America, already a football nation?

by Nick Lichtenberg, writing from New York City

The debate isn’t settled over whether America can become a “football nation,” but It’s a mistake to think that any other country simply gets past football’s frustrations and neuroses. Greece is surely a “football nation,” having won the 2004 European Championship, but just celebrated its first ever World Cup win on Thursday. And England, the oldest football nation around, was bowled into existential crisis after a particularly dreadful result on Friday. Even farther back, England largely shunned the sport in the 1970s and 80s when its emotions became too raw, with violent and tragic results.

Going into this World Cup, I thought we had a professional squad that could “get stuck in” and “do a job.” But the USA were stuck in neutral in the first half, not so much resembling a crack outfit as the original cast of Saturday Night Live: the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players. Blown away by a country with a population smaller than the borough of Brooklyn, either Bob Bradley got his tactics wrong, or the team was mentally unprepared to play as presumed favorites, or both. But whatever it was, stuck-in-getting was not happening.

The USA came out in the second half and looked like the team that had been billed. But that was a mistake, too: the billing should have mentioned that the USA always do this, always playing below and above their potential, often in the same game. I remember counting them out of the Confederations Cup in 2009 and then they went and wrote the book on how to beat Spain. When I saw Landon Donovan abruptly grow to 9 feet tall and thunder in one of the most in-your-face goals I’ve ever seen, the transformation was underway. And then I realized, we don’t need to worry about “football nation” status because we already have a living, breathing football culture at work in this squad.