Sam's Army In Retreat

World Cup. Team USA. Who cares?

Okay, Team USA didn't advance, but it could have been worse. Remember 1998? That American team was the '62 Mets of soccer - nobody there could play that game. The 2006 team lost with honor and dignity. They played their best in a group where three teams happened to be as good or better. No one expected Ghana to come out on top over the Czech Republic for the next round; Ghana benefited from low expectations throughout group play. They also benefited from a controversial penalty kick, which was awarded to them on a technicality. Also, if you look at the statistics of the other eliminated teams - four eliminations between two groups still to be determined - you'll see that while our team left something to be desired, Costa Rica was a disaster.

Team USA isn't entirely off the hook, though. The one thing the Americans can't do consistently enough is score goals. You're telling me that the team - nicknamed "Sam's Army," by the way, and not a name you want to use for a team that always seems to be in retreat - can't find a decent kicker anywhere? (Oh, that's right, they're all in the NFL.) Here the team has to get its act together if they want to do more than just show up in South Africa in 2010. Maybe some people found the team's performance embarrassing. Well, it hardly came close to Connie Chung's bizarre lounge-diva schtick at the end of the last installment of her MSNBC series.

In the meantime, the 2006 World Cup goes on. The Americans - who, thanks to George W. Bush, had to travel through Germany anonymously and couldn't put their country name on their bus for fear of anti-American violence against them - can go home and stop worrying about their security. We American soccer fans can go back to looking for Major League Soccer games on television, even though Hitler documentaries are much easier to come by. An the rest of the country, whose only experience with soccer was Brandi Chastain taking off her shirt at the end of 1999 Women's World Cup championship game in triumph, can stop pretending to care about the sport and go back to rotisserie football. And of course, some of us will actually watch the rest of the World Cup. We shouldn't expect any further water cooler chat over it, though.