Fear and Exultation in U.S.: World Cup Ahead of Classic

3/24/2017

Tim Howard

Clint Dempsey

With no clue about the glories about to unfold, my nerves were kicking in, 12 hours before kickoff.

I was obsessing about the starting lineup – and the formation – and the deep hole in the standings for the American men’s soccer team.

I could not summon any of this fear and trembling for the just concluded World Baseball Classic, but on Friday, as the U.S. prepared to play Honduras in San Jose, Calif., I was worried if Tim Howard’s injury and Clint Dempsey’s heart issues would allow them to go full-tilt-boogie.

I was looking forward to Bruce Arena’s return as head coach. I was worried about the injuries that have decimated Arena’s player pool.

This is true national sporting fear, known to soccer fans around the world, and now a very real tradition in the United States.

Then the U.S. displayed the get-out-of-jail-free card and welcomed back Dempsey and Howard and Arena with a 6-0 romp over Honduras.

How often, in motion sports like soccer, basketball and hockey, do players display initiative at the changing of a coach?

From the whistle, the U.S. was energized and creative. The first sign was relatively new players like Darlington Nagbe (speed, brains and low-to-the-road center of gravity) opening up the field. He was followed by Christian Pulisic and Sebastian Lletget, displaying freedom to find space, to take their shots.

And then Dempsey, his glower intact after a bout with arrythmia, scored a hat trick. And Michael Bradley turned and launched a long left-footed goal that reminded me of Jermaine Jones' surprise blast in the last World Cup. And Howard was back in goal, his bald head sweating in a prolonged pre-game practice, his eyes giving direction to his defenders.

What I am saying is, in my own home, liberated by retirement to be a fan, I loved it. Now I can start obsessing about the match in Panama Tuesday.

I could not summon anything like this for the final of the recent Classic Tuesday although I enjoyed watching a compelling young U.S. pitcher, Marcus Stroman, shut down Puerto Rico in an 8-0 victory.

From reading the terrific analysis by Billy Witz in the Times on Friday, I see the American players have reacted negatively to the emotion shown by fans and players from Latin America and Asia. The excitement is cultural….and it is the future of the Classic….but I can understand what the U.S. players are feeling.

They are from Major League Baseball, the best league in the world, and so are most of their opponents. In a few weeks they will be playing official games and I will have knots hoping Yoenis Céspedes can hold up all season and most of the young pitchers will be healthy and what adventures will befall our beloved Weepin’ Wilmer Flores.

Allowed to shed neutrality, I get tied into knots for my home-borough Mets, not for an all-star national team in March.

My friend Clemson Smith Muñiz, editor of a terrific new site on Latin baseball, explains my inner dichotomy:

“Hola, George, the irony of the WBC final was Latinos had skin on both side of the field. Team USA starting pitcher Marcus Stroman's mother is from Puerto Rico; third baseman Nolan Arenado's father is Cuban and his mother Puerto Rican; and first baseman Eric Hosmer's mother is Cuban. Yes, it took a ‘Half-Rican’ to beat the undefeated ‘Quarter-Rican’ Seth Lugo and the rest of the Boricuas.”

Plus, the stirring Puerto Rican team, with its dyed blonde hair and accent marks on the back of the jerseys, consists of beloved and respected players from the long season: venerable Carlos Beltrán and dynamic Yadier Molina, players we love to watch all season (except maybe when they help crush the Mets.)

Those emotions are ahead of us. But ever since Paul Caligiuri’s goal in Port of Spain in November of 1989, the U.S. has had the feel of the World Cup -- the men’s quadrennial struggle to qualify, the women’s reign of excellence, now in decline.

Qualifying is brutal – hard faces on Latin players, coming to American soil with much to prove, flying objects and language in ominous places like Azteca Stadium, inexplicable official decisions on the road. The stuff of horror movies.

Maybe the World Baseball Classic will get there some day.
Right now, I knew true sporting fear – meaningless, but tell that to my nerves.

bruce

3/25/2017 12:27:12 pm

george,

i watched the wbc with some amusement.

wasn't much interest in the usa for the first three--didn't really count or so it seemed--but suddenly it became more important when the usa looked like it had a chance.

the usa had a very strong team in the 2006 tournament, but came up very short. virtually no interest and, my goodness, they lost to canada for god's sake even tho they had a-rod, clemens, jeter, varitek, jones, wells and more.

chuckled when you wrote you were worried about honduras.

shows how weak this zone is. canada has some very good soccer players but it's pathetic when it comes to qualifying for the world cup. once is the grand total.

winning concacaf is a bit like being the tallest person at a munchkin convention.

bruce

George Vecsey

3/25/2017 01:01:55 pm

Bruce, very true. FIFA allots 3 1/2 slots to Concacaf (regional conference) It's all about TV audience and corporate sponsors. Follow the money. When the New Blatter expands World Cup, I bet this region gets 4-5-6 slots. Once in a while USA or Mexico or Costa Rica wins a match in the WC final tournament, but the time has not come yet. GV

Ed Martin

3/26/2017 08:25:49 pm

Enjoy! (As we say around NYC- usually in front of a blintz or pastrami sandwich, but US soccer counts, too.)

The Mets???

George Vecsey

3/27/2017 08:45:21 am

Ed, the Mets (and other baseball teams) play every day, so the terror is spread out -- slumps, wretched games, and sometimes even a liberating acceptance that this is NOT next year.
But soccer qualifying rounds, or tournaments like World Cup, are quadrennial tortures, few and far between.
Take this Tuesday's match in Panama: It is on something called BeIn, to which I do not suscribe so I may have to forage around on the web to follow minute-by-minute postings -- highly unsatisfying.
best GV

Alan Rubin link

3/27/2017 10:46:13 am

Coaching does make a difference. This is true at all levels of sports.

Bruce Arena did not use any magic in turning around the USMNT. He simply applied the basics of good coaching, respect for his players, pushing each to extend themselves and strive to be the best that they can be.

Mistakes are to be expected but never to be criticized, especially not in public. Players are encouraged to improve and move on.

Good teams always have the combined trust among the players and their coach. Winning is usually the result of individual efforts working for a common goal. Brett Ledbetter’s book, “What Drives Winning” very clearly defines this process.

Listen to the coaches on his home page http://whatdriveswinning.com/.

They all emphasize personal development and achievement and not to obsession with the result. Winning is a natural result of the process.

I had previously expressed my belief that Klinsmann lost the USMNT’s players when Donovan was left off the team. Although they performed credibly during the 2014 MWC, this decision had an unsettling effect upon the team. Klinsmann’s continual public criticisms about the team and U.S. soccer was also divisive.

Arena may not be USMNT’s long-term coach, but he was the right choice to help turn things around. He seems to have shown confidence in the team and the players are free to be themselves while knowing the coach has their back.

Lat year’s Boston University’s women’s soccer team was an example of good coaching. They are a strong Division I program that has done well nationally. The have won the Patriot League championship each of the years since they joined about four years ago.

BU plays very strong competition prior to the beginning of their Patriot League schedule. This usually includes a west coast trip to play Stanford and UCLA.

BU lost their first ten games during the 2016 season. They eventually qualified for the NCAA post season tournament. I’m friendly with Nancy Feldman, their head coach and program director.

When I asked her about the turnaround, she said that they continually evaluated all the positives that the team displayed in the ten losses and focused on what was needed to succeed. Nancy said that the team needed to know what they were capable of and that they were not defined by the ten losses.

I would suggest that Bruce Arena is doing much of the same. One game does not define a turnaround, but it is an encouraging start.

George Vecsey

3/27/2017 11:53:48 am

Alan thanks for the comment. I haven't spoken with Arena since the return, but I saw him on TV. Asked if he was a better coach now, he smiled and said quite quickly, yes, he was. He always treated his players like adults (staying in hotels in Seoul and Hamburg during World Cups) but had gotten cranky by 2006. It's funny about Klinsmann. Many Germans thought he was a moonbeam -- too much time in America -- but some US players seemed to think he was too stern. Every World Cup coach cuts somebody, or doesn't play him. Bruce seems to recognize that Pulisic has gifts...and is getting better from being in Bundesliga. See you soon G

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Fear and Exultation in U.S.: World Cup Ahead of Classic

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