We Will Get Another Chance in 1994 Cup--Unfortunately
FLORENCE, Italy — Yankees, go home.
The United States team sleeps with the fishes. Those floundering, foundering Americans have gone down for the third time. They have gotten the old heave-ho from the World Cup soccer tournament, to the surprise of, oh, maybe seven people on seven continents.
We lived down to everyone’s expectations. We came, we saw, we never conquered. The results are in, and here they are: a No Damn Good (Game 1), a Not Half Bad (Game 2) and a Nothing to Write Home About (Game 3). Our latest non-achievement, Tuesday night’s 2-1 loss to Austria, was interesting principally in the respect that it wasn’t 1-0.
However . . .
For the red, white and (mostly) blue, this is the end of the World Cup, not the end of the world. Nobody is going to be yelling “stop the presses” in the United States because the team lost a soccer game or two or three. Around the nation and around the world, our reputation remains intact as a country that does not play soccer very well and does not much care one way or another that it does not play soccer very well.
Four years from now, at least, we are the World Cup.
“It isn’t going to take another 40 years for us to get to the next one,” said Bob Gansler, who might or might not still be the Americans’ coach when they play host to--and thereby qualify for automatically for--the World Cup of 1994, when we will try again to run our half-century victory total to two.
And who knows? In four years, Gansler might even learn how to smile. For some reason, the guy always looks as though he has just sat down in a chair to get two wisdom teeth pulled, and smelled alcohol on his dentist’s breath.
“Much has been made of the fact that I haven’t smiled a lot,” Gansler said as his Club Mediocre vacation in Italy came to an end. “Well, let me tell you something. Just because I don’t smile doesn’t mean I’m not pleased.”
This was a typical defensive posture for Gansler, whose specialty as head coach was instructing his players how to run backward. We have seen circus unicycle acts that did not backpedal as quickly and as often as the United States did in this World Cup. Fans in the stands must have felt like cupping their palms over their mouths and shouting: “No, the goal’s that way! Go that way!”
Gansler did the best he could, which wasn’t much, with a team that was too slow, too short, too skinny, too young and even too bad for its own good. The one thing the Americans turned out to be good at was committing fouls. Had they spent half as much time kicking the ball as they did kicking their opponents, they might still be playing soccer alongside all those geographical giants such as Colombia and Belgium and Cameroon.
One player was kicked out of the Cup opener against Czechoslovakia for slipping up behind a guy and shoving him face first to the ground. Tuesday, in retaliation against a nasty Austrian team that could conduct clinics on dirty tricks for the Philadelphia Flyers and Detroit Pistons, half of the first half was devoted to U.S. forward Bruce Murray’s attempts to rearrange the features of certain Austrian players into something resembling Vienna sausage.
If you enjoy high-contact soccer, this was your kind of match. At one point, Murray lay on the field for at least two minutes, holding his face in agony, while the action continued on the opposite end of the field. Soon as everybody returned to his end, Murray made sure the referee wasn’t looking, then went upside an Austrian’s face.
A mean and speedy little sucker name of Andreas Ogris responded to Murray with the time-honored American gesture of clutching his crotch, informing him to be on guard at all times, in all places, from that minute forward. Later, after Ogris scored the game’s first goal, he made a point of celebrating right next to Murray and giving him a little bump-and-run on the way by.
About the funniest thing all night happened when Austria’s Peter Artner was ejected for more below-the-belt play. Scattered American fans in the mostly-Austrian audience began to sing the traditional so-long song: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodby!” Trust us on this point: the World Cup is no place for any American to be saying goodby to anyone from some other land.
The end came with U.S. goalkeeper Tony Meola, a kid who has more charisma in his left pinky than his coach has in his whole body, dribbling the soccer ball like a basketball. It was 10:45 p.m., and the clock would soon strike midnight for the United States. Time to go back to bouncing a ball with our hands, which is, after all, something we know something about.
The good news is: We’ll be back.
The bad news is: We’ll be back.
