World Cup 2010: USA

https://twitter.com/TimHoward2010

“Detroit has a nice smile, it’s just that some of her teeth are missing.”
 
Detroit’s slump comes in more varieties than Heinz Ketchup. She’s an ugly one industry town. Her ex-Mayor is in jail for stealing from her, and worse still a documentary ran recently that gave her that final kicking, a beating in the face from the buckle of the rust-belt. The infamous, can’t pull your eyes away from the screen  – watch through a crack in your hands – moment came when a hapless Detroiter showed the camera how he catches and sells raccoons as food.
 
One of Detroit’s strengths is her sport – Pistons, Redwings, Tigers & Lions – but no football team. In the 1920′s soccer in Detroit was a boom sport but after those initial halcyon years football flickered like a faulty light bulb through the decades. In the 70s came NASL and the Detroit Express – with Jimmy Hill  as the owner and Trevor Francis as the star in the cavernous Pontiac Silverdome. That stadium again brushed cheeks with the beautiful game in 1994. with the World Cup. Romario even scored there. The Silverdome now lies fallow, only to be graced by occasional Monster Truck rallies and even more seldom football exhibition games. It deserves to be rammed full, not pockmarked with the faithful few.
 
Nationwide, World Cup success is craved, but in Detroit – this sport is largely ignored by the media – leaving it stillborn. In a prominent local paper football vies with, and loses out to, girls high school soccer and hunting. Detroit news is slick, and populated with a bevy of beauties (see pics), but any mention of football is clunky in the extreme – goalscorers are mispronounced (or just plain wrong), and all reportage is done with a barely concealed smirk.

Exhibit A - Gorgeous Detroit Newsreader

Exhibit B - Another gorgeous Detroit newsreader (on left, clearly)

 
Soccer and the World Cup may be a buzzword in some locales but as far as Detroit is concerned it is all quiet on the Midwestern Front. American detractors see football as a hoary old sport, but Detroit media are the real troglodytes. There are many people out there, fighting to bring this sport to Detroit, but without the media, there is a little corner of the Midwest that will remain forever North Korea.

So Landon Donovan, our footballing pen pal, has returned to LA. The Home Depot Center in Los Angeles – a distant football colony – with Tom Cruise watching and David Beckham hobbling must be a far cry from the Old Lady Goodison Park. A move back to Everton is possible, and we should push for it as much as we can. Whereas Beckham was brought to the US as a footballing missionary to garner attention for MLS, exporting Donovan will focus foreign eyes on Merseyside. We shouldn’t underestimate just how much of a star we have on our hands either; when Everton signed Lie Tie and Li Weifeng millions tuned in to watch the Toffees. Sadly, those two players, a magnet for Chinese fans, weren’t capable of impressing on the pitch. Donovan though, patently is a level above our former Chinese duo, and he is a huge star Stateside. Look inside the first page of this month’s Rolling Stone Magazine and you are hit with a Gatorade advert, a simple sepia picture of Landon Donovan flicking the ball up in the air, and his name isn’t anywhere. Just like David Beckham – Donovan needs no introduction to an American audience. Stroll around any Midwest city and you will occasionally spot the livery of “Big Four” shirts popping out from the crowd. Expect to see Everton shirts too in the coming months and years. Pushing football alongside Baseball, the NFL, and Baskeball in the American sporting consciousness is an almost impossible task. Pushing an English football team though, is less hard – and we couldn’t have chosen a better player. Most pundits on the American side of the pond feel that Donovan’s talent was outgrowing MLS – and a huge number of fans feel that he needs to go abroad to grow. Donovan’s ten week stint at Goodison, laced with strong performances, has simply strengthened that argument. Any American interest in Donovan instantly becomes an interest in Everton. It is hard to want Donovan to succeed and divorce that from wanting Everton to do well too. It makes little sense seeing Donovan back in the MLS after he did so well against some of the world’s best, in LA he’s a gastronome forced to dine at McDonald’s every day, in the UK he is with kindred spirits; a feral Mowgli brought out of the jungle back to where he belongs. A neat parallel can be drawn with the NBA, which is similar to the Premier League, both are Meccas for their respective sports – where all aspiring players want to get to. Tony Parker – basketballer, Parisian, mate of Thierry Henry, and husband of the gorgeous actress Eva Longoria – plays in the NBA for the San Antonio Spurs. He plays in the NBA because it is the peak of his profession, playing in Paris would be counter-intuitive. The same goes for Donovan, who seemed genuinely touched by the passion of the Everton fans, and was a more than capable performer in the Premier League. Donovan’s return to California will bring him nice weather and his friends, but although sunny, professionally speaking California is a dark corner of the sport. Donovan is now a member of the Everton diaspora, and he’s welcome back whenever he wants. Moyes was right to treat the loan deal with respect – he was stung by Mark Hughes’ behaviour, prising Lescott from us like a bigger child in the schoolyard, and he didn’t want to treat LA Galaxy with that same disrespect. What Moyes has done though is give Donovan a taste of the big time, success is moorish, and the competitive streak in Donvan will be pining for Merseyside. It may not just be the prohibitive sum that MLS reportedly want for Landon that kills any deal for Everton, David Beckham’s injury means that Donovan is now wearing the crown of MLS’ star player again… The sun never sets on Moyes’ Everton empire, like most Premier League teams we have players from all corners of the world – Donovan will bump into some in South Africa – and hopefully at Goodison next season.

It is highly frustrating, I flew back to the UK for 2 weeks and during that time ALL the major football news was happening in LA on the side of the pond I just left.

I like to think that whilst I was flying to London, Becks and his cultural attaché Posh were up in the air too, flying in whilst I’m flying out. There seems to be a lot of confusion in both countries as to what Posh and Becks have come over for; Posh isn’t coming to LA to act and Becks definitely isn’t coming over to play football.

At school I was a history boy, it was the one subject I loved and in some ways it is fitting that I am an Everton fan , our good fortune and success seem tethered to the past, history being my passport to these fertile Evertonian lands.

My favourite quote with regards to history is by Cicero; “Those that forget what has happened before them are doomed to forever remain children” … and boy are they forgetful here in the US. And the weirdest thing?

This layer cake of deluded positive thinking all seems to emanate from Michigan. Alexi Lalas, was born and raised in the footballing tundra of Birmingham Michigan, and spouts nonsensical MLS hype with every breath. As recently as last week the general manager of Michigan MLS feeder club the “Bucks” said that Becks (and MLS) would be an utter success, after all “Pele was in his 40’s when he came here”… when in fact he was only three years older than Becks….he continues to rationalize this by saying that “they all came over in the twilight of their career”, as if that is any different from what is currently happening in the MLS.

In fact many parallels can be drawn from the Pele-led and defunct NASL, and the Beckham-driven MLS. Both leagues see one superstar as being integral to the success of soccer. However there are some stark warnings that many people aren’t taking. Following the slow piecemeal success of the New York Cosmos they graduated to the huge Giants Stadium, in a playoff game of 1977 the Cosmos filled the stadium with an attendance of 77,691, a staggeringly huge amount of people. The first body blow to the NASL was the addition of extra franchises into the league, diluting the quality of the league and adding stamina sapping trips across this huge continent of a country. The death knell was television viewers, and although the playoffs were given a decent slot on television the viewing figures were not as high as expected, so they were cut from television, the lifeblood of any sport, especially an embryonic one.

There has been an explosion of writing on the subject of US soccer ever since Becks decided to join the LA Galaxy. A constant stream of articles from the Guardian have outlined:a) How appalling the standard of MLS is…b) How frustrated Europeans are with America’s lack of world view.. (WORLD Series, NFL WORLD Champions etc etc).c) How the MLS fans are a gruesome chimera of a loyal and fierce enclave of hardcore fans and an indifferent mass of bums on seats, the “sunday drivers” of football fandom.
“Sawker” in the States is seen as a either womans sport or a kids sport, as full of ponces and divers, and crucially , a soporific sport.
So is soccer ever going to be a success in the US? I am extremely doubtful. It is simply impossible to generate all the things I find beautiful about football synthetically. Things that are permanently tethered to the heart of England, minnows gnawing at the ankles of giants in the FA Cup, the Dunkirk-esque idea of glorious failure, a well fought away point for Everton at Stanford Bridge, playing sunday league on a muddy november with the ruddy stench of the local farms manure climbing up my nostrils. Things all football crazed englishmen may love – but if presented to an American sports fan they will treat it in the same way that they treat Marmite or Branston Pickle, with bemused disgust. If someone tells you in the UK that they havent missed an Arsenal game in 2 years, you can guarantee that they have seen them in the flesh and they are a season ticket holder. In Detroit, if someone says that they haven’t missed a Redwings game in two years they mean that they havent missed a game on tv. The idea of the “draw” is a complete anathema to American sports fans. Their language is a language of glory, of dancing and whooping on command, of abandoning a team as soon as they poorly perform. There is no relegation , teams are instead kept afloat through the “Draft” system. People can point to the rise of soccer in certain states like California but the most painful thing that I discovered in my life over here was that Detroit has hosted a World Cup ’94 match between Brazil and Sweden. And nobody cared. Romario who? On finding out that cruel secret I feel like a combination of Charlton Heston in “Planet of the Apes” when he sees the Statue of Liberty, and Edward Woodward in “Wicker Man” when the wretched truth hits him as he comes over the hill. All this has been done before with Pele, George Best et al. I’m with Rodney Marsh on this one, congratulations Becks – your career is officially over.

Alexi Lalas obviously has a huge chip on his shoulder, perhaps replacing the iridescent orange facial hair he used to have. A few weeks ago Alexi caused a stir, by implying that he might not release Becks for international matches (he’s unaware that they don’t have a choice) and that his move from Real Madrid to LA Galaxy would not be a step down. Today he riled me up even more by suggesting that the Premier League isn’t that far ahead of the MLS in terms of quality:
“We know when we’re being patronized and I get so irritated when I hear the experts in England talk about David Beckham as if he’s going into semi-retirement by leaving Real Madrid for Los Angeles. That’s ignorance of the first degree because almost every one of those critics has not even seen a single MLS game. It’s insulting to us and to our sport to say Beckham is on his way to Hollywood when he’s coming to play in one of the most competitive leagues in the world. There are a lot of stars in European football who would struggle over here. But Beckham has done his homework on this league, and his team-mates, and he recognizes the merit of American soccer.”
“You know, there’s no accounting for bad taste. The fact that a segment of the world worships an inferior product in the Premiership is their business. In England our league is considered second-class but I honestly believe if you took a helicopter and grabbed a bunch of MLS players and took them to the perceived best league in the world they wouldn’t miss a beat and the fans wouldn’t notice any drop in quality.”
I first became aware of the goatee sporting ginger at USA ’94 – my dad tried to ignore his annoying hippie-esque presence on our TV, but became increasingly disgusted when he signed for Padova and played for them for two years, ruining our Sunday afternoon Italian football marathons. He clearly has delusions of grandeur which may be rooted in the fact that he scored for the United States in their 2 – 0 win over England in ’93. At any rate my dad only had two words about him “Ginger Prat” – and those words still ring true. Last summer I was treated to Alexi Lalas’ ‘analysis’ of world cup matches on American TV, the man always fought his corner like a ginger rocky, claiming the US could easily make it to the quarters. Aside from his soporific and utterly misinformed analysis I noticed that the ginger goon had shaved off his goatee beard (great move Alexi) although I suspect he was going to cause a frissant of excitement by shaving it off – he probably thought that the response would be similar to when Dylan went electric.
I think his goatee amputation has had a strange effect on him; whereas the goatee calmed him down (perhaps by stroking it when deep in thought), the new goatee less Alexi seems to be an angry man. It would be better if he’d have left his ginger goatee perched on his chin; it serves as a warning, a sign that the person wearing it is clearly disturbed – now he is merely and undercover weirdo, a deluded loon masquerading as a professor of football.
After growing up in England I have been living in Michigan for a while now; by far the biggest gap in my life is football, or the lack of it. I will have to watch next season on cable which shouldn’t be too bad, aside from the horrendous commentary. There is no football on US TV worth watching, is it any wonder that all the yanks round these parts think this sport is shite?
MLS doesn’t count, I would honestly rather watch a snuff movie starring my parents than be subjected to the mephitic league that is the MLS.
Aside from a few pockets, the US is footballing tundra. And Michigan is one of the places where “soccer” is most vilified. Michigan is an excellent state to examine, despite hosting a Romario goal in the Brazil-Sweden 1-1 draw at the Pontiac Silverdome; no one has any knowledge or passion for football. Although the sport is hugely popular with children, football in America remains an utter enigma. To this day, the total attendance for the USA ’94 final tournament of nearly 3.6 million remains the greatest in World Cup history, despite the expansion of the competition to 32 teams in 1998. The fact that last years World Cup final got more American television viewers than the baseball World Series is also perplexing.
And yet…there are small slivers of what Lalas said that ring true, the Premiership is becoming a two horse race. Lalas aspires to make the LA Galaxy on a par with Man United – could it be that instead of American soccer teams looking to Europe as their future, that the MLS format resembles the UK’s future? Or worse still, with the influx of American Tycoons will we start to turn into the NFL.
American Football, the ugly stepsister of the beautiful game is 60 minutes of play constantly interrupted by “time-outs”, ends of quarters and flagging down of plays by referees. Adding to the soporific atmosphere is the fact that whole legion of players is mercy to one man – the Coach, who makes all tactical decisions. My in-laws seemed perplexed when I told them that in English football the players make the majority of the tactical decisions, it seems like American sportsmen need to have their hand held and have all decisions made for them, thus putting out the last embers of spontaneous play. “Football” is an utter misnomer for this sport, when the ball is touched by a foot it is during a completely superfluous act. Any kicking for extra points is a fait d’accomplis, a needless evolutionary blind alley, like male nipples. This sport, with the university brass band at half time is a symposium of geeks but it is smoothly done as is most entertainment in the states. American football and entertainment in general over here is peppered with commercial breaks, shouts of “time out!”, “action!”, “touchdown!”, and “cut”, and audiences that applaud and cheer only when prompted by a flashing light. I’d take a windy cold Goodison over this anytime.
This tedious battle of attrition is punctuated by sporadic yelps of pugnacious glee from the crowd, erupting momentarily from their catatonic silence whenever a tackle or random act of brutality occurs. Of course, it is very sanitized brutality, stopped instantly by referees busily scurrying over, and dulled by the extensive armadillo coating of body armour. The players dance around in pre-prepared celebration signature moves whenever their team progresses a few yards , or they stop the opposition moving a few inches forward, this sport is closer to tractor-pulling than football. A touchdown is greeted by screams of people just going through the motions and is very different to witnessing a goal at Goodison.
So in summary, Lalas is an eccentric goon who doesn’t know the second thing about football (he signed Abel Xavier for God’s sake!). I will never be able to watch a full MLS game as it is SO sleep-inducing, and it will be the tragedy of tragedies if the Premiership turns into the NFL.