The Jersey City Independent "

An ongoing series on how Jersey City soccer fans — and those who aren’t — watch the games.

90′ + 1′

Ian Darke, the well-known British announcer ESPN hired to cover the World Cup, called it “stranger than fiction” and said it would rival something out of Hollywood. Our stereotypes still well intact, at least in the dramatic, though our soccer playing not so much.

In the last game of the group stages for the United States, the U.S. side could finally be said to resemble some of the European powerhouses of the 2010 World Cup — which is to say, skilled play on the ball, (mostly) smart passes and opportunities to score in abundance — but equally similar to many of those teams this year, they performed in a dominant manner that lead nowhere — almost. Add the team’s penchant for suffering from yet another botched call by the refs, and maybe U.S. soccer is finally here (though how often is this mistakenly suggested?). This time, the evidence could be found in the small crowd at LITM, gathered if not in numbers appropriate for the stakes than at least present in spirit and soccer awareness. And they were rewarded, finally. The team’s weak points, their perseverance and dealing with the weight of expectation, not to mention the pressure of being the favorite team, were silenced. Our critics? Likely not as much. There’s still the issue of the gift-wrapped goal in their first game against England, or allowing two goals to a Slovenian team that could only manage one other goal in their other two games.

For the time being, however, the United States walks away as the winner of their group for the first time in 80 years and will play the runner-up out of Group D at 2:30pm on Saturday.

Go figure that it would take Bob Bradley’s steadiness to keep the team on track, demonstrated in his refusal to say much about Maurice Edu’s overturned goal against Slovenia other than calling too much discussion of the mysterious foul “a waste of time.” As it turns out, the best salve to controversy is to win a game you should win, even if a linesman decided to add more controversy with an offsides call that replays showed to be clearly incorrect. John Harkes, the American announcer paired with Darke, could only disgustedly say, “I’m done challenging referee calls.” This time, though, it was early enough in the game to not matter.

With each near miss, the U.S. loyal crowd at LITM retched, and there were many such misses, beginning with that faux offsides call against Clint Dempsey. See: Jozy Altidore’s near empty-netter sailing high, Dempsey hitting the pole on one occasion and sending a ball high on another, Michael Bradley’s shot from distance that which, like many of his strikes, moved with purpose and promise but not enough result. Of 22 shots, ten were on goal, compared to the four on goal for Algeria. Finally, though, Dempsey tipped an Altidore rebound right to the Algerian keeper who knocked it away, only for Landon Donovan, the leading American goal scorer, to be in the right place at the right time to finally deliver a goal in the 91st minute.

What could have been a game ending in frustration, and frustrating excuses, wasn’t. The refereeing, however, may have renewed calls for instant replay, which has been incorporated into tennis, baseball and football, but which FIFA has long been resistant to.

Shane Smith, who was tending bar at LITM this morning (and who is also a co-founder of this publication), is OK with FIFA’s decision on that.

“In tennis, for example, they spend too much time reviewing calls,” he says. “They have so much technology for reviews, and players are given opportunities to challenge calls. It takes the focus away. Sometimes you just have to let the umpire’s call stand.”

Unofficial though it may be, nothing stopped ESPN from replaying the controversy over and over again, each time showing where exactly offsides was, and how Dempsey was on the correct side of it. This, coupled with the replays of each missed set piece and each near-goal, and maybe Smith is onto something with doing away with replays, even if just for the fans’ sake.

Earlier in the game, Jim Foti, remembered watching the 2006 World Cup in Nairobi, Kenya and bemoaned the relative lack of fans at LITM when it opened at 10 am.

“There were big screen televisions everywhere you went, and everywhere was packed,” he said of Kenya, though he noted that there wasn’t an issue of time zone difference. He was there with his wife, who works for the Catholic Medical Mission Board, which provides medicine, supplies and knowledge about AIDs to the region.

Though he was in Kenya under severe circumstances, he still noticed the passion for the game. He speaks to the atmosphere, as well as the tents that were set up and under which people could sit and watch the games, since the bars and restaurants were either too full or too expensive for some fans. It was yet another example of the holiday-like occasion that is the World Cup for the rest of the world.

“There were a number of American fans there,” he recalls, “but there were so many more Italian fans. When they won it people celebrated everywhere.”

Foti, who was at the Zeppelin Hall Beer Garden for the England-USA match, says that though he got there an hour and a half before game time, it was already practically filled to capacity.

“I’m not a huge soccer fan,” he admits, “but for the World Cup you have to be, right?”

LITM on a Wednesday morning, like most bars in Jersey City, won’t have that kind of crowd so early in the day. But expect this Saturday to be big everywhere.

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