The Shame of Being an American…

…and listening to our national anthem being tortured by a singer who stretched every syllable to include twenty more notes than Francis Scott Key ever intended. More to the point, wouldn’t it have been just a bit more sly and fun if she’d sung “My Country Tis of Thee” instead of The Star-Spangled Banner?

Sung to the same melody as God Save the Queen:

My country,’ tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing;
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims’ pride,
from every mountainside let freedom ring!

I wanted to include a recording of this atrocity to share with those readers who were fortunate enough to have fast-forwarded their recording past all the pre-game stuff. I couldn’t find one, so I suppose even YouTube has standards.

It’s bad enough that we are forced to listen to this wretched American Idol-style garbage before games on our own turf. But to hear it in Wembley…

I was saved from total mortification by the sight of David Beckham. That reminded me that at least England bears full responsibility for The Spice Girls.

And if the national anthem weren’t a bad enough omen, the rest of the night was doomed as soon as I saw that Josh Wolff and Eddie Johnson were starting up top. I know it’s a friendly, but don’t you usually at least try to be competitive in these things?

And now we get to play Spain, and…gulp…Argentina.

Calling all Americans!

Just for fun, try this quiz from the Guardian to check your knowledge of American soccer trivia. I’m not even sure that trivia accurately describes some of the questions. Many of you will ace this, but I admit that Questions 2 & 3 were stumbling blocks for me.

Hmmm, I wonder just what the Guardian is implying by posing those two questions on the eve of the US-England friendly at Wembley?

Even Better Than the Real Thing…

I watched the Champions League final at Fado, a pub in downtown Chicago. I hadn’t been there before and didn’t know anything about the number of screens, nor how easy it would be to get a table near one of them. So I recorded the game and, happily, remembered to set up the DVR to record two shows afterward…just in case.

I don’t usually watch games in public. Let’s see, there was last year’s Gold Cup final at Quigley’s and a Chicago Fire playoff game in 2006 at the Globe and…that’s about it. I am not very social about these things. I like to concentrate on the game while freely expressing my wild, half-baked opinions to Steve. But I was persuaded that the first-ever all-English Champions League final should be seen in a pub, despite the inevitable presence of Chelsea supporters.

We arrived about ninety minutes before the start, but only one table was open. We snagged it. Things got a bit tight as the crowd grew, but everyone around us was generous about sharing space. I didn’t have a perfect view, but I did see every bit of the action. Some people in the group–Steve’s friend Jonathan and friends–elected to stand for a more direct view of the game. They don’t seem to mind, do they?

The atmosphere at Fado was all that I had hoped for. The place was jammed with serious supporters of both teams, although red shirts outnumbered blue. Each side was enthusiastic but mostly respectful. Best of all, everyone was really, really into the game. The underground community of soccer fans was out in force–and many (most?) were American, too.

After van der Sar blocked Nicolas Anelka’s penalty the party really got under way for the celebrating United supporters.

This evening I treated myself to a second viewing of the game. It was a delight to watch it without yo-yo-ing between numbness and high anxiety. Who can savor the drama of a penalty shoot-out right in the middle of it? Not I. My keenly-felt disappointment when Petr Cech easily saved Ronaldo’s poorly-taken shot seems excessive now, knowing as I do that Manchester United would still lift the trophy.

And John Terry’s misery? Just as awful to watch the second time as the first.

Layer Cake

“The top four next year will be the same top four as this year.”

That was Kevin Keegan’s prediction after Newcastle United’s loss to Chelsea in the penultimate game of the season. He grumbled that the league’s evolution into an elite, uncrackable quartet plus sixteen also-rans meant that “boring” football was the inevitable result.

Keegan’s words unleashed a torrent of commentary. Just google “Keegan Football Boring” and take your pick of the opinions that were spouted by everyone from Reading’s Steve Coppell to every sports journalist in Britain to bloggers around the globe–except Soccer Orb. That is because I’m not inclined to conduct an examination of the state of English football that is sufficiently thorough and comparative to analyze Keegan’s assertions. It is true that since I’ve followed the English game (1998 or so), the title has been held by just three teams–Manchester United, Arsenal, and Chelsea. And the top four are nearly always those three, plus Liverpool. However, Everton finished fourth as recently as 2005 and both Newcastle United and Leeds United–currently residing in the “where-are-they-now” file–made several appearances during the past decade.

I am straying off-point already. I understand that the rich tend to get richer in the world of sport, especially in European soccer. Teams that regularly appear in the Champions League have access to cash flows that open doors that will forever remain closed to lesser teams. Everybody knows that. But does that make the EPL boring? Speaking from an American viewpoint–not at all.

Forget for the moment this year’s nail-biting race for the title and the relegation drama at the other end of the table. Just look at the non-league competitions that spice up European football. I was reminded of this by today’s UEFA Cup Final match between Glasgow Rangers and Zenit St. Petersburg. Though it isn’t nearly as prestigious or lucrative as the Champions League, the UEFA Cup tournament is a portal to extra-league competition for eighty clubs across the continent. Over the years, the most successful of these have been Juventus, Inter Milan, and Liverpool. Tens of thousands of supporters from Glasgow and St. Petersburg descended upon Manchester for the deciding match. Even though the UEFA Cup may be a poor relation compared to the Champions League, everybody seemed pretty happy to be there, especially the Zenit side at the final whistle.

Speaking of the Champions League…most American sports fans could never imagine anything like this. A tournament that runs simultaneously with the domestic league schedule? Just for fun, try suggesting this to an NFL or Major League Baseball fan. The level of competition is daunting, given that it’s reserved for truly the best of the best. And it’s not as if Champions League glory always goes to a domestic league winner. Liverpool finished in 5th place in 2005, yet won a great victory over AC Milan in the Champions League final. There’s nothing boring or predictable in either the UEFA Cup or Champions League tournaments.

Then there’s the FA Cup. True, it lacks the prestige of Europe and the top English teams often field youthful, inexperienced players in the early rounds. But Manchester United and Chelsea fought tooth and nail in the Cup final last May, if you’ll remember. Winning a Double is so difficult that it’s been done only ten times since 1889 and just one club has ever won the Premiership, FA Cup, and Champions League ttitles all in the same year.

All this implies that there’s no shortage of meaningful competition in English club soccer. The relegation/promotion system that governs the many layers of the English game guarantees that things get shaken up often enough in the lower half of the table to keep it interesting. It’s clear that the top of the Premiership strongly resembles a very stable oligarchy, yet this doesn’t trouble me. Why? Because real achievement is measured by multiple trophies these days. The top clubs are held to higher standards that are more difficult to meet. Doubles and trebles are rare and likely to remain so. Moreover, competition among those top clubs is keen. Were any supporters of Manchester United, Chelsea, or Arsenal bored this season? I doubt it.

I understand that the examples I’m providing here don’t really speak to Keegan’s point, which is the unlikelihood of second or third-tier clubs breaking the top four’s stranglehold on Premiership glory. This is probably true. And it won’t change unless the FA bans its clubs from participating in lucrative European competitions. The probability of that event is exactly zero, of course. So I would like to invite those Brits who find the Premiership boring to take a trip across the pond in late July or August. They can take in a baseball game…perhaps between teams like the Chicago White Sox and Kansas City Royals. Both were hopelessly out of contention–for anything at all–weeks before the 2007 season was over. With no threat of relegation, why did the fans bother to show up? For the beer, hot dogs and peanuts?

Just 25 months and two days away…

Remember this?

If 750 or so days does seem light-years away, remember that Euro 2008 is just around the corner. And it looks like all the games will be televised on ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2.

Since England didn’t qualify, I intend to sit back and enjoy the tournament. There’s a real freedom to enjoy the games when there’s no rooting interest, isn’t there? There’ll be no agony watching them go down on penalties this time, to Portugal or anyone else…

You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to…

I tend to use the words football and soccer interchangeably.

This draws sneers from some American soccer fans, or so I’ve read. They use words like Euro snob to describe people like me. To be fair, there’s never more than a smidgeon of pretense in anything I write or do. I happen to like football as a name for the beautiful game, but I don’t have any special attachment to it.

What we know as football here in the United States is apparently an offshoot of rugby. The word soccer was derived from the phrase association football, which was used to distinguish the kicking game from the rugby-variant–in England. I suppose I could have researched the origins of all three games–rugby, soccer, and American football–had I any real desire to get to the bottom of this. Maybe then I would understand why a game in which the foot touches the ball just a handful of times during a sixty-minute game is still called football. But who cares, really? The point is that there are good reasons why two different names are commonly used to describe the same sport.

Growing up in America, all I knew about soccer was that the ball was black, white, and round. I was dimly aware that it was hugely popular in Europe and Latin America. And I’d heard that there were few things that the World was more passionate about than the World Cup. Much later, I learned that most people on the globe used the word football to refer to the game I knew as soccer. I was neither offended nor irritated by this and I definitely wasn’t filled with righteous indignation. Why would I have been? I knew that the rest of the world didn’t play American football. And since the game that we called soccer relied mostly on moving the ball with the feet, it made perfect sense to call it football.

Then I spent six months in London.

It was impossible to live in England without absorbing something about football. The London newspapers, both the real ones and the fun & trashy tabloids, were both entertaining and educational. One of the things I learned was that some Brits were well and truly bothered by the American practice of calling their favorite sport soccer. I think they viewed it as another maddening example of the Yanks’ insistence on doing things their own bloody way. An American, on the other hand, is merely baffled to hear Latin Americans and Europeans refer to soccer as football. He gets a puzzled look on his face–like George Bush at a press conference–and wonders, “Wait a minute…have I ever seen a team from England in the Super Bowl?”

What would Shakespeare have to say about all this? As a matter of fact, Juliet posed this question to Romeo:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

I shall happily continue to use both football and soccer exactly as I please.