The World Cup

Soccer

I have to admit that I have really gotten into the world-cup again.   I've watched about half the games in the first rounds and almost every game since and it's become abundantly clear that the US will need to address the following few things if they hope to be competitive in 2014

They need to get rid of that coach for the following reasons.

-          although I know he motivated the team but when you have your kid playing on the team it feels like Little League baseball and the world-cup is the major leagues

-          Against Ghana after running up and down the field for 120 minutes he never used his last substitutions to get some fresh legs in there.  Even I know that at some point you're getting diminishing returns when your players are completely exhausted.  Don't talk to me about penalty kicks because you need to get there first.

  

-          You can't fall behind and hope to catch up every single round especially in a long tournament with world-class competition.   At some point you have to be aggressive early and play from ahead for a while..which leads to

-          The US team needs to find, import build, buy, grow or steal some forwards.  It is blatantly obvious that our front line cannot compete with the world class talent on these European and South American teams.   They don't have anybody who is fast or strong.  Their strikers are horrible.   You know when your best scorer is a midfielder that you have to rethink your strategy.  Whatever happened to Freddy Adu?

-          Somebody go down to Arizona and reverse those immigration laws immediately and get some Mexican and Guatemalan kids into futball uniforms with a big USA flag plastered to the front of it.   At the same time maybe it's time to shut the Canadian border as we have plenty of hockey players…I think.

We all know that Soccer will never be anything more than the fourth sport in this country and people will point to this as to why we cannot win a World-Cup.   This is total trash fourth or fifth place still means you can get a ton of viewers.   Playing soccer is immensly popular amongst kids so it's not like they aren't being exposed to it.    If Soccer is the fourth of fifth best sport than track and Field has to be the 10^th  and downhill bobsled has to be #1000 and the US Olympic team does quite well in that.      Of course it will never be as popular as the NFL or MLB but there are 300,000,000 people in the USA while a lot of the countries who do well in the World Cup have less than 10% of that population.    The way I see it you only need one-in-ten kids to be interested to have the same amount of kids to pull from as other countries.   USA soccer should be investing in youth programs with the internet, satellite TV etc it's about time we start getting some good futball in this country on TV because you know our kids know how to watch TV which is the first step to getting interested and eventually good.    I'm convinced that if the World Cup was every 2 years the US would be more competitive because this country does get into it for big events.  It's just hard to follow a sport when you are watching the equivalent of the Santa Fe River Dogs vs. the Bakersfield Blaze.   I would like to watch good futball it's just hard to find and hard to find a team to root for.

But most importantly they need a coach who can teach our players to act because it's very obvious that if you can't grab your leg in pain when a guy slides 10 feet away from you, you'll never compete on the big stage.