#usacol

Copa America Match Report: USA vs. Colombia (0 - 1) or “The Faces of James Rodriguez"

Jäckchen,

As I mentioned in my last dispatch, I’ve been traveling.  Most of this recent trip has been spent in LA, schlepping around in Ubers, eating endless tacos and having long conversations about whether or not “Creative” is a valid job title.  However, I did end up in San Diego for a weekend bachelor party, and it was there I found myself watching Copa America’s third place game.  The winner would bask in the bronze glory.  The loser would take home commemorative keychains.  GO GO USA.  

Viewing Venue: Liebe Jack, have we ever talked about San Diego?  And how much I hate it?  As Northern Californians, you and I are naturally going to gravitate towards the foggier, mountainy-er half of our beloved home state, so I’ll admit bias.  But I’m not one of those “fuck LAers” - I love the languid pace, the everywhere flowers, the 50s signage, etc etc.  Something happens, however, when you get past Carlsbad on the 5.  The heat gets a little muggier, the storefronts get a little dirtier, and the Oakleys come out.  San Diego, with it’s weird hybrid of military culture, SoCal buenos tiempos and druggy seediness, is a dark place.  Bros in open-top Jeeps with face tattoos, blasting Sublime and leering at preteen beach walkers.  Miles of vape shops and Hawaiian coffee stands. Confederate flags, plastic bags of oranges rotting in the street, overly sexual Rastafarian murals.  Doom.  

Anyway yeah, I was at a beach house in San Diego.

Snacks and Libations: It was a bachelor party, I’ll plead the Fifth.

Co-watchers: Eight thirty-something bros, most of whom went to Harvard Law.  Most weren’t big FUSSBALL people, but a couple of them knew who James Rodrigues was.  

The Game: Perhaps it was a somewhat blissed-out mental state, but I could not bring myself to care about this game really much at all.  As I said in my match report on USA vs. Argentina, the state of US Soccer is very clear to me: we’re deeply deeply “okay I guess” at FUSSBALL.  Winning this game would not change that status, nor would losing it.  Mainly I was interested to see DER JUNG GUNS take the field (Pulisic, Nagbe) and begin the inevitable hype—>disappointment cycle anew.  Sadly, neither of them figured heavily.  In the main, this was a classic USA performance.  When they have the ball, we’re full of grit and determination to shut them down and win it back.  When we achieve that goal and get the ball, we do nothing much.  

The main thing that left an impression on me here was the last five or six minutes of the game, which saw Colombia pull a downright impressive array of time-wasting tricks (diving, faking injuries, taking forever with throw-ins, arguing with the ref unnecessarily, etc.) in order to run the clock down.  James Rodrigues alone wasted a good two minutes by calling the physios to the field to help him with the facial cramping that resulted from his near-constant baroque-painting-level whine face.  

At this point in the game, most of my bachelor party co-attendees were yelling obscenities at the screen and observing that these shenanigans were the kind of thing that prevents the sport from getting big in America.  Usually I’ll defend “the dark arts” of FUSSBALL, and point out that the fouling system in basketball is just as stupid, but I found myself completely agreeing.  It was annoying, and if every soccer game ended that way, I’m not sure you and I would do this blog.  Thankfully, most don’t.  To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why this one did - maybe Colombia just didn’t give a damn, maybe it’s [OFFENSIVE CULTURAL CLICHE ABOUT SOUTH AMERICAN SOCCER REDACTED], maybe it was the heat.  Who knows.  All I know is this game was eh.