Showdown in Berlin

What's really wrong with American soccer and why Italy will beat France in one of the greatest World Cup finals ever.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Sports, Andrew O'Hehir, Soccer

July 7, 2006 | If you've paid attention to this year's World Cup tournament, even for 10 seconds, you've probably absorbed the conventional wisdom that the United States' national soccer team was a huge disappointment. On one level, this is fair enough. The Americans lost two games and tied one, scoring just two goals and giving up six. They weren't among the 16 teams who went on to the second round and clearly didn't deserve to be.

There is another side to the story. Italy will play France in Sunday's championship game in Berlin (2 p.m. Eastern time on ABC) and will be favored by most observers to hoist the World Cup for the fourth time. Always known for their relentless defense and their "cynical" tactical play, the Azzurri are among the most difficult teams in the world to score against. In fact, they have surrendered just one goal in the entire tournament. That goal was scored by, yes, the United States, on June 17. Admittedly, it was an own-goal, plonked into his own net by Italian defender Cristian Zaccardo. But it happened because the speedy, athletic Americans were attacking with ferocity, rattling the Italians' confidence; the United States dominated much of that game and the 1-1 result was fair to both teams.

In many countries in the world, a draw with Italy in the World Cup would be cause for dancing in the streets and lighting other people's property on fire. In the States this year, it's nothing more than a footnote to a story of failure. That alone tells you how much this sport has become an accepted part of American life. It's sweet that we played even-up with perhaps the best team in the world, but dammit, when are we gonna win something?

That's a complicated question, and the short answer is: Don't hold your breath. It's worth pointing out that fans in 29 other eliminated nations (along with dozens of others who didn't even qualify this year) are asking themselves the same thing. The sense that soccer is an unforgiving mistress, that our team could and should have done better, that our own lads' failings, combined with bad luck and some inscrutable acts of God, doomed us to unfair defeat -- that's an emotion shared in the last two weeks by, among others, the Argentines, Dutch, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Germans.

We don't have space or time for a dissertation on the American team's problems, but my friend and colleague King Kaufman (an admitted soccer neophyte) recently pointed to one issue so obvious and glaring it doesn't get talked about enough: Millions of American kids play soccer, but, speaking generally, the very best American teenage athletes do not. Some infuriated readers thought King was suggesting that 7-foot, 330-pound NBA centers should be imported into the U.S. soccer program, but he said no such thing. (Euro-soccer snobs displaying their immense ignorance of American sports can be every bit as amusing as Yank soccer-haters displaying theirs about the world game.)

I don't know about King's idea that, for example, Udonis Haslem of the Miami Heat (who is 6-8 and weighs 235 pounds) might make a dominating soccer player. But I also don't know that he wouldn't; Haslem is a superbly conditioned athlete, not a lumbering genetic anomaly of basketball stereotype. Size is only an absolute advantage at certain positions in soccer (goalkeeper, central defender and striker), but it doesn't inherently make players worse. British, Italian, German, Scandinavian and Eastern European players have gradually gotten bigger over the past couple of generations, and being taller than 6 feet is no longer seen as strange.

I can tell you this: If we could take the best high school athletes at the skill positions in the major American sports (let's say center fielder, point guard and wide receiver), roll them all back six or eight years and get them started in soccer, we'd have a dramatically improved U.S. national team pool. U.S. soccer boosters say this kind of improvement is happening anyway, but progress looks pretty slow. As King observed, Landon Donovan and DaMarcus Beasley, the enigmatic stars of the American team, both underperformed in this year's tournament. Now America's tiny coterie of core fans must chew endlessly on Donovan's refusal to play professionally in Europe (and thereby improve), and Beasley's apparent inability to improve (despite playing professionally in Europe). If -- I'm just making this up here -- Torii Hunter and Stephon Marbury and Deion Branch were in the mix and competing for those spots, Donovan and Beasley's idiosyncratic career paths might not matter much.

Winning the World Cup requires a better team than the United States will have for the foreseeable future. It also requires less tangible things: consistently improving your level of play and your concentration, catching some lucky breaks, and avoiding bonehead plays, injuries and bad calls by referees. That's true of all major sporting events, I suppose, but the closely contested nature of international soccer -- in which most games are decided by one key play -- often assigns a fatal significance to fluke events.

It's one's understanding of those fluke events, I think, that separates those who grew up with the sport and respond to it almost instinctively from those outsiders who find it alternately dull, bizarre and mystifying. Was the dubious penalty kick awarded at the end of the Italy-Australia match on June 26, which gave the Italians a gift goal and saved them from playing a 30-minute overtime while down a man, a fundamentally unfair way to resolve that game?

Aussie fans will lament that call forever, of course. But for most soccer fans around the world, its rightness or wrongness was almost secondary. (For the record, I saw it as a legitimate foul, albeit packaged and sold by Fabio Grosso's histrionics.) Playing 10 vs. 11 against a determined, fearless but technically inferior team (defender Marco Materazzi had been red-carded), the Italians had to find a way to win, and they did. If that play hadn't worked, the fatalist fan's thinking goes, something else would have: The Australian goalkeeper would have muffed an easy one, a ball would have caromed into a goal off the referee's butt, a whistle blown in the stands would have distracted a defender at the wrong moment.

Still, alongside that fatalism -- the sense that every miraculous goal, questionable penalty kick and undeserved red card has already been carved on a great score sheet in the sky -- the World Cup also provides unexpected surprises, and this year's late plot twists have been more unexpected than most. No one, and certainly not anyone in the French and Italian media, expected the two finalists we will see on Sunday. They were widely seen as fading soccer powers of Old Europe: The French were a charming collection of yesterday's stars, unlikely to survive the first round; and the Italians were egotistical prima donnas, stuck in an overly defensive style and paralyzed by the corruption scandal afflicting their country's professional league.

Well, Old Europe has looked pretty sprightly these past couple of weeks; international as the game has become, the old maxim that national teams excel in their home continent seems as true as ever. (Six of the eight quarterfinalists, and all four semifinalists, were European sides.) In defense of my own spotty pre-tournament projections, I will only say that I was right about the United States (an easy call) and right that somebody would beat Brazil. I didn't have the right somebody, and for that I'm grateful. I expected to see Germany facing either England or Brazil in the final, but this should be a much better match.

Next page: How Italy and France match up -- and a prediction of the final score