6/23/2010 – USA 1, Algeria 0 – 1-0-2, 5 points, top of Group A

(via omg yanks)

When you're a sportsblogger and your fiancé is getting her PhD in a humanities field, you spend a lot of time explaining yourself.  (She doesn't because a few years ago the explanation became "it seemed like a good idea at the time," which fair enough.) After the beer flew and the rage subsided against Slovenia, I was asked to explain what the hell it was with me and the USMNT, and I thought about it systematically for the first time.

My first attempt to explain was jingoistic. I like the United States and would like to root for some sort of national ideal. The Olympics are far from sufficing because they don't seem fair or competitive. Hey, we grew this Michael Phelps guy in a lab, let's see how badly he can crush humans without flippers. Etc. The national team is good, but not so good that rooting for them feels like ugly Americanism.

That was kind of right, but missing the important thing. When Dodgy At Best put out an Algeria preview, his bolded section headers read "Karma," "Revenge," "Hope," "Fortune," and "Fate." Because I am who I am mine were "stop Nadir Belhadj" and "get a lot of set pieces"; DAB got it right, and I got it wrong. I can break down a football game all day. Basketball is given over to tempo-free numbers. Baseball could be played between computers these days and no one would notice. If you are so inclined, you can delve into the details of any and reject the narratives people layer on top of them because randomness can't happen and everything must have meaning. The analysis will be better and smarter but the experience a little poorer.

Soccer defies that. It is opera on a field. Not the Italian variety where a series of humorous misunderstandings yield mildly sexy results, but German opera—Klingon opera. Plenty of tridents. Sheets of rain. Thunderbolts cascading from the sky. In the background armies march through the mud, toward each other. Patterns converge in a rumble, pressure building until it's unbearable and someone falls over, a spear jutting out from his breastplate.

I don't have any critique in me any more. Jonathan Bornstein started a World Cup game and that's fine. The US went up and down the field and didn't shut down space in the midfield and didn't finish and had everyone in bars across the country three minutes from crumpling into the sort of heap that national manias are born from. A typical example will transpire later today when Serbia tries to shake off old Yugoslav demons:

Perhaps some of the Europeans there – certainly the French journalist opposite – were driven by anti-German feeling, perhaps some were instinctive Slavophiles, but when the three locals at the MTN (South Africa-based mobile telecommunications company) desk reacted to the final whistle with a group hug and collective dance, the appeal of Serbia's inner turmoil becomes difficult to deny. Unless they'd had a bet, I suppose, but when asked one said he'd decided to support Serbia because "they seemed to be trying to lose".

English journalist Simon Kuper dedicated a good chunk of his most recent book to explaining the English fatalism towards their team, one that echoes the national narrative of empire lost. It's so cliché that multiple books have been written about it, including Kuper's earlier, excellent "Football against the Enemy," but it's true: soccer does reflect the national culture, mostly because people want it to and no one can stop its narrative by dissecting it.

The USA's narrative has been bootstraps. College kids rescuing the program, batty goalies with an American flag fetish, Paul Caliguri, and so on. Tom Friend just published a lengthy story on USA 1990 third-string goalie David Vanole that's veritably dripping with half-truths dedicated to shaping that narrative. The USMNT is the 1980 hockey team spread over twenty years, because that's the way we want it.

We don't roll around on the ground. If we fall over, we probably just fell over. We run and and run and run, and late, when everything is stacked against us in a game where it's just so hard to finish the job, we do it Puritan style: ugly effort. A minute into stoppage time, the ball's just lying there and it's all about who will get there first.