U.S. National Football Team

USA USA USA US America have actually got a pretty good record in World Cup, it may surprise people that the USA were involved in some of the very first World Cups in the 1930s, some twenty years before England or any other home nation did so themselves. They cannot kid themselves that they invented the game though, and the truth now is they are really not very good. A spectacularly bad performance in France ’98 where they lost all their games and worse still losing to Iran is hopefully for them not on the cards again. I would not bet against it though. Some bright person decided that it would be a good idea to host the 1994 World Cup, a festival ...  Read the complete review

While we think of Americans as Basball slugging, ball throwing, puck slaping,slam dunking sports fans, we tend to forget one thing. If they get interested in something, and practice a bit, soon they become world champs at it. For decades (well since the 1970's) they have tried to adopt our beautiful game. Trouble was, they went about it the wrong way. Instead of developing it at Grassroots level in schools and collegese, they brought in a ready made package of seasoned veterans and over the hill has beens. Stars like George Best and Pele tried to impress but failed. The crowd that would have attended were already heavily involved in ...  Read the complete review

Scoff, if you like, at our poor performance in France 1998, and the catastrophic defeat at the hands of Iran. Possessing a Dutch-American nationality, I suppose the logical thing to do was throw my support behind Holland from the very beginning. As was particularly the case in Italia 90, the United States could not be compared to Holland in terms of technical ability. As Brian Glanville so aptly states in his “The Story of the World Cup” (1997), American coach Bob Gansler “preferred beef to brains” in this, the USA’s first World Cup since 1950. Yet in this early period, I had a thing for the underdog. After a disastrous 1-5 ...  Read the complete review