Thoughts on Week One

The refs have been okay. Surprisingly so. After the debacle of 2002, when refs single-handedly catapulted the Koreans to the semis (ciao Italia, adios Espana), expectations were low for '06. The only individuals who can make more of an impact during this tourney than Ronaldinho are the guys in the black & white stripes, er, the yellow & gray adidas shirts. And after what we've seen in Italy (What? Corruption in Italy! No way! I am shocked!) and Spain (It just hasn't been revealed yet, but let's face it - whoever the PM supports has an infinitely better chance to win. It happened with Real Madrid, now it's Barca's turn), the refs that aren't corrupt or don't just plain suck are a rare breed these days. People say that FIFA is making a big mistake by putting refs from all over the world (Benin, Singapore, etc), but please, refs are bad worldwide. Look at Massimo De Sanctis, Medina Cantalejo, Hugh Dallas...the list goes on. Even the NBA is an embarrassment - Dick Bavetta...say no more! The most we can hope for is that there are none of the egregious screw-ups that marred the last Cup and so far, so good. Aside from some bad decisions that cost Australia, Ghana, Ukraine and France, the refs have been decent; and to be fair, none of those four teams that suffered some bad calls could really claim that their games' results would have been different. The Aussies won, Ghana & the Ukraine were outplayed and lost, and France deserved no better than a draw vs the Swiss.

The announcers have been atrocious. Whoever elected to make Dave O'Brien, who knows about as much as my dogs about soccer, the #1 commentator for the World Cup should be instantly banished to a lifetime in Botswana. It's a sad commentary on the state of soccer in this country that our #1 play-by-play guy is someone who has basically had to learn the game of soccer during the past few months so he doesn't sound ridiculous commentating on these games. And I mean no disrespect to O'Brien - the guy's doing the best he can, but how can you expect someone who doesn't know half as much about soccer as guys like JP Dellacamera and Rob Stone to do a better job than them? Just because he says it in a good announcer's voice doesn't mean that "Beckham is a great kicker of the ball. That's a great kick" doesn't sound stupid. And just because we all want soccer to grow in this country doesn't mean that excuses need to be made for the Americans' no-show against the Czechs - the team left all their "cojones" at home. It was plain to see - soccer fan or not, that was pretty clear. Heck, my dad has seen about four games in his life and even he knew that.

Which brings me to the painful subject of the US. The Czech game exposed the US for what they are: a decent team that's come a long way in the last 15-20 years, improving all the time, and if things go their way (like in 2002), there's always the chance for them to go far in a World Cup. But again, they're just an okay team - no better or worse than teams like Korea or Ghana or Ecuador - so when they get stuck in a tough group, then all of a sudden they're pretty much overmatched & all that hype starts to ring hollow. Everyone in this country acts like we should be giving the Czech Republic & Italy tough games and, while I'd like to see them show some balls, it's just not realistic for them to tie or beat those teams more than 2 times out of 10, so in the Cup, the odds are against them. Now I expected them to finish second, mainly because I thought that Italy would be distracted by the calcio betting scandal and the US could grab a draw against them and then beat Ghana, but if they play the way they played against the Czechs, this could be a repeat of France '98. Still, expectations are too high. For example, people expect the US to kill Ghana, when Ghana has a player (Essien) who cost Chelsea $43 million last year - no one on the US team costs 1/10 of that. I think the most anyone can hope for now is for them to play a hard-fought, tough game against Italy; that was the real problem against the Czech Rep - no cojones. On a good day, the US is capable of getting a result against the Azzurri. On a bad day, you might as well throw in a tape of the Czech game.

As bad as that loss was, it was even worse to see the reaction of the US team and coaching staff. To say that the team imploded right before our eyes does not strike me as an overstatement. Arena called out his players in public, something you wouldn't expect from a veteran coach. The players fought back, a bit surprising for guys who described their coach as a "genius" before the Cup started. All of a sudden, it started to feel like we were watching Steve Sampson in 1998. But there's enough blame to go around. For all his accomplishments (and for my money, which ain't much, he's the best US coach ever), Arena didn't have that team ready to play and he would've been better off taking a page from the Andy Reid handbook and accepting responsibility for that - whenever possible, a coach is always better off taking the blame and then dealing with the players behind the scenes, not airing the proverbial dirty laundry. And the players, too, acted like a bunch of immature, overmatched babies. What are Beasley and Convey doing blaming Arena for their crappy performances? Beasley plays for the best club team of anyone on the US team (PSV Eindhoven) - of all people, he should know better than to blame his coach for his performance. And Convey, who claimed that he didn't know how Arena wanted him to play against the Czechs, might want to discuss that with Arena before the game, not afterwards. I didn't think that a repeat of France '98 was possible, especially not with Arena in charge, but I may be proven wrong.

Right now, the only thing more embarrassing than the US team's performance is the fact that W's foreign-policy has made the country so despised world-wide that the US is the only Cup team who can't have their flag on the side of their bus. Heck, the team is currently staying at Ramstein Air Force Base! And another person who, along with Arena, Beasley & Convey, might want to be attending some classes on dealing with the media is Eddie Johnson, who compared the Italy game to a war. Um, that's probably not the best analogy at the moment. Let's see here, what do I not want to do before the biggest soccer game in US history? Fire up the opposition, whose soldiers are fighting alongside ours in Iraq? Check. Aggravate an already tense situation surrounding the team by reminding the world of the US obsession with war? Done. Heck, at this point I'm surprised that the team hasn't decided to only eat Freedom Fries at Mickey D's and travel to games in F-14s.

But enough of the politics - it'd be a shame to waste the best month of the last four years talking politics. Let's talk some more futbol. Here are the tourney's five best goals so far:

1. Esteban Cambiasso, ARG (vs S&M)
2. Fernando Torres, SPA (vs UKR)
3. Tomas Rosicky, CZE (first goal vs USA)
4. Robin Van Persie, HOL (vs IVC)
5. Kaka, BRA (vs CRO)

And lastly, I'll end the debut day of World Soccer Blogger with some suggestions on what else to be reading these days (smart, huh?). Phil Ball, author of some fabulous books on Spanish soccer, writes for ESPN Soccernet about once a week and is also writing for the New York Times during the Cup. Michael Davies, who wrote some hilarious articles about the 2002 World Cup in the Far East, is back with new stories of sausages, the autobahn, and German toilet paper. He'll be fun to read until his beloved Engaland are eliminated by ze Germans in round 2 (as predicted here)...and then he'll be really fun to read. He can be found on ESPN's Page 2. Enjoy!