How do you celebrate a loss? The English, who have long glorified their country’s valiant second-place finishers, don’t have a problem with it. But Americans? Surely, we are all about winning, coming out on top, stomping the other guy’s face into the dirt. To lose is to be a loser—a term of opprobrium I only learned after moving across the Atlantic. Isn’t cheering a team of losers an un-American activity?
Not necessarily—at least, not in the World Cup, where the initial stage of the competition is conducted in groups rather than on a knockout basis. But it does take a bit of getting used to, as we discovered today, when Team U.S.A. progressed to the next stage of the tournament despite losing to Germany, 1–0, in the rain-sodden city of Recife, on Brazil’s northeast coast.
“The United States have one hundred per cent earned the right to get out of this group,” Taylor Twellman, a retired soccer player who was serving as ESPN’s color commentator, intoned as the match drew to an end. And he went on, “Nobody, and I mean nobody, thought they had a chance in this group.” The U.S. players and Jürgen Klinsmann, their coach, may quarrel with the latter point, but Twellman was broadly right. According to FIFA’s official ranking, Germany is the second-best team in the world, and Portugal is the fourth-best. Team U.S.A. is ranked thirteenth, yet overcame the odds and progressed.
And the team did deserve it. In defeating Ghana, 2–1, and then playing Portugal to a 2–2 tie, a game they were unfortunate not to win, the American players competed fiercely; they were well organized and, against Portugal in particular, they played some attractive soccer. Belgium, their likely opponents in the round of sixteen, a knockout round, will not take them lightly.
Still, the last stage of their passage was a bit disappointing, after all the buildup to the match. Germany was clearly the better team. For long stretches of the game, the Germans held possession of the ball, and denied the U.S. players any chance to go forward. For the first ten minutes, in fact, the Americans hardly touched the ball. A German goal seemed inevitable. Somewhat surprisingly, it was delayed until the fifty-fifth minute, when Tim Howard, the U.S. goalkeeper, made a great save from a corner—and then the ball ran out to Thomas Müller, the German striker, who calmly stroked it into the corner of the net.
At that point, the German goal didn’t seem too disastrous. With Portugal leading Ghana 1–0, the group-table arithmetic still favored Team U.S.A. But, a minute later, Ghana scored an equalizer, and the calculus changed. Suddenly, the African team was just a goal away from eliminating the American side.
Hitherto, my Twitter feed had been full of hope and bravado. Mark Knoller, a White House correspondent for CBS News, reported that President Obama watched some of the game on Air Force One, en route to an event in Minneapolis. “We’re gonna kick Germany’s ass just like in WW2,” Andrew Kaczynski, a political reporter at Buzzfeed, tweeted just before the kickoff. (Note to American soccer fans: never tease the Germans about the Second World War. It took English fans a long time to learn this lesson. Partly as a consequence, their national team hasn’t recorded a victory of consequence over the dreaded Jerries since 1966.)
Once Ghana scored, my newsfeed took a darker turn. “Right now, #GHA has the power to eliminate #USA from three straight World Cups,” the sports section of the Wall Street Journal reminded its readers. “Ghana going through … despite having lost to the U.S. would be a pretty good way to get Americans to quit caring about soccer again,” Sonny Bunch, the managing editor of the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site, lamented.
At this stage, what was happening in Brasilia was what really mattered. My two daughters, who had just got out of school for the summer holidays, broke out in a chant of “Portugal, Portugal.” In the seventy-third minute, Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese pin-up who denied the United States a historic victory on Sunday by creating a goal in the last moments of the match, went racing into the Ghana penalty box and fell down under a heavy challenge. “I would call that a foul,” one of my daughters said. I agreed, but the referee didn’t.
The tension continued to mount. Then, in a flash, it dissipated. A high ball came into the Ghana penalty box. The Ghanaian goalkeeper went up for it, but neither caught it nor punched it away. Instead, he muffed it, pushing the ball softly out to the six-yard box where Ronaldo, standing alone, gratefully kicked it into the net. Portugal was leading 2–1, and, with less than ten minutes remaining in both matches, the United States was pretty much safe. To snatch a place in the last sixteen on goal difference, Ghana needed to score twice. Portugal, which got whacked, 4–0, by Germany in its first game, would have needed to score three more times—a hopeless task.
In the stands in Recife, the television cameras picked out some Americans who had heard the news from Brasilia. They were cheering and smiling, and, evidently, looking forward to journeying to the city of Salvador, where the next U.S. match will be played on Tuesday. The United States had lost. And won. For American soccer fans, particularly the newer ones, these are good times. Just don’t ask them to explain how goal difference works.
Photograph by Robert Cianflone/Getty.
