In the soccer press yesterday, all the writing and chatter is about the state of U.S. soccer. Is Bruce Arena responsible for the failure? What should the federation do to improve things? Why did our top players fail to show up when needed?

Fans are hurt. They gave the team great support, but to no avail. Perhaps they knew that they were shouting for a hopeless cause, but no matter; they shouted and encouraged the team until the final whistle announced to the world that the Americans were going home without a victory, and with only one real goal scored against six conceded in three matches.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but made much worse by the latest news from Germany. In the match between Australia and Croatia, referee Graham Poll of England made an unforgivable error. He gave a caution (yellow card) to one Croatian player three times, when he should have sent him from the field at the second.

Well, you say, what does this have to do with the state of U.S. soccer? Let’s have a look at the context surrounding Poll’s mistake, and the strong reaction from FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who stated that the error is not understandable. That remark is ominous for Poll, since all the referees knew before the competition started that a major error meant a ticket home.

Before the World Cup started, we knew that for the first time since 1978, no American referee would be officiating. Kevin Stott from southern California was nominated by U.S. Soccer, but his performances did not satisfy the FIFA referee committee; he was named as a reserve. After two referees could not pass the fitness test, and another dropped out because of the suspicions of his connection with the scandal in Serie A (Italy) competition, Stott was invited to attend the World Cup, not as a referee, but as a substitute and development official. Not great, but better than nothing.

So he and two assistant referees, Greg Barkey and Chris Strickland, went to Germany to serve as fourth officials and fifth officials. They carried the faint hope that they would get a game, even though FIFA has said that they had no plans to use development or reserve officials. It would have taken a major screw-up by several of the nominated referees for the Americans to get a chance. And of course, Stott, Barkey and Strickland would have to do their jobs perfectly.

Fast-forward to Poll’s match between Australia and Croatia. Stott was the fourth and Barkey the fifth official. Their principal tasks involve being extra pairs of eyes to see events on the field, and in Stott’s case, to manage the team benches, substitutions, display of numbers, time left. But also, all officials must keep a record of the game, and for the first time in the World Cup, all the officials are wired and connected by a radio system, in order to pass information back and forth in case of a missed flag, or a foul behind the referee’s back. Even before the advent of radio communication on the field, communication among the officials is essential for efficient refereeing.

After Poll’s major error, he confessed to a review panel that he had mistakenly recorded Australian defender Craig Moore, #3, when booking Croatian defender Josip Simunic, also #3, in the 61st minute. Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA had said after the match: “We have had four officials and what is not understandable is that nobody intervened… There are people there and one of them should have intervened and run on to the field and said, ‘Stop, stop.’” That’s an ominous statement that the mistake was not solely Poll’s; it indicts Kevin Stott and Greg Barkey, as well as Poll’s two assistant referees from England.

FIFA communications director Markus Siegler announced that the referees’ committee would decide Wednesday which officials will stay after the second round, and then, referring to Poll’s match, added: “The referees committee also recognized … the fact that none of the match officials at the stadium picked up on the error.”

I know from personal experience that recording a game from the fourth official position or while acting as linesman (now assistant referee) is not a difficult task. With radio communication, it should be even easier, making this error in Australia versus Croatia almost incomprehensible. Even if the radios weren’t working, communication among all the officials is straightforward.

The statements from the president and the communications director of FIFA seem to indicate that some of the officials involved in this screw-up will be going home on Wednesday. Poll may survive because of his vast experience and reputation, but not Kevin Stott and Greg Barkey (and inevitably, Chris Strickland, because they were selected as a trio).

And if that were to be the case, it would be another message the world is sending about the state of U.S. soccer.

I watched (happily) the telecast of the tense and exciting Italy/USA game today, and listened (unhappily) to the bleatings of the team of commentators—Alexi Lalas, Eric Wynalda, Marcelo Balboa—about some of the refereeing decisions. Yes, I know that Dave O’Brien was there, too, but in my opinion he doesn’t qualify as a commentator on soccer, and certainly not as a pundit (Learned Teacher).
What bothered me more than anything about their commentating was not the obvious chauvinism, for the three of them have made no secret that they were supporting the U.S., but the fact that they were wrong, simply wrong. And since they are well-known retired professional and national team players, their words can have an influence upon many, many young and impressionable soccer players. You don’t spread worthwhile knowledge by having the ignorant teach the naïve.
Let’s take four decisions: the three sendings-off and the disallowed goal by Beasley. And in order to keep you reading, let me say at the start that in my opinion, all four were correct.
Everyone seemed to agree that the young Italian De Rossi deserved to be dismissed after his elbow split and bloodied McBride’s face, and as I saw it, the foul was a deliberate act. But even if the contact had been entirely accidental, he would have been sent off, because FIFA has decreed time and again that they are trying to eliminate from the game any contact with the elbow. So a careless act, a reckless act or a deliberate act involving the elbow should get an expulsion. The difference would be in the punishment the player gets, for a deliberate act might get more than one game suspension. We’ll see. But none of the “commentators” mentioned any of this, during the game or after.
In the final minute of the first half, the referee evened things up by sending off Mastroeni of the U.S. for a challenge on Pirlo. That’s what the commentators thought: a “pay back” call. I’ve never known a referee make a call to even things up, but I do know that some players talk about it. But let’s look at the foul, and see what a nonsense the commentators put about.
Mastroeni went in for the challenge and got there late. When he made contact with (that’s polite talk for kicked) Pirlo, the ball was 5-6 feet away, Mastroeni’s studs were exposed and they caught the Italian just above the ankle. If you think that such a foul is not worthy of a sending-off, what on Earth is? Mastroeni knew he was not going to get to the ball first or at the same time as Pirlo; that’s one of the first skills you learn in competitive soccer. He chose to keep going, and he was rightly punished for the foul.
Not three minutes into the second half, a rather worn red card was raised in the air again to let us know that Eddie Pope was leaving, for a foul from behind on Gilardinho. Was it worth only a yellow? Not in my book, but that’s not the point. Pope already had a caution for clobbering an opponent earlier. The first caution was a statement to him that he would not go unpunished for something similar. It was an official warning about his conduct! Now Balboa thought that the referee should have talked to him and tell him to knock it off. But Marcelo, my boy, the referee did that when he gave Pope the yellow card in the first half. ‘Nuff said.
And finally the goal disallowed after DaMarcus Beasley drove the ball into the net. The description from The Independent in England is objective, accurate, succinct, in other words, right on. “DaMarcus Beasley actually had the ball in the net with a fine angled drive, but McBride was in an offside position, right in front of goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon.” Balboa got this one right, but Bruce Arena yelled out: “That’s impossible!” Although he still shouts and gesticulates about decisions, he has learned, after being sent off in international matches in the past, to temper his remarks and behavior.
I’ll have more to say about commentaries, and I’ll have more to say about why the commentators get things wrong, and why players do the foolish things they did today. But in the meantime, I’m happy to say that a referee did what he was supposed to do, without fear or favor. I must disagree again with today’s commentators, for I believe he will have another game in this World Cup.

Yes, the whole world knows that the U.S. got thumped by the Czech Republic in the World Cup. No doubt, most soccer fans here are wondering why, and of course it is the job of soccer columnists and pundits to tell them why. But before I start, I want to remind you what the word pundit means. Taken from Hindi, it means learned teacher, with emphasis on learned.
I was asked by my editor to comment on the U.S. failure in the World Cup, and I told him that I would do so when it was clear that Donovan, Beasley, McBride, Pope, Keller et al. were in fact eliminated from the competition. That can’t happen before Saturday when they face Italy, and surely no real pundit would attempt to analyze an event that hasn’t happened yet. Nor will I.
The problem so far, it seems to me, is that a lot of fans, pundits and even some of the players and coaches, have been deceived by their own expectations. Ranked as number five in the world, it’s easy to kid yourself that you can take anyone on. Donovan should have recalled, before he stepped on the field with Pavel Nedved, how he felt after being run off the park some months ago by another world-class midfielder, Steve Gerrard of Liverpool, in a European game. That was before young Landon decided he could become a superstar by returning home to hone his skills in MLS. No doubt he’s happier back home in California, but he’s not going to become a better soccer player in this company.
I wrote an analysis of the FIFA ranking system in this blog on May 29. Even though I have read many recent commentaries on the defeat by the Czech Republic, I have not seen many of those same writers try to figure out the flaws in the ranking system. Perhaps they aren’t true pundits; perhaps they are not after all, learned teachers.
So I’ll wait until after the U.S./Italy game is over before commenting any further. And if the U.S. wins, then I’ll wait a little longer. My hindsight is better with the past than with the future.

Inevitably in a World Cup, some of the intense excitement is generated by controversial refereeing decisions. We just can’t avoid them; the referees come from all over the world, some from countries where the level of the game is at best amateurish. How can a referee from, say, an island in the southwest Pacific or from Benin have seen the kind of soccer a referee from Germany or England or Argentina sees week in, week out?
Knowing this, you hope that no referee gets in over his head in a game that requires someone with more experience and knowledge. And then you hope that he won’t make a decision that determines the course of a game. An unjust sending-off, for example, a dodgy penalty-kick, or to get to the point in a game today, the awarding of a goal which should never have been.
Today Australia and Japan played a game that should have been a toss-up. Australia has for the most part players earning their money in European leagues, and Japan, one of the surprises of the 2002 World Cup, are a lot more sophisticated and skillful than many observers give them credit for. But then we come to the critical decision, in the 26th minute of the game.
Nakamura hit a ball from the right, and curled it in towards the mouth of the goal, to the hungry crowd of defenders and attackers waiting there. Pack that many players in a small space, and you can expect trouble. And the wise referee prepares for it.
Over comes the ball, four players go up for it, including the Australian goalkeeper. One of the forwards bumps the goalkeeper out of the way so that he cannot reach the ball, which drops into the net. Several defenders protest, but Egyptian referee Essam Abdel Fatah waves them away, and all of a sudden Australia are one down.
[For those with a technical frame of mind, the reason Fatah missed the call, is because he was in the wrong place to see what was about to occur, and his view was obstructed by the crowd of players. He was outside the penalty-area for an inswinging ball in the face of the goal. A wiser referee would have gone to the goal-line to get close to the action, in which in professional soccer, it is not uncommon for one attacker to take the goalkeeper out of the play, leaving the ball free for other forwards. But how much professional soccer does a FIFA referee from Egypt see in the course of a year?]
On and on the game went, with Australia unfairly a goal down. Dispirited by the goal, they weren’t playing well, and it looked as though they might lose on the basis of the decision in the 26th minute.
But the Great Referee who looks down to dispense justice took over in the final minutes of the game. After sustaining the suspense for as long as he dared, he gave Cahill, the Australian substitute, a couple of opportunities. At eighty-four minutes, it became 1-1; eighty-nine minutes, 2-1 for Australia, and in the last minute of play, Aloisi banged in the third for a final score of 3-1.
Yes, Virginia, there is a soccer god looking down in Germany to dispense justice. Now let him send the Egyptian home and bring in the professionals.

As soon as Theo Walcott, the 17-year-old striker for Arsenal of the Premiership, was selected to play for England in the World Cup in Germany even before he had played for his club, the press and the fans started asking: “Is he ready?”
Here’s the opinion of his coach, Arsene Wenger. Remember that he sees him play every week, and that when he bought Walcott from Southampton, he bought him on the basis of his play in the division below Arsenal, but nevertheless in highly-competitive soccer. In an interview broadcast by the BBC in England, this is what Wenger said:
“Well, I realize that it will be a big responsibility for him, but I’m confident he will take it as naturally as he can and that I believe he can be a pleasant surprise personally. Because he can come on and make a difference. He has the ingredients where you do not need too much experience to express them, because of the good timing of his runs, and he has an electric pace, and he is a good finisher. No matter—you can say what you want but when you play against Paraguay, the defenders will not be better than he has in training, and once he’s in front of them, he’s in front of them and you’ll never catch him back. So I don’t think that that makes too much difference. Just the fact that it is the World Cup, it’s maybe more impressive, but 90 percent of the time he will play against players who are far less good than the players he plays against in training.”
Tomorrow morning, we will probably have a chance to see the young player run against those Paraguayan defenders, and then we can gauge how wise his Arsenal coach is.

For our soccer pleasure, I present a SMORGASBORD for the opening of the World Cup.
A little TID-BIT before the appetizers come around: Not one of the eleven starters for Brazil plays in Brazil. European leagues have become the heartbeat of top-class soccer.
Now, the APPETIZERS, a plateful of readers’ responses to previous blogs. Matt recommends the new World Cup anthem at http://thegamesong.com Sample lines from the rap, accompanied by great game clips:
If you live for the game
And it runs in ya veins
Say “Ole, Ole, Oh!”
Drunkenfist (really!)suggests entering a World Cup prediction contest for a prize of $2500:
http://www.121s.com/viewtopic.php?t=8315
The ranking system stirred up some comments: Giancarlo was glad of the explanation; Kevin asked about the ELO system as used originally for chess, and Henrique suggested the same thing. Thanks to both of you for bringing it up. I’m going to check it out and I’ll get back to the blog with comments.
And inevitably, someone spotted a mistake I made. (I was a referee for a long time; I’m used to it!) Thank you Jason for noticing I mixed up the Coles (Ashley and Joe) in England. I’ve straightened it out now.
THE MAIN COURSE: The TV schedule for tomorrow:
Game 1, Friday, Jun 9: 12:00 Eastern, 9:00 PCT: Germany/Costa Rica ESPN2 & Univision
Game 2, Friday, Jun 9: 15:00 Eastern, 12:00 PCT: Poland/Ecuador ESPN2 & Univision
How about a nice FRENCH DESSERT: Arsene Wenger talking about Theo Walcott playing for England:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_
cup_2006/teams/england/4762855.stm
For those who can’t reach the video, I’ll print the transcript tomorrow.
And to end the meal, a DOSE OF ANTACIDS because of all the injuries to players:
Gennaro Gattuso, midfielder of Italy, out with a thigh injury;
Steve Gerrard of England, out with back spasms after a knock on the hip;
Djibril Cissé of France suffered a terrible injury when last night he fractured both the tibia and fibula of his right leg in a warmup friendly match against China;
Michael Ballack of Germany, who has a calf-strain, may be out for the opener. Some of his teammates may be injured by Ballack’s comments about their chances in the Cup. “This team wobbles. It isn’t always stable,” Ballack said.
Lionel Messi of Argentina may not be available because he is still recovering from a leg injury;
Pavel Nedved of Czech Republic, injured and iced a knee in practice;
The first-choice goalkeeper Isaksson of Sweden, suffered a concussion after being hit in face by the ball from a shot by a team mate;
Do Santos of Tunisia, the leading striker, is out with shin injury;
The Netherlands had a string of injuries but apparently everyone is OK now;
So too Australia: all are OK now, after the latest, their principal striker Viduka limped off practice.
Six Croatian players are recuperating after their losing warm-up match with Spain. Hurt feelings, mainly.
Tomorrow morning, it all begins. Enjoy the feast!

The presence in the World Cup of precocious teenage players indicates what must change in the U.S. if we are ever going to seriously challenge the world as a major soccer country. Forget the artificial ranking of number 5; it won’t mean much when the games start on Friday! It’s only goals that will count.
The reason we will get to see these youngsters is because of the way that the rest of the world develops players. Talented kids are identified early, sometimes even before they have reached their teens. They are encouraged to train above themselves, with older, more experienced players, eventually competing with adult players if they sign with professional clubs. They learn the skills and the tactics of the game before they are too set in the ways of amateurism.
For many years, players in the U.S. were not allowed to play in the next upper age-bracket, and for a youth player to turn out for an adult team required almost as much paperwork as you need to buy a house. And even then his youth coach could prevent it by simply saying “No”, irrespective of what the player wanted.
Because of the emphasis here on a college education, good players as teens seek out scholarships, using their soccer skills as a means of buying that education. In doing so, they lose out on a soccer education. If they really have professional potential, in most cases they will suffer by being in the hands of an amateur coach for four years. Where they need better players to learn from, they will have only their peers, and will end up (maybe) as journeymen in MLS. Freddie Adu is an exception, allowed by his family to forego some of his formal education in order to develop as a player.
Signs of change are about us, however. Is it possible to combine the proven way of developing the world’s best soccer players, with the U.S. desire for an education that many foreign players abandon? In 1999, 20 of the best youth players in the country were invited to participate in a grand experiment. Would they move to a residency program in Florida to train as soccer players for the Under-17 world championship while getting a high-school education?
Did it work? If it didn’t produce a team of world champions, it did produce four fine soccer players who are now part of our World Cup team: Landon Donovan, DaMarcus Beasley, Bobby Convey and Oguchi Onyewu. And three of them play successfully in Europe; only Donovan abandoned the European scene to concentrate on developing his career in Major League Soccer.
But more important than the immediate success is the fact that it points the way to the future. We have to identify the talented players early, give them a way to play against and develop as professionals while preserving their desire for an education. Twenty-five years ago, the North American Soccer League sowed the seed for this development with Team America, an entirely home-grown group of players competing as an entity against teams stocked with professionals from all over the world.
The performance of our national team in the 2002 World Cup showed that we have the desire and the talent. The Florida experiment shows what we have to do now.

The first World Cup I saw was televised from Sweden in 1958, when the whole footballing world was introduced to a 17-year-old Brazilian magician called Pelé. I still lived in Wales at the time, and I watched him score the goal in the quarter-finals that put my heroes out of the competition 1-0. In the semis he scored three against France, and in the final, two against Sweden, one of them by trapping the ball on his thigh, flicking it over his head and volleying it past the keeper.
In most soccer-playing countries, fans are accustomed to seeing teenagers perform at the highest level of professional soccer. The list of such young players extends back into the nineteenth century. Pelé himself was only fifteen when he first played for the Santos club in Brazil, Maradona came on for Argentina as a teenager, Rooney of England was playing for Everton in the Premiership at seventeen, and George Best began to star for Manchester United as a teenager. The best of them get used to the crowds, the pressure at an early age, and carry it with them into international soccer.
Theo Walcott of England is an unusual case because he has been picked to play for England in Germany, but hasn’t yet appeared for his Premiership team Arsenal after he was transferred from Southampton, where he was a starter. He did appear in the recent international match against Belarus, and showed no signs of stage-fright. I would expect that before he leaves Germany, he will have played in his first World Cup.
We should all be looking forward to seeing the Argentinian teenager Lionel Messi, who plays for Barcelona. Recovering from a torn leg-muscle, he says he’s ready to play, but not for a full ninety minutes. However, already the Argentinian press is calling him the “next Maradona”, after his performances in under-20 competition.
Arsène Wenger, coach of Arsenal in the Premiership and obviously building a team for the future, can boast: “We are the only club in the world with three teenagers at the World Cup - Theo Walcott (England), Cesc Fabregas (Spain) and Johan Djourou (Switzerland).”
Other 17-year-olds have made their debut in the World Cup: Samuel Eto’o and Salomon Olembe (both of Cameroon) at France 1998; Nigeria’s Femi Opabunmi in 2002); and Rigobert Song (Cameroon) in 1994. And, of course, Pelé, who was 17 years and 235 days old when he first played in Sweden. He became the youngest World Cup player in 1958, the youngest-ever goalscorer and ultimately the youngest-ever World Cup winner.
My column in the Tribune today is about watching Pelé. Go to the online version and search with my name to get it.

Picture a small town on a promontory jutting from the north shore of a beautiful lake surrounded by the central Swiss Alps. Add a small soccer stadium with perfect turf, an interior playing pitch, and a gym. Bring in a group of world-class soccer players to prepare them for the greatest sporting event on Earth—the 2006 World Cup. That has to be perfection, nirvana for any soccer fan. But is it ideal for the players?
Let’s face it: sports stars love adulation. They thrive on the enthusiasm of fans, and when the fans are nearby, the players can’t resist them. In the small stadium specially built in Weggis, Switzerland, for the Brazilians, the fans are only a few feet away from the players on the pitch. And that creates a problem for their coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira.
In an interview with the news agency Reuters, Parreira explained: “We know that we have a team of celebrities,” but added that that “is not enough to win the World Cup. You have to have humility and play for the team.” The skills of the Brazilian players are dazzling—envied and feared by their opponents. But Perreira wants them to be able to express those skills, and so in the training camp he had planned “..to create a relaxed and tranquil atmosphere, so that the players can play with happiness and freedom, creativity and improvisation.”
But with 5,000 fans nearby and hundreds of journalists watching, too much boisterous happiness is not enough peace and tranquility. Not only that, but the road leading to the stadium—the so-called “party mile”—has become lined with concession stands selling food, and worse, the notorious Brazilian capirinha, a drink made from crushed limes, sugar and cachaça, a very strong liquor derived from sugarcane, and nearly equal in potency to moonshine. Enough was enough for Perreira, who threatened to shut out the public if things got out-of-hand.
But in the world of top-class soccer competitions, the coach is not necessarily the most powerful voice. The Brazilian federation is getting a lot of money for being in Weggis, just as the U. S. Soccer Federation got a lot of marketing mileage out of the three games the U. S. played in seven days (23, 26 and 28) this past week-and-a-half. Never mind that the U. S. players arrived in Germany bone-tired after that effort, never mind that Parreira is unhappy.
Money counts, and the Brazilian coach had to make nice. You can almost see him gritting his teeth to say later that “It’s nice for the players to be applauded and recognized. It has not, in any way, disturbed the rhythm of our work.” Yeah, right! But they are still the favorites.

What a deal the Brazilian federation got when looking for a place for the team to train before the World Cup! According to the news agency Reuters, the small town of Weggis, on Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland, offered a temporary home for the Brazilians in their two-week pre-World Cup training program. Not just a five-star hotel for free, you understand, but a 5000-seat stadium for practice, an indoor training pitch and a gym. And the good citizens threw in a media center for good measure, so that more than 400 Brazilian media staff could report back to Rio de Janeiro on how the team looks.
But that’s not the whole deal. The sports marketing company that came up with this scheme also tossed in $1.2 million in cash to the Brazilian football federation as an extra incentive, and took care of transportation and security costs. The cost to the town itself, a beautiful little place on a gorgeous lake in the mountains, will be only a few tens of thousand of Swiss francs (a Swiss franc is worth about a dollar-and-a-quarter), the rest being taken up by organizers and sponsors, who will of course, sell tickets to the training sessions, and TV rights to more than 100 countries.
For the die-hard fans, the organizers will even auction off the right to sleep in your favorite player’s bed, but only after he has gone.
This seems like a win-win situation, if ever I saw one. The Brazilians spend only a few of their own “Reais” (plural of the Brazilian currency “Real”), the team has perfect facilities, with a pitch exactly to World Cup dimensions, and even covered with the same species of grass; the locals spend a few dollars to get the World Cup favorites (and some tourists) in town, and the sponsors are going to make some money on the venture.
Weggis was good enough for visits from Queen Victoria (she was rarely amused) and Mark Twain, but the mayor of the town thinks that the presence of the Brazilian World Cup team is “…definitely the biggest event in our history.”
But is it good for Brazil, as they prepare to defend their title? Check in here tomorrow for more information and comments from the coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira.