Will the US deliver yet another soccer punch?

PANAJI: The coach described his own team as sheep ready to be slaughtered.

This was a bunch of hastily assembled part timers that passed off as the US football team at the

1950

Brazil World Cup. Their opponents in a group match were

England

– the inventors of the modern game who donned the mantle “Kings of Football” in the run-up to the event.

An imposing record of 23 wins and three draws in 30 matches leading to the World Cup saw England a 3-1 bookmakers favourite before the match. The Americans with a goal record of 2-45 over seven huge losses were a pathetic 500-1.

It’s now a bizarre piece of history that the “rag-tag” outfit that comprised school teachers, a hearse driver, postmen and dish waters among others, pulled off a 1-0 win over a side backed to go all the way in the World Cup and made nonsense of an English newspaper’s suggestion that the US should be given a three goal start in the match.

The goal scorer was one Joe Gaetjens, a Haitian, and one of three foreigners in the line-up who qualified to play on the basis of a commitment to become US citizens.

Almost 70 years after that “aberration” at the Estadio Independencia Belo Horizonte as die-hard English fans may have liked to call it, the teams meet again, this time half-way around the world, in an Under-17 World Cup quarterfinal at the Nehru Stadium at

Fatorda

in Goa.

There’ll be no postulation this time. If anything, the US could well start marginal favourites if momentum is a factor.

After all, England scraped past Japan in the round of 16 via the tiebreaker while the Americans surged into the last eight with a 5-0 rout over

Paraguay

, three of those goals coming from Tim

Weah

, son of the legendary Liberian

George

.

A lot has happened since that ambush on June 29, 1950.

The US are now major players in the World, ranked No. 27 on the Fifa charts and having featured in seven senior World Cups in a row (1990-2014) and 16 out of 17 U-17 World Cups although failure to qualify for Russia 2018 has left the country’s football distraught.

The Americans even hosted the 1994 World Cup where they progressed to the second round before losing to Brazil 0-1 and have notched epic wins over Portugal and Mexico in the 2002 edition before bowing to hosts South Korea.
The next meeting between England and the US in the World Cup took place at South Africa 2010. The result, a 1-1 draw.

In the women’s game, the US with three World Cup titles are a powerhouse. And when it comes to the grassroots, school and college football numbers boost the total number of players to 24 million in the country.

And all this even with US football enduring a rollercoaster ride that saw a failed attempt to sustaining a professional league called the NASL in the 1970s and a struggle to hold its lines in a battle for the entertainment dollar against baseball, the NFL (American football), NBA and NHL (ice hockey).

The current US squad boasts of goalkeeper CJ dos Santos who plays for Portuguese giants Benfica, defender Sergino Dest who does duty for Ajax Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Josh Sargent who has assisted the US U-20 team at the World Cup in South Korea earlier this year. Much of US football’s growth accrues from the Major League Soccer where German legend Juergen Klinsmann, whose son Jonathan played in goal for the US at the U-20 World Cup, has been an influence.

A scenario so different from the men training for the first time on the eve of departure to Brazil 1950 en route to scripting arguably football’s greatest ever upset.

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