And our best player left the field on a stretcher.
World Cup 2006: Wandering Europe
SNAPSHOTS:
1. Paris et Les Invalides
2. Zidane, Ribery, et le Trocadero at Midnight
3. Aller a Strasbourg
4. The Autobahn and the Art of Happiness
5. What Happened in Berlin
6. My Birthday: Berlin in Summer
7. Back in the Thick of It: Ghana v USA
8. Sam's Army, Cognitive Dissonance, and Facepaint
9. Born in the USA
10. "USA!" he yelled. "USA!"
12. We watched happily as the scores of passing Ghanai...
 USA vs Ghana |
It was somewhere in between. The defense was playing well, and Claudio Reyna was again proving to be the best American player on the field. But something was still missing: the hunger we showed against Italy. The game went back and forth a while, neither team with a clear upper hand. Sam's Army was in full voice all around us, with chants and songs like "Everywhere We Go" and "When the Yanks Go Marching In", and, my personal favorite, considering the generally dim light in which Americans are viewed across Europe: "Nobobdy likes us, Nobody likes us, Nobody likes us, And we don't fu#!ing care!"
Disaster struck. Again, the stars were aligned against the American team. Reyna, defending against Haminu Draman, collapsed to the ground in a heap, obviously in pain. Haminu Draman ran by him, proceeded into the box unopposed, and stroked the ball past Kasey Keller, the American goalkeeper. We were down 1-0.
And our best player left the field on a stretcher.
It looked bleak. Minutes later, American DaMarcus Beasley won the ball on the left side, drove in a low cross, and Clint Dempsey, a relative newcomer to the team, slammed the ball emphatically through the Ghana goalposts and into the net. A vacuum sucked the air from my lungs as every human body around me began to scream. Flags thrashed the air. There were high-fives and high-tens and every other expression of euphoric mayhem we could dream up. The match was tied, and Noemie and I were grinning ear to ear, slapping palms repeatedly with the Tennessean and the enthusiastic business guy from DC who stood on my left.
Halftime approached, but the stars were not done aligning yet. Just before the whistle, gentle contact by an American defender in the goal area resulted inexplicably in the most serious call a referee can make. A penalty kick. Basically a freebie goal, penalty kicks are rightly rare in the World Cup, where many matches end 1-0 or 2-1. And rarer still are they in added time before halftime, or for contact far from the goal.
"Bullshit!" "Bullshit!" the Tennessean joined in with the voices behind us. Bullshit was what it was. "Bullshit!" Noemie and I smiled.
But the referee didn't change his mind. Steven Appiah stepped up and converted the penalty kick. It was 2-1. And immediately it was halftime. American momentum was gone.
Noemie got us beers. In a shocking show of brash, commercial, wonderful, imperialistic Americanism, the only beer offered in 2006 in all the stadiums of the World Cup in Germany, the ancestral home of beer, is... Budweiser. An exclusive contract is an exclusive contract. We drank it.