It is Old World against New. It is the battle for supremacy in Group C. But it goes beyond that. England against the United States is a clash of sporting cultures. The oft-voiced criticism on the east of the Atlantic is that the Americans proclaim themselves world champions at sports few other nations play.
Equally valid is the British habit of inventing sports, exporting them and seeing other countries beat them thereafter. It is 44 years since England were world champions at the national sport, only 12 months since the United States almost won one of Fifa's premier tournaments, the Confederations Cup. At some stage, Winston Churchill's phrase 'the special relationship' is certain to be used. When Churchill coined it, in 1946, it was an apt description of the political and diplomatic ties. Now, for the English at least, a love-hate relationship may be a more appropriate description.
Its financial power and cultural dominance makes the United States a behemoth. Its historic preference for baseball, basketball and American football makes it the last frontier for the global game. Brits have attempted to conquer it; Bobby Moore, George Best and others in the North American Soccer League and now David Beckham in Major League Soccer. But English ambivalence is apparent at times. Football, in the US, tends to refer to a sport where the ball is generally in players' hands; soccer is a rarely used term in the United Kingdom.
To English irritation, the vocabulary of the sports alters across the Atlantic. Writing and broadcasting styles differ dramatically and, given a predilection for statistics, the American sporting lexicon can be hard for the British to understand. Yet, as Churchill also said, history is written by winners. In this instance, it is written about defeats. England's traditional supremacy has been punctuated by two high-profile humiliations: in the 1950 World Cup, when Joe Gaetjens scored the United States' winner and some British newspapers assumed the score was a misprint and changed it from 1-0 to 10-1 or 10-0 to the English; and a 2-0 setback in 1993, courtesy of Thomas Dooley and Alexi Lalas.
Historically, it has been a no-win game for England, expected to win and embarrassed when they did not. Yet the prowess of Bob Bradley's team, deservedly ranked 14th in the world, shows the progress the Americans have made. This is their sixth consecutive World Cup; England, in contrast, missed the 1994 tournament, staged in the United States. That, in turn, should disprove the theory Americans aren't interested in football. No tournament has had a higher average attendance than the one in 1994, with 68,991 spectators per game; the expanding MLS is one of the success stories in world football; and the US should prove one of the best supported teams in South Africa.
And England has served as a finishing school for their squad. Nine played there last season; four others have done in the past. Jay DeMerit, the defender who worked his way up from Southall, in England's ninth tier, to Watford before earning international recognition, is an extreme example of the benefits of crossing the Atlantic. He, like several of his teammates, is a university graduate, college scholarships providing part of their education and explaining why many American footballers are more eloquent than their English equivalents.
A grounding in several sports may explain why the United States excels in producing goalkeepers, which was long assumed to be an English speciality. Had he been born in Jersey, rather than New Jersey, Tim Howard would have been a shoo-in for Fabio Capello's team. The same cannot be said for the outfield players, although Landon Donovan would be in contention. Beckham's LA Galaxy teammate and, briefly, Howard's colleague at Everton, also illustrates the difference between the two teams.
Aged 28, he should win his 124th cap. By way of comparison, Peter Shilton, the most-capped Englishman, played until he was 40 to accumulate 125. The US play almost as often as some club sides; a regular criticism of England, in contrast, is that players fail to replicate their club form on international duty. That said, both England and the United States disappointed in 2006, just as both had surged encouragingly to the quarter-finals in 2002. Making amends for events in Germany four years ago, however, becomes a secondary consideration in this clash of two footballing worlds.
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