have no real impetus to make wholesale changes even if they knew where to start.
The U.S. plays Spain in seven days, and Spain is by most accounts a better team than England. On Big Soccer, there’s a thread asking about what to do about this game. I’m at a loss but with my baseball background I’m guessing maybe we can break out the lallygaggers speech:
1 response so far ↓
1 JE // Jul 6, 2008 at 6:45 pm
We did not win the War of 1812. British soldiers occupied Washington and burned down The White House and Capitol. Our attempted invasion of Canada was a failure. Andrew Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans AFTER a peace treaty was signed. Call it a draw if you must, but we were certainly not the victors.
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