You’ll never fully appreciate soccer if you don’t get that the sport itself has a sense of humor. Seriously. It’s a capricious entity, willing to mess with a person’s head for a laugh. Just ask the fans in Kingston and Panama City.
In the last month The United States national team has visited both venues for World Cup Qualifying, each time playing like they wanted to lose, only to snatch a last-minute draw from absolutely nowhere. A lot of American fans are apoplectic. We are, if not the best, at least the second-best team in the region right now (if we’re behind anyone, it’s Mexico, of course) and yet we’re struggling against Jamaica. And Panama, for crying out loud. Panama. That is kind of pathetic, right?
But these fans forget one thing: this is par for the course. And it’s soccer. Full-on, no regrets, capricious soccer. All you can do is hope for the best.
See, nothing is better suited to sport’s wants and needs than World Cup Qualifying. There’s just so much going on it has a stunning number of opportunities to be its wacky self. The process is too long, overcomplicated, and almost non-sensical at times, but that’s part of the joy of it. And as a lover of all non-lethal forms of madness I can’t help enjoying its bold imperfectness.
Like any other sport soccer’s got its personalities, chaos, controversy, injustice, and overall drama. But it just has so much more of each because almost every country with more than eleven people in it takes part in World Cup Qualifying. (Yes, even Moldova.) In fact, I’d say soccer is much less sport than it is theater.
I could go on for weeks just talking about the 1998 and 2002 qualifying campaigns for the United States. The ups, the downs, the fact that, until it was all over, fans never had the right to feel safe. If, after it was all done, you smiled and said "Of course we made it. We were supposed to", it was false bravado. Only the very best teams get to coast through Qualifying (and sometimes even they struggle) and we aren’t anywhere near "very best" status. Like everyone else, we ride the current and hope, at the end, our team has done enough to make it through. We should make it. Chances are we will. But eventual champions Brazil struggled throughout much of their qualifying run in 2002. It can happen to anyone.
Here are a couple of the more memorable threads from recent United States campaigns:
- Poor Jeff Agoos. Contrary to popular opinion, Jeff Agoos is actually a fairly decent defender. The guy just had a knack for making roughly one critically bad decision every time he played for the national team. Sometimes the opponents capitalized. Often they didn’t. And over a two-game stretch in 1997, poor Jeff Agoos single-handedly made our qualifying campaign a lot tougher. We were coming off an energizing 1-0 victory over Costa Rica (thanks to Tabare Ramos’ brilliant strike) and looking to solidify our position with a win against Jamaica. We were at home, in Washington, DC, and the Reggae Boyz didn’t travel very well so it seemed an easy win. If only. We struggled to get any offense going. But then the referee, perhaps feeling sorry for us, gifted us a goal when he called a penalty kick for a handball outside the area (remember that). It was a bad call. But, hey, these things do even out. Our 1-0 lead was short-lived, because Agoos’ bad decision came moments later, in the form an unbelievably stupid pass straight to a Jamaican striker. 1-1. And that’s how it ended. In the very next game Agoos dug himself (and us) deeper when got ejected in a crucial Day of the Dead match in Mexico City. We had to play down a man, to Mexico, in Mexico City, for 60 minutes. A loss would have been devastating. And so we had to sit there, at altitude, and take wave after wave of attacks. Somehow we crawled out of Mexico with a tie. Somehow. Getting points out of Mexico is hard. Getting points out of Mexico when you’re down to ten men is Herculean. Jamaica, the United States and Mexico ended up qualifying for the 1998 World Cup, by the way.
- The handball which wasn’t. Remember that bad penalty call against Jamaica? Well, it came back on us in the next qualification cycle. Just minutes from the end of a game in Costa Rica, with the score 1-1, the Jamaican referee (Peter Prendergast) inexplicably called Gregg Berhalter for a handball in our penalty area. The ball, for the record, hit his head and may have inadvertently ricocheted off his upper arm and out of play. Handballs should only be called when the player’s made a deliberate attempt to play the ball with his hand. There’s no way Berhalter did any such thing and I have a hard time believing the referee made an honest mistake. I think Prendergast was trying to make up for a fairly legitimate penalty call he’d missed just a few minutes beforehand. Either way, they won. We both made it to the World Cup (along with Mexico), so, no biggie.
And it goes on like that. So many stories, so much insanity, so much theater. So much soccer.
I’m happy the circus is in full swing again. From Brian Ching’s game-tying heroics in Kingston to Cobi Jones’ (probably offside) last-minute equalizer in Panama City, we’ve had our share of dramatics already. Plus El Salvador’s Denis Alas was ejected from their 2-0 loss to us on Saturday. For wearing a necklace. This is how it always is. How it always should be. And I’m just looking at the games which involved the United States.
The wackiness is global. And it’s interminable. The big stories at the moment involve possible prison time for a Latvian streaker, England’s recurring problem with choking, and Canada’s justified ire over some dodgy refereeing. [Update: And Robbie Savage thinks that his being suspended from an upcoming match against England is a, wait for it, violation of his human rights!] This stuff never gets boring.
And it gets back to my basic point. Soccer has a sense of humor.
In fact, the sport is downright jocular. Stepping into league soccer for a second, consider the story of Bryn.
On the last day of the season Torquay United needed a draw to prevent themselves from being dropped to a lower league (imagine the Kansas City Royals getting dropped to AAA and you get the basic idea). Late on in the match it seemed like Torquay were doomed to lose. Enter Bryn, the police dog:
Bryn was guarding the ground’s Popular Side and suddenly took exception to Gulls defender Jim McNichol, biting the Scotsman on the thigh.As doctors tended to the player, the referee kept an eye on his watch and racked up the injury time. The dog bite had given Torquay a little over four extra minutes in which to fight for a point.
That made Bryn the toast of Torquay, because it enabled one of the best players of a wretched, miserable season to become the saviour.
Just about the only thing that had given the Gulls a prayer going into the final day was a 16-goal haul by Paul Dobson. Seconds from the end of the extra, extra injury time, he made it 17 following a defensive blunder.
Torquay were staying up, dooming Lincoln – who had already finished playing by the time the crucial goal went in – on goal difference.
In other words, Bryn is the dog who saved Torquay United. Did I mention that Bryn got a lifetime ticket out of the deal? Or that after he died the club had the dog stuffed and put in a place of honor in the boardroom?
That’s the world’s game for you. Nothing quite like it.
