"The Sweet Sixteen"

Well, the first two weeks of the 2010 FIFA World Cup are in the books.  The tournament is about halfway over now, as there are little more than two weeks left.  We've already seen some beautiful goals and dramatic endings, but the best is surely yet to come.  This is where it really begins to get exciting.

Half of the teams have been eliminated.  Among the fallen are some surprises, like Italy and France.  But at the expense of some of the ousted favorites, some exciting underdogs have advanced like Japan, South Korea and Slovakia. 

Now 16 teams remain, and they will battle it out for the trophy and title of World Champions in a single elimination tournament.  There will be no more tie games now- if a match is tied after 90 minutes, two 15 minutes halves of extra-time will follow.  There is no "Golden Goal" rule anymore, so all 30 minutes will be played, no matter what.  If the match is still level after that, it will be decided by the dreaded penalty kicks.  After the last matches finished this afternoon, the round of sixteen bracket was complete:

Viewing Guide to Group C's Finale

After "winning" 1-1 against England, the USA was off to a great start.  Things fell apart quickly last Friday, when the Slovenia game did not begin exactly as planned.  Down 2-0 at halftime, the Americans were in deep trouble.  A loss would've effectively knocked them out of the tournament.  Only five teams in World Cup history had ever come back from two goals down, but the US needed at least a draw to stay alive.  They fought back heroically in the second half however, and actually scored 3 goals, only for one to be controversially disallowed.  The game finished 2-2, which was enough to keep the American's alive.  England continued to struggle, and could only draw against Algeria, totally opening up the group, and creating many different scenarios for tomorrow's games.

Here is the group table with one match left for each team (Click to see full size):

Remember the top two teams will advance.  Both games are tomorrow morning (Wednesday, June 23nd) at 7AM PT.  The Americans play Algeria on ESPN, and England takes on Slovenia on ESPN2.  Picture in picture or split screen is encouraged.  The games are also streaming on ESPN3.com if you want to monitor the England game while watching the USA game on your TV.


So, what exactly has to happen tomorrow for the USA to advance into the group stage?  Let's keep this as simple as possible. 

10 Must Watch Games

We're now well less than 24 hours away from the opening match of the World Cup.  For soccer fans around the world, today is even better than Christmas Eve.  Most probably won't be able to sleep tonight.  Luckily for those of us on the West Coast, we won't have much time to sleep anyway, the opening ceremonies and coverage starts tomorrow at 6:00AM PT.


Here is a complete schedule of the World Cup- listing the eastern start times for all the games, and what channel each match will be on here in the states.

We obviously don't know the knockout round match-ups yet, but even if the group stage this year has  some potentially great games.  Here are the 10 must-watch group stage games for the casual American follower (in chronological order):

** All matches in PACIFIC TIME  (translate accordingly if you're in a different time zone) **

Meet Your USA Team- Part II: The 23

This is the second of a two-part intro to the US Soccer team.  Here's a link to part I that details the recent history of the team, including last summer's Confederations Cup.  Today's part two is an introduction to the 23 players that make up this summer's World Cup team.





During his four years as USA coach, Bob Bradley gave a "cap" (international appearance) to 92 different American players.  But for the world cup itself, he had to narrow the roster down to 23.  It certainly wasn't easy.  


The 23 players selected do not necessarily represent the best twenty-three American players alive.  They are the best players suited to run Bradley's system, and with the right balance of players at each position, because fatigue and injuries are a reality at the World Cup.  Some players also missed out due to injury.  The most notable was Charlie Davies.  Davies is a young striker, who went through a remarkable run with the national team last summer, and looked on the path to superstardom before a horrific car crash nearly took his life last Autumn (click here to read my emotional blog about Davies accident and rehab).  He was not able to recover in time for the World Cup, causing a selection problem for Coach Bradley, and leading to controversy when he was left of the roster.


The World cup only comes around every four years, so while it's an extremely important decision for the coach, it's also an emotional one.  Bradley had to cut players that gave their all to the national team for three years of qualifiers and build up.  But after what was surely a difficult decision, Bradley released his roster in late May.   


Without further ado, meet Bob Bradley's Final 23 for South Africa:

Meet Your USA Team- Part I: Recent History and The Confederations Cup Run

Once seen as little more than a running joke in an international soccer circles, the United States Soccer team has not exactly had a long and glorious history.  With soccer relegated to essentially a niche sport in America, the national team struggled through failure after failure during most of the 20th century (check out this long but fantastic article about the American Soccer's decades of futility) and few at home even noticed.

Things began to change in 1989, when a stunning goal in the last qualifying game by Paul Caligiuri sent the Americans to their first World Cup in nearly a half century.  The Americans were outclassed that year in Italia 1990, but hosted an extremely successful World Cup in 1994, and acquitted themselves well on the field as well. 

World Cup Week Begins!

It's now less than 4 days until the opening match of the World Cup (host South Africa, vs. Mexico Friday, 10:00AM ET, ESPN).  The excitement is really building.  Most teams have played their final warm up matches, and are raring to go.  It's going to be a long week waiting until Friday!

Here are a couple links to get your afternoon going:


A great article by Sports Illustrated's Grant Wahl, previewing the World Cup with players and teams to watch, as well as links to numerous other World Cup previews and resources on SI.com


Yahoo Sports' Martin Rogers' column about England's lack of respect for their American opponents, in the build up to their June 12th match


Highlights of the USA's 3-1 warmup victory over fellow World Cup team Australia


You might of heard about the nearly tragic stampede before a warm-up friendly between North Korea and Nigeria in South Africa this Weekend.  Here's a great eyewitness report from a Nigerian journalist 



Watch this space, I'll be back soon with a preview of the American team, introducing you to all their players.

So Who's Playing?

As mentioned earlier, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa is a competition between thirty-two teams.  You could probably guess a good deal of the participants, but some are more surprising.  You know how the teams were selected through qualifying, but who made it?  

Here's a fun map of all the 2010 World Cup participants, from Wikipedia.   

Green= In World Cup, Red= failed to qualify, Purple= did not enter

The Basics

For some, the following post might be common knowledge.  Maybe you already know everything I’m about to explain.  But many people don’t.  To me, most of this stuff is second nature; it’s my life.  But I realized from all the questions I’ve been getting lately and the responses I got when I told people about this blog, that the workings of the World Cup are not exactly common knowledge.  So give it a read.  I don’t mean to be condescending or redundant, but a lot of this stuff is not very well known.  If you already know all this stuff, congratulations!  You are in a rare group with maybe 1% of your fellow Americans.  If you’re on the other end of the spectrum, and this is all new to you, even better.  I’m glad to help.  

The World Cup starts a week from today.  I plan on eventually going into detail about certain teams, players, games, etc.  But before we can talk about that, we have to address the most basic questions first. 

Podcast of the Day

Okay "Podcast of the Day" is a bit of stretch, as this likely won't be a regular feature.  But I listened to a pretty good podcast today with ESPN's Bill Simmons ("The Sports Guy").  Simmons is one of my favorite writers.  Although he loves the team I most loathe (the Boston Celtics), I admire his writing style and the 'every fan' perspective he writes from.

In this podcast, he discusses the World Cup with ESPN writer and television producer Michael Davies.  Davies, a Brit, is one of ESPN's leading soccer writers.  This podcast is about 50 minutes long and is perfect for the casual sports fan.  Davies and Simmons discuss some of the tournament's potential stars, which teams could win, what it will be like for fans in South Africa, England's hopes, and more.  Because Simmons is representing the casual American fan, the two make frequent analogies to American sports, discuss the US's chances, and even go off on a tangent about which NBA stars would make good soccer players.

It's a really fun listen, and would be enlightening for all but the most hardcore soccer fans.  It's a perfect introduction to the World Cup for the casual fan.  You can listen to it on the ESPN.com website, or download it on Itunes and listen to it in the car, at the gym, etc.


http://espn.go.com/espnradio/player?rd=1#/podcenter/?id=5239664&autoplay=1&callsign=ESPNRADIO


My favorite quote: Davies on the reaction in England if the US beat them on June 12th:
"Honestly, if we'd lost the Falklands War against Argentina, it would have been easier... It would have been easier to lose a war to Argentina, than to lose a World Cup game against the US"

Today's Video of the Day

I plan on posting lots of videos on this blog.  I like to think I'm a decent writer, but some things are just better seen than read. I'll try to include as many relevant videos are possible. 

Today's video is a good introduction to the passion and excitement of the World Cup.  It features the official song of the 2010 South Africa World Cup, Wavin' Flag by K'naan, with highlights of historic World Cup moments.


Click here to watch the video on youtube.

Welcome!

I plan on getting some posts up soon.  You can expect around one per day, over the next 10 days leading up to the kickoff of the World Cup on June 11th.

'What exactly is this blog?', you're probably wondering.  I am a huge soccer fan, especially of the LA Galaxy and USA National team, and am extremely excited for the World Cup.  I recognize though, that I am in the minority in America.   Soccer is a fringe sport here at best, and not well understood by most people- sports fans/media included.  When the World Cup comes around (once every four years) , the media begins to give soccer a huge increase in coverage.  Tons of people who never cared about soccer at all try to follow along, and causal fans get truly sucked in.  It's hard not to- there's a reason the World Cup is the most popular and important sporting event on the planet.   

While it's easy enough to follow along without truly understanding what's going on, wouldn't it be much more fun for these new fans if they had a background in soccer?  This blog will be your background.  I want to help people who are less obsessed with soccer than I am enjoy the World Cup just as much.