US Soccer Has A Lot To Learn

Mexico beat the US 5 to 0 in the finals of the Gold Cup on Sunday at Giants Stadium in front of a crowd of 80,000, most of whom showed up wearing green to support the bad guys.

What does this teach us?

First, that New Jersey is a lot more like Mexico than the United States. Scratch that, most of us already knew that, so we didn’t really learn anything there. But it’s pretty pathetic that even on US soil the US doesn’t have a home field advantage.

Second, it teaches us that the US is really bad at soccer. Again, most of us already knew that, so nothing new there either. But it was a particularly embarrassing defeat, the worst at home for the US since a blow out against England in 1985.

A lot of fans and analysts will point out that it was our B team. These are the same morons who pointed out that the US had a strong showing against Brazil in the Confederations Cup.

B team or A team, when you lose to Mexico 5 to 0 at home, you blow. By the way, Mexico didn’t bring all of its best either.

And we looked about as strong against Brazil last month as McLovin did in Superbad.

He might have scored, but it wasn’t pretty.

And by the way, pretty does matter. In sex and in soccer. In sex because, well, because it does. Personality shmersonality. Take this simple quiz:

Would you rather have sex with her …

Or would you rather have sex with her?

And pretty matters in soccer because if your game is ugly, you won’t win a championship. You might get away with a lucky goal and win a game here and there. But fundamentals are essential to continued success. Which is why nobody will ever confuse soccer with Wall Street.

And that brings me to the one thing that we really can learn from all of this. The analysts for soccer in the US suck.

I realize they’re trying to make us believe we have a chance, so that people watch, so the network can sell ad space.

Effen A Cotton! Effen A! Not since Dodgeball has a sport been so humorously commentated.

I didn’t see the Brazil game live, thank you Eurosport. But I read all the articles. The ones that said we were good. Then finally I watched the game, thank you DVR. We looked like ass. We looked so bad in the first half I didn’t watch the second half.

And the first half was the half we scored in. We’re not impotent. We have some quality players, players who can score on any field, any day. But as a team, we have no game.

We rarely thread three passes together in the front third of the field. When we score, it’s usually great finishes from set plays or broken plays. We almost never develop our own chances. Not against the good teams. Shit, not even against Honduras.

We looked good in Korea in 2002. Good against Mexico. And more importantly we even looked good against Germany. But those games were anomalous.

I’m a patient man. I’m a hopeful man. So I’ll wait and I’ll dream about the US getting better. And after all, our team has an excuse … every kid in Brazil plays the beautiful game from sunrise to sundown. We don’t.

But what about the analysts? What’s their excuse? Where’s their integrity? Oh, I forgot. In the end, they answer to Wall Street.