Category Archives: world cup

Soccer’s meteor

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You have to be fairly old, or Italian, or to have joined the soccer cognoscenti long before that sport made serious inroads around here, to realize the brief but somehow lasting impact of one Salvatore Schillaci, who died last week. Maybe you had to be there, at the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

He was this poor kid from Sicily, subjected to longstanding regional prejudices in his own country, who nevertheless came to prove the aphorism that “fame in Italy lies in the back of the opponent’s net.” He had entered that World Cup a bench-warmer, a last-minute edition to the home team roster, yet emerged a national hero, scoring a tournament-leading six goals—five of them game-winners—in leading Italy’s Azzurri to a third-place finish.

A comedian in Florence named Roberto Benigni had snidely declared, in the midst of Schillaci’s flash-in-the-pan heroics, that “a Cameroon-Italy final in the World Cup would mean Schillaci could play for either team.” The not-quite-one-of-us slur. But Schillaci—“Toto” to friends and ultimately to an entire nation—is being remembered as the very face of that international event, the unquestioned star. “Toto was tutto,” James Horncastle of The Athletic wrote. “An everyman who, through sheer determination, seemed capable of everything. He showed that even the fleeting can paradoxically endure.”

With Schillaci’s death at 59—a relatively fleeting life, like his soccer masterpiece—that month-long tournament is being fondly recalled by Italians as the summer of the Notti Magiche—the Magic Nights—mostly because of his lightning-strike scores that set off gleeful, frenzied celebrations by fans and Toto alike.

He was a workingman’s hero who had spent eight years on lower-division pro teams in Sicily, was virtually unknown before—and essentially disappeared from the national team after—that World Cup.

He was 25 at the time, and acknowledged “living through a moment of sheer magic. I remember very very well when Italy won the World Cup in 1982 [when he was 17]. I was one of the fans running up and down the street screaming and yelling and waving a flag.” Only to become the spark for the same 1990 response, streets filled with fans, honking horns, brandishing Italian flags and chanting “Forza Italia!”

That tournament’s primary essence was to have set the record for the lowest average scoring per game in Cup history (2.21 goals), with a championship final—West Germany over Argentina, 1-0, on a penalty kick—that the New York Times’ Rory Smith called “perhaps the ugliest in living memory.” There was the famous Cup-associated debut concert of the Three Tenors supergroup in Rome and the goofy Lego-like tournament mascot, “Ciao.” Mostly, there was Toto, punching holes in mountains, bringing out the Roman candle in the tifosi—Italy’s soccer fanatics.

So, the Schillaci Papers:

Italy, a strong pre-tournament title favorite, had its artistic, flowing play on full display in its opening game against Austria but still was stuck in a scoreless tie when coach Azeglio Vicini brought Toto off the bench with just 16 minutes to play. Four minutes later, Schillaci leaped in the goalmouth to meet a high crossing pass from Gianluca Vialli, snapping his twisting body to the right to head in the winner.

Eyes wide, arms raised, Schillaci mirrored the shocked, awed reaction throughout Rome’s Olympic Stadium. Italian fans, after all, suddenly had perfection to go with the beauty they expect from their team, though soccer doesn’t necessarily work that way.

Crew cut and slightly stocky as opposed to most teammates’ dashing, long-haired look—and not in the starting lineup until Italy’s third game—Schillaci again scored the second-half winner against Czechoslovakia. And conjured the decisive goals against Ireland and Uruguay, and the opening goal in the semifinal before Argentina’s eventual shootout victory.

He was all over television. Staring from the front page of every newspaper. In his hometown of Palermo, Schillaci’s father was hoisted on neighbors’ shoulders and paraded around the square. When the 123 entrants of that year’s Miss Italia competition were polled on which national team player they’d most like to go on a date with, 87 picked Schillaci. “He enriches his performances with masterpieces of goals,” Vicini said of Schillaci.

You had to be there.

Football. And football.

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Pondering big football doings on the horizon…

First, an aside: A long-ago Dallas Cowboys star running back, Duane Thomas, when informed that having starred in the Super Bowl must have been “like going to the moon,” marveled in response, “You been to the moon, man?” Thomas’ reply to assertions that the Super Bowl was the “ultimate game” was similarly restrained. “If it’s the ultimate game,” he said, “how come they’re playing it again next year?”

So, with all due respect to the upcoming Super Bowl, America’s most-watched television event and cultural benchmark, the topic here is the football competition paramount in the eyes of most Earthlings: Soccer’s quadrennial World Cup tournament. And, interestingly, how that event’s return in 2026 to these shores is an example of retrofitting international expectations—physically as well as enthusiastically—into American mores.

Word has just come down that the World Cup championship final will be played on July 19, 2026 at the home stadium of American football’s two New York teams, the Giants and the Jets, in the New Jersey Meadowlands. This is a big deal, and more evidence that football—sorry, soccer—continues to be melded into the U.S. entertainment fabric.

We are well past the time when most of us in The Colonies reflected the great sportswriter Frank Deford’s perception that “USA” stood for “Uninterested in Soccer A-tall.” The 2026 World Cup essentially is guaranteed to set records for attendance and profit, in part because the tournament will be expanded to 48 participating teams, up from 32 in the last seven iterations. For the first time, three nations—the United States, Canada and Mexico—will share hosting duties, with the U.S. getting 78 of the tournament’s 104 matches.

And this time, 32 years since the U.S. staged the 1994 World Cup, the 11 U.S. stadiums in use will feel far less like mongrel soccer facilities, now better equipped to convert their gridirons to pitches to meet global requirements with widened playing surfaces and grass floors.

American football fields, Yank officials had to be reminded back in ’94, are 120 yards long and 53.3 yards wide, while soccer matches are played out on a 115- by- 75-yard layout. On grass; not artificial turf. Back then, before MetLife Stadium replaced Giants Stadium as New York metro’s primary football theatre, officials proposed what sounded like growing hair on a bald man’s head.

The idea was to construct a grass playing field on an elevated platform suspended by a scaffolding almost 12 feet above the permanent floor and extending six or seven rows into the Giants Stadium stands.

By the time World Cup sites officially were awarded then, the goofy platform idea had been ditched and great pallets of sod were trucked in from a North Carolina farm and placed over the fake turf. Likewise, grass was brought from a farm in California to temporarily cover the artificial stuff in the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. (There was a lot of slipping and sliding on that grass inside the roofed Silverdome during the opening game there.)

These days, stadiums routinely cover their plastic grass with the real stuff to hold major soccer events. A Rhode Island outfit—Kingston Turf Farms—advertises having installed sod over the artificial surface for years at MetLife Stadium: “We bring in a crew to truck the specialty sod in, transport the sod to the field and install the sod over specialized turf protection layer…to transform an artificial playing surface to a natural grass surface in a 24-hour period,” Kingston Turf Farms broadcasts on its website.

And to make their field wider to meet soccer standards, MetLife officials plan to remove 1,740 seats, estimating a decrease in capacity from the 83,367 attendees at an October Giants-Jets Game to 74,895.

Of the other 2026 World Cup stadiums in the United States, those in Arlington, Tex.; Atlanta, Foxborough, Mass.; Houston, Inglewood, Calif.; Seattle and Vancouver also will cover their artificial turf with grass. (“Natural grass,” as the often-used redundancy has it.) And several stadiums are expected to figure out some way to widen their playing surfaces.

When international soccer officials granted the United States its first World Cup in 1994, it came with the stipulation that this country would establish an elite professional soccer league and, beginning in 1996, Major League Soccer materialized. And one consequence of that creation was the new league’s rejection of hybrid football/soccer venues. By 1999, the first “soccer-specific” stadium—with a wider field of grass—was opened in Columbus, Ohio and, of the 26 MLS teams now based in the United States, 22 of them compete in such arenas.

Such stadiums, by the way, were the brainchild of Lamar Hunt, an original founding investor in MLS. And a real football guy, however you define “football.” Hunt was a principal founder of the American Football League and of the charter member Dallas Texans. Who became the Kansas City Chiefs, beneficiaries of the 1966 AFL/NFL merger avidly pursued by Hunt.

The same Chiefs, of course, now attempting to win a big game that Lamar Hunt was first to call the “Super Bowl.”

But about the laundry…

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It was inevitable. Pundits and spectators who rarely pay attention to soccer—but apparently were lured into taking notice of the significant World Cup match between the potential insurrectionist Americans taking on imperial England—rushed to label the resulting 0-0 tie as “boring.” At least when long-ago sports columnist Jim Murray wanted to make that sort of personal observation about the sport, back when most Yanks still dismissed soccer as a foreign enterprise, he did so with some snarky humor: “I’d tell you the final score but there wasn’t any.”

Fine. I will not work myself into a high dudgeon in defense of what I found to be a tense and dramatic duel in the globe’s most-followed athletic event. The argument over soccer’s relative appeal remains a truly dull one. You like soccer or you don’t. Like poetry or gardening.

What obviously was boring were the American uniforms. “Kits,” in the soccer vernacular. A humdrum monochromatic blue? Blue shirts, blue shorts, blue socks? (With black splotches upon really close examination.)

There are teams running around loose at the World Cup nattily and appropriately attired: Argentines in their classic Albiceleste, the white-and-sky-blue stripes that mimic Argentina’s flag; Croatians in the red-and-white checkerboard from that nation’s coat of arms; Germans with a wide vertical black stripe on white; Brazilians in their traditional yellow shirts; Mexicans in inventive alternate jerseys of white covered with red doodles representing the country’s pre-Hispanic memory and current cultural touchstones.

In ranking the top uniforms in this World Cup, a cbssports.com post previewed “which teams will look the most stylish in Qatar and why the USMNT [U.S. Men’s National Team] won’t be among them.” (The English outfits aren’t much better—white with pale-blue touches, hardly summoning England’s white flag with red St. George’s cross—though England’s alternate uniforms, all red, save the day.)

The Americans’ present sartorial tedium recalls 1990, when the United States qualified for its first World Cup appearance in 40 years and showed up in unremarkable white duds with some blue trim. It was fellow journalist John Powers of the Boston Globe, exposed to that drab kit, who argued that the Yanks should have come “looking like Apollo Creed, all stars and stripes.” (Creed, kiddies, was the fictional boxer, sort of a pugilist Uncle Sam, played by Carl Weathers in the series of 1970s and ‘80s “Rocky” movies.)

Then, voila! For the U.S.-based World Cup in 1994, the athletic outfitter adidas tailored a pair of bespoke outfits for the home team that indeed broadcast stars and stripes in national colors. One uniform featured a faded blue shirt of imitation denim—very American—with huge stretched-out white stars and red trim and red shorts; the other consisted of a white shirt with wavy red stripes and blue shorts—very flaggish. (Photo above)

Of course, the whole uniform project—then as now—always is based on marketing, and most of the U.S. players were startled, and not particularly thrilled, upon being introduced to the ’94 outfits, which they found a bit gaudy. “I opened the box and said, ‘There must be some mistake,’” John Harkes said at the time. “But,” he added with a shrug, “it kind of grows on you, actually.” Alexi Lalas—now a World Cup commentator with the standard middle-aged businessman’s appearance but then a lanky goateed, flowing-locks redheaded defender—was said by a couple of teammates to “look like Raggedy Ann” in the red-striped shirt.

Now, with the ’22 World Cup in progress, and really not much to say about the Americans’ attire—impossible to describe it as chic or snappy or dapper or modish—it was interesting to come across an exhaustive report on The Athletic website resurrecting the then-shocking departure from the norm with those 1994 outfits: How most of the players initially were appalled by the kits, which were unlike anything soccer had ever seen, yet over time have embraced them, partly based on fond memories of having made a surprise run to the Cup’s knockout round that year.

Honestly, fellow World Cup observers—whatever you think of soccer—is there anything about the current U.S. kits that fits Nike’s claim that they “inspire unity, symbolize diversity and celebrate [a] commitment to expanding the game for the next generation on and off the pitch…”? Is there anything interesting about them at all?

Sorry. Boring.

Love for the underdog

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Americans are a fortunate lot, born to moon landings and miracles on ice on other unprecedented successes. We assume a degree of superiority in comparison to other peoples, an over-the-top arrogance based on a history of industrial and technological advances. We invented the airplane, chemotherapy, chocolate chip cookies. Baseball.

But we ain’t perfect, and the start of another World Cup tournament is a reminder to have some humility. As Will Leitch noted in a New York magazine essay, “In no other context outside international soccer are Brazil, Argentina, Belgium and Denmark global powers and the U.S. a plucky upstart.”

So, no, there is no expectation that the Yanks will bring home the Cup from the month-long event being staged out of season and out of the sport’s normal zone of influence—in the tiny oil-rich, culturally restrictive Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. Of the Cup’s 32 participating countries, the United States is ranked roughly in the middle, with—according to FiveThirtyEight website predictions—a 1 percent chance of going all the way. FiveThirtyEight gives the U.S. only a 53 percent hope of surviving the three-game opening round.

The Leitch article accurately headlines the World Cup “the only real American underdog story,” even as Leitch posits that this situation “makes the team considerably more fun to cheer for.” The lovable underdog. And, while there is plenty of evidence that the 2022 Yank team has a number of handicaps—the second-youngest roster in the tournament, a disappointing run-up to the tournament in terms of victories, perfect health and firepower—it ought not to be forgotten how far American soccer (and American soccer fandom) has come in the last 40 years.

1983. Caracas, Venezuela. Pan American Games. There was a first-round U.S. soccer match against Guatemala, a country with roughly 1/20th the population of the United States, in which the Yanks had their rather large heads handed to them. 3-0, I think it was.

The Latino fans in attendance were kind, not averse to showing appreciation for the Americans’ efforts but fully aware of the chasm of competence and how foreign the sport was to the 1980s American scene. One could imagine a thought bubble over the fans’ heads, with the words: Gringos, this is a football. It is round. Are we going too fast?

It was another seven years before a collection of U.S. college lads, lining up against hardened pros from around the globe, barely sneaked into their first World Cup in 40 years only to remind that “American soccer player” was widely regarded as an oxymoron. Like “jumbo shrimp.”

Then again, how much adventure is there in rooting for a team always assured of victory? How real is that? When the Yanks trampolined into the second round of the 2002 World Cup with shocking wins over Portugal, then fifth in the world, and longtime rival Mexico, U.S. soccer spokesman Bryan Chenault summed up the giddy reaction—and sudden interest from the opinion-shaping media—saying, “Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. And they’re all welcome. There’s plenty of room.”

Something clearly was afoot. That year, as the Americans came within a referee’s failure to penalize a German’s illegal touch of surviving a 1-0 quarterfinal loss, talk-radio and sports-column pundits began to unreasonably fret over the possibility that soccer somehow could shoulder aside the place of football, baseball and basketball in the pantheon of U.S. sports. As if that were the point.

The truth is that a large portion of the American citizenry has come to acquire a taste for soccer, and their national team—not a world-beater but clearly competitive—has added to the appeal of the World Cup’s top-notch sporting theatre.

Old friend George Vecsey, among my sports journalism heroes, who has written a book about the eight World Cups he covered for the New York Times, has just posted thoughts on the Yanks’ present football situation, including this (to me, surprising) observation: “The accumulation of injuries and benchings and transfers lead to my conclusion that the best days of American soccer just might be—I hate to say this—in the past.”

Whoa. But we still have chocolate chip cookies.

The sports time machine

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(Florence)

Maybe you have noticed, during the three-plus months of compulsory sports inertia due to the coronavirus pandemic, a forced nostalgia among the chroniclers of competitive fun and games.

With almost nothing happening on the world’s playing fields, we are hostage to video of bygone championships. Arguments over whether Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays or Duke Snider ruled center field in the 1950s. Personal yarns of having Been There when this or that “classic” unfolded.

Television, talk radio, newspapers and magazines have rolled out their version of the WABAC Machine—that delightful “Peabody’s Improbable History” segment in the old Rocky-and-Bullwinkle cartoons. (Talk about nostalgia.)

Okay. If you can’t beat ‘em….

Thirty years ago, Newsday dispatched me to Italy to cover soccer’s month-long World Cup tournament. At the time, the vast majority of Americans were thoroughly uninformed about, and mostly uninterested in, that no-hands sport. The 1990 U.S. team, furthermore, was the Yanks’ first to qualify for the Cup in 40 years, a collection of wet-behind-the-ears lads metaphorically doing the doggy paddle in a pool full of Michael Phelpses. No threat to capture a nation’s attention.

But the idea then was to acquaint our local readers with a significant global event that would be coming to the United States for the first time four years hence. (It’s an irony now not only that soccer has gotten a solid foothold on these shores but especially that, with the lack of other programming, soccer—from the professional European leagues—currently is the most available live sport on American TV.)

That 1990 adventure played out over 35 days, requiring travel via trains, cars, busses and, on one occasion to reach the island of Sardinia, a plane—24 trips among 11 cities—eight of them competition sites for the 24 national teams, the other three team training camps.

Florence on Sunday, Pisa on Monday, Florence on Tuesday, Montecantini of Wednesday, Florence on Thursday, Milan on Friday, Rome on Saturday….

As much as the soccer, geography and culture were stars of the show, all the stunning Renaissance architecture and layers of history to experience. (“Ancient footprints are everywhere,” as a Dylan lyric describing Rome goes.) To a furriner, of course, there were a few challenges among the plentiful visual and culinary delights.

No two Italian cities did anything the same way. Telephones. Train accommodations. Signage. All different.

Restrooms were marked “signore” and “signori,” but some forms of signore apparently could mean either “ladies” or “sirs.” And there were no little pictures on the signs. Traffic patterns best could be described as chaotic. “Anarchy,” an Italian explained to me with delight.

The American players certainly were naïve travelers, out of their depth off the field as much as on. With an average age of 23, they were the youngest—and least worldly—team in the tournament. Just settling into their training base on the coastal town of Tirrenia, on a U.S. military site known as Camp Darby, the Yanks complained of skimpy breakfasts consisting of toast and jelly. They wanted eggs and pancakes and so on, the luxury of air conditioning and a refrigerator in each room. The Italian daily La Republica slyly described them as “ben nutriti”—well fed.

Florence on Sunday, Genoa on Monday, Tirrenia on Tuesday, Naples on Wednesday, Rome on Thursday…

Patriotic fans from across Europe constantly were in evidence. Scots arriving at games in team shirts and kilts. Austrians touring the Vatican with their red-and-white national flag draped over shoulders. Italians flying their green-white-and-red colors next to the laundry from apartment balconies, from car windows, from the passenger seats of motorbikes.

On game days in venue cities, wine and beer were banned in restaurants, a decidedly un-Italian circumstance. But more than a few establishments navigated that problem by serving wine in green mineral-water bottles, leading to the observation that they were “turning wine into water.”

A couple of soccer clichés were at work during the tournament: 1) The widespread lack of scoring. (Jim Murray, the snarky Los Angeles Times columnist, once wrote of the sport that had too many 0-0 ties for his taste, “I’d tell you the final score but there wasn’t any.”) And 2) hooliganism.

At the time, England’s club teams had just had lifted a five-year ban on playing in continental Europe because of thuggish English fan behavior. For the ’90 Cup, England’s national team, for its three first-round matches, was sentenced to Sardinia—reachable only via plane or boat—to better screen potentially troublesome followers. There were a handful of scuffles with police, though no problems at the stadiums.

Florence on Friday, Cagliari on Saturday and Sunday, Tirrenia on Monday, back to Florence on Tuesday…Turin by the weekend, then Rome, then Bologna and back to Florence…

Oh, yes. The soccer. Cameroon was a revelation, knocking off reigning champion Argentina in the Cup opener, giving the otherwise defensive-oriented tournament jolts of rare creativity and style and advancing to the quarterfinals. Cameroon’s star was 38-year-old Roger Milla and its coach a Siberian who spoke Russian and used Cameroon’s Soviet Embassy chauffeur to translate instructions to his players.

Italy’s Salvatore (Toto) Schillaci, a 25-year-old journeyman from Sicily who started the tournament on the bench, became an overnight sensation with six goals in six games—five of them game-winners. Argentina’s Diego Maradona was a shadow of his heroic 1986 World Cup self, except for one exquisite assist that saved his mates from a mid-tourney elimination against Brazil.

The Americans lost all three of their first-round games and were sent home, no surprise, though their 1-0 loss to host Italy established their worthiness as a Cup participant. West Germany—the official reunification of East and West still was three months away—won the dull championship final against Argentina on an anticlimactic penalty kick.

There you have it: Another proxy for a real-time 2020 sports story.

The World Cup escape

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Comparative happiness is immoral. I’m not about to take pleasure in the fact that England currently suffers with some dreadful politicians stoking fear of immigrants and other perceived grievances. Besides, that sort of thing is abundantly available right here at home.

On the contrary, I am a bit jealous of how the English were afforded a temporary, euphoric respite from anti-social turmoil by the World Cup and their national team’s delightful run in the tournament.

It was just soccer and, in the end, the English lads didn’t necessarily reverse a self-deprecating “narrative of decline” described by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, that it’s been “all downhill since the end of the Second World War, or the end of the Empire, or 1066…”

Or the Brexit chaos that reportedly has Prime Minister Theresa May facing the possible collapse of her government. But by changing the subject—“Don’t You Know There’s a Bloody Game On?” the Sun newspaper headlined amid bad bureaucratic developments—the soccer team unleashed a unifying giddiness in pushing to the Cup semifinals for the first time since 1990.

From my perch in New York, and with the United States having failed to qualify for the first time since 1986, I allowed myself multiple, shifting allegiances from the start of the tournament. Spain, for its buzzing, precise passing and teamwork. Portugal, just to watch Cristiano Renaldo’s out-of-the-blue strikes. Argentina, in anticipation of Lionel Messi’s magic. Mexico, because our neighbors to the South deserve a break. Brazil, because Brazilian soccer is true performance art. Panama, because a tiny country making its World Cup debut is a beautiful thing, however it fares. France, based on a family ancestry going back many generations, and with the discovery of France’s wondrous teenager Kylian Mbappe.

The whole thing, even without a home team to follow, was a welcome escape from the daily—hourly—assault of depressing national and international news, an uplifting antidote to spreading xenophobia.

By the end of group play, I was all aboard the English bandwagon. Marveling at goalie Jordan Pickford’s lightning reactions. Raheem Sterling’s downfield sprints. Harry Maguire’s precise headers. Manager Gareth Southgate’s formal attire (a vest?). Harry Kane’s relentlessly unmussed hair in spite of his diving, lurching, rumbling charges toward goal—not to mention his role as the target of repeated fouls. (“A friend,” reported my daughter, who now lives in London, “called him ‘the most English person possible.’”)

Even England’s excruciating extra-time loss to Croatia in the semifinals couldn’t break the celebratory fever. The soccer anthem “Three Lions,” with its bullish chorus originally written when England hosted the 1996 European Championships, was revived with a vengeance:

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

Because England invented soccer, the natives nurture an assumed superiority regarding the sport—but offset by the contained melancholy of knowing their side has won the World Cup only once, in 1966. And, since then, repeatedly has endured the cruelest of losses in major international tournaments, six times beaten in penalty shootouts, beginning with the 1990 World Cup semis.

A sidebar: I covered that shootout loss for Newsday, in Turin, Italy. The English manager then was Bobby Robson, who gamely declared that he and his team had “to put on a bright smile and accept it. There’s nothing you can do about it.” The English had played the Germans to a 1-1 tie through 90 exhausting minutes of regulation, plus 30 of extra time, only to lose the sport’s version of a game of H-O-R-S-E. Or something akin to taking turns throwing a football through a tire.

Of course it was noted then that the Germans had been England’s victims in the ’66 final, and that called to mind the English sportswriter who is said to have written, on the eve of the ’66 title match, a wickedly clever reference to matters beyond soccer:

“Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”

But, as I say, comparative happiness is immoral. And this World Cup did a good job of sidelining political stuff and cultural differences. While the English jauntily sang their “Three Lions” song (the title referencing the team’s official shield with national roots dating to the 12th Century):

Three lions on a shirt/Jules Rimet still gleaming/Thirty years of hurt/never stopped me dreaming. (Jules Rimet was the longtime soccer official after whom the World Cup trophy is named.)

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

After England eliminated Sweden in the quarterfinals, my daughter texted that “People are driving around honking horns and singing out of windows….I just saw a young white kid on a bike yell, ‘It’s coming home’ and high-five two old black guys sitting on a bench as they yelled it back to him….Everyone here is talking about weather (in a good way) and the World Cup. It’s a lovely change in atmosphere.”

We could use some of that here in the Colonies.

Celebrating Panama’s World Cup debut

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Maybe it takes an American of a certain age to understand that Panama should feel no shame in its World Cup results—three losses in three games, including that 6-1 pounding by England last Sunday. Someone who witnessed the United States’ showing in the 1990 Cup certainly can relate.

Back then, it was perfectly clear that the label “American soccer player” was an oxymoron, like “living dead” or “jumbo shrimp.” The Yanks had showed up at the Cup for the first time in 40 years with a collection of callow amateurs in a den of hardened professionals, in no way comparable to other Cup participants. And they immediately were humiliated by Czechoslovakia, 5-1, on the way to an 0-3 record.

It was a requiem for a lightweight and brought mocking headlines from the soccer-savvy Europeans. The newspapers in Italy, that year’s host nation, dismissed the Yanks as “poor kids, thrown to the massacre,” with a defense “made of butter.” (Only one other time in that tournament did a team allow 5 goals as the 1990 per-game average of 2.2 set the still-standing record for lowest in the 88-year history of the event.)

But here’s the thing: One of the U.S. players, Chris Sullivan, made the point right after being publicly humbled by Czechoslovakia that “we deserved this. But just remember: We’re the students here. Why not have the rest of the world read that 5-1 score and know that we’re the students of the game? We’re still learning.”

Yes, and now we have Panama’s burdensome trial in Russia, its first dance at sport’s biggest international party. Though not as soccer-challenged as that 1990 U.S. team, though boxing and baseball are more entrenched in its sports culture, Panama competes with a pool of talent severely limited by a population, 4.1 million, that is less than half that of New York City.

“When the coach [Hernan Dario Gomez] said we were coming here to learn, that is exactly what he meant,” said Panama’s 37-year-old captain Felipe Baloy, known as Pipe (Pee-pay). “We were coming up against world-class teams with great players.”

Baloy realized that, the final score aside, to have produced his country’s first World Cup goal late in that England match was “something big. We’re learning a lot. The result makes us sad, but the first goal is important.” It merely set off national merrymaking.

The newspaper Marca in Spain declared that “Panama found themselves in front of a cyclone, they came up against a deluge of goals and found themselves inundated.” Italy’s Gazzetta dello Sport called the game “not a match” but “an English stroll.”

In sports, of course, everyone is looking for a Rosy Scenario, something akin to the ideal romantic partner. But sometimes, you don’t have to win to win.

In 1990, a central character on the U.S. team, Tab Ramos, was 23 years old and devoid of professional experience. Immediately after he and his mates were taken apart by Czechoslovakia, Ramos’ thoroughly reasonable attitude was, “This is the greatest experience of my life. If I had to go through it again, just the same way, I would.”

Not signing any articles of surrender, that. Ramos recognized the expectations, that American soccer barely was crawling then. Sure enough, he wound up playing in two more World Cups as the Yanks grew into legitimate Cup actors—their failure to make this year’s tournament notwithstanding. Amid their run of six consecutive World Cups, they pushed to the quarterfinals in 2002.

So Panama lost three games and went home. What’s so bad about that? Its players, and its nation’s fans, got a front-row seat at the most watched sports event on earth. Of the 201 national teams worldwide, Los Canaleros—“the Canal Men”—were one of only 32 to make it to this summer’s big show.

“We qualified [for the World Cup],” Gomez said. “We have to celebrate that.”

Felipe Baloy got it. “The experience in Russia has been top-notch,” he said. “We hope that Panama can keep going. As a group, we’ve had a good coexistence in which we’ve spent time with younger players, who will stay with us.”

There is a verse in the Panamanian national anthem that, translated to English, goes like this:

Progress caresses your path.
To the rhythm of a sublime song,
You see both your seas roar at your feet
Giving you a path to your noble mission.

See you in 2022, Panama.

Upside down in Trinidad

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This time, the United States needs only a tie in its final World Cup qualifying match in Trinidad.

This time, home-standing Trinidad & Tobago (with only one win in nine qualifying matches) isn’t nearly the threat it was in 1989, when a T&T victory or tie would have sent the Trinboganians to the 1990 Italy-based World Cup instead of the Yanks.

This time, the atmosphere can’t possibly match the frenzy in Port of Spain 28 years ago, when all residents of the dual-island Caribbean nation appeared to be dressed in red; when the week leading up to the game was a wild party of Calypso and reggae music in the streets—“jump-ups,” they were called; when the passionate locals giddily chanted, “We goin’!” and “Bum dem!” (“Burn them” visitors.)

It might have been intimidating to our small group of American reporters if it hadn’t been so downright entertaining and spirited. And good-natured. Amid the cries of “Search and destroy!” smiling T&T natives greeted us—we were easy to spot—with wishes of good luck or teased us with calls of “Yankee Doodle went to town.” Followed by, “Where is your red?”

Red, the national color, was on sale everywhere. Caps, shirts, underwear, scarfs. Schoolchildren had replaced their standard uniforms (some red, but many of other hues) with all red. Songs from Trinidadian Calypso singer Blue Boy’s latest album, all related to the World Cup effort, were booming throughout the capital city: “Journey” and “Football Dance” and “Goal!” and “Trinidad Boys, Tobago Boys” and “Road to Italy,” with the lyric, “When the Yankees come to the stadium/We’re going to beat them like bongos.”

T&T’s team was called “Strike Squad” and prided itself on “Kaisoca”—Calypso soccer—a flowing, fast-paced, dynamic style that seemed superior to the mechanical, defensive methods of a U.S. squad severely limited in international experience.

That was seven years before the first legitimate U.S. professional league, MLS, debuted. The Yanks had not been to the World Cup in 40 years, and their mostly bland play through the ’89 qualifying process had their federation officials worried that the commitment to place the 1994 World Cup in the United States could be rescinded if the team failed to earn a berth in Italy.

So our little knot of U.S. scribblers was mostly of the belief that the Trinboganians, who clearly cared more about international soccer than the typical American, would have their wishes fulfilled. They chanted, “T&T, we want a goal. On the roooooad, on the rooooad, on the rooooad…..to It-a-ly.” During pre-game festivities, one T&T fan marched around the stadium with a sign, “Even Bush”—George H.W. Bush still was in the White House then—“supports T&T.”

We stayed at the famous “upside-down hotel,” built into the side of a steep hill, with the lobby entered from the top of the hill and the elevators going down. The 10th floor is at the bottom. Everything was just disorienting enough to be memorable.

The game was played on a Sunday afternoon. That morning, we U.S. reporters—there couldn’t have been more than six or seven of us—were invited to have breakfast at the hilltop mansion of then-U.S. ambassador Charles Gargano. He politely welcomed the representatives of such big-time publications as the New York Times, New York Daily News, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. But it was me, from little old Newsday on Long Island, who got the long-lost friendship treatment. Because Gargano had made his fortune in construction on Long Island, and his son recently had built a site in my village of Babylon.

(A few years later, Gargano was in some hot water for iffy campaign contributions, but I can assure everyone that I never saw the man again).

Anyway, from Gargano’s perch above the city, we could look down on the National Stadium, already overflowing with more than 30,000 red-clad spectators more than five hours before kickoff. Among my fellow journalists then was the Times’ esteemed George Vecsey, who noted in his 2014 book, “Eight World Cups,” that then-T&T soccer federation honcho Jack Warner had had 45,000 tickets printed, creating a dangerous overcrowding situation.

Somehow, everything turned out all right, in spite of the Trinboganians’ crushing disappointment when the U.S. conjured an unlikely 1-0 victory. The Yanks’ decisive goal, a looping 30-yard left-footer by Paul Caligiuri in the 30th minute, arguably is one of the two most historic shots in American soccer history. (Joe Gaetjens’ 1950 World Cup goal that shocked England is the other.)

The exact time of the score could be questioned. Because there was no scoreboard clock, my wristwatch served as “official” timer for our handful of scribes. More remarkable than the U.S. victory—and the Yanks’ sudden efficiency after months of bumbling around—was the grand reaction of the T&T crowd.

It sent the American players off the field to warm applause (and more Calypso music). It called the weeping T&T players back for a final lap around the stadium with chants of “We want Strike Squad.” Following a chaotic round of interviews in the sweaty, cramped, celebratory U.S. lockerroom, several of us reporters walked back to our hotel just after sundown and were repeatedly called to by locals along the way.

“Hey, Yankee.” Uhhhh, yes? “Congratulations!”

This time, I won’t be there. But it couldn’t match 1989, anyway.