LIKE IT IS: U.S. team’s showing at World Cup success

— Soccer really is an amazing sport.

There may not be better conditioned athletes in any one sport than soccer.

A 90-minute game can last more than three actual hours with extra time, and for most of that, the guys are running or all-out sprinting up and down the field. If they happen to have the ball, they are being challenged by one to three guys.

Saturday, by some luck, your trusty scribe got to kick back and watch the U.S. team take on Ghana in the World Cup.

It was sort of a down day on the tail end of my vacation.

The Wo rl d Cu p wa s intriguing because of Team USA and how it advanced from pool play despite being robbed in a game against Slovenia. A hero was born that day, Landon Donovan, a 28-year-old who has been playing soccer since he was 7, who gave the USA a draw with his goal. He also had the only goal in a victory over Algeria and scored the lone goal for the U.S. team in Saturday’s 2-1 loss to Ghana.

Until Saturday, the United States had outscored its opponents 3-0 in the second half, but the U.S. team ran out of gas against Ghana in a match that exceeded 120 playing minutes, and was unable to come back one more time.

Of course, any team playing a team from Africa in South Africa should have gotten a couple of extra penalty kicks just because of those infernal vuvuzelas.

The African teams are accustomed to the mad hornet sound those horns make, but visitors are not. I can’t say for sure they bothered the U.S. team, but they bugged me so badly I turned the sound down.

Take nothing away from Ghana, an outstanding team, but between that buzzing and Ghana being the last African team in the competition, the USA had ahuge disadvantage.

It was good to see former President Bill Clinton there supporting the U.S. team, but then a big part of why Saturday’s game was switched to big brother ABC is that good Americans will pull for anything that has a flag on it in international competition.

How often do you see track meets in prime time unless it is the Olympics?

The World Cup and the USA’s success - and it was a success - will give soccer a popularity spike in America.

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, but we Americans prefer, on the whole, football over futbol, which was born in the mid-19th century.

Of course, other countries aren’t as athletically diversifiedas we are. We also have Major League Baseball and the NBA, and traditionally, in the South if we build a park, it has a basketball court instead of a soccer field.

North Little Rock Mayor Pat Hays saw the advantage of adding soccer fields to Burns Park, and they have more than paid for themselves with tournaments that brought in people from all over the country, pouring dollars into the economy.

There were Americans other than celebrities in attendance Saturday in South Africa. Windstream CEO Jeff Gardner and his wife were supposed to be there (obviously, I didn’t personally see them). At a recent function, Jeff said they were going and had plannedthe trip for months.

They were there to support the USA, but they are also truly big soccer fans.

Ghana’s winning goal was what I’d call a freaky breakaway, and the shot on goal couldn’t have been stopped by any goalie in the world because it was a perfect kick.

Incidentally, U.S. goalie Tim Howard calls Memphis home, but the international player has property in Hot Springs and his motherin-law, Carol Neel, lives in Little Rock with her husband, Tony.

The USA is now out of the World Cup, but it will continue to be televised by ESPN, and there will be people who watch. Probably with the sound off.

Sports, Pages 27 on 06/27/2010

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