Some reading material
I said I would talk about the Kansas City/New York game over the weekend today. Okay, I lied, but I will talk about it tomorrow when I preview the Kansas City at Columbus midweek match.
I’ve come across a couple of interesting articles that I’d thought I’d share. Last week, a reader (I have readers?) from Manchester in the UK noted that many in Britain and Europe hope that the game succeeds over here. Coincidentally, Steven Wells of the Guardian (a newspaper that absolutely loves to poke fun/insult the United States) had a blog entry about English views towards Americans playing “their game”, and that perhaps we Yanks know a bit more about this game than the rest of the world believes. I can also assure you that despite the stereotype, most American fans of the game don’t want to see radical changes to the rules similar to the NASL (and many of those ideas came from the Brits). Americans playing association football is really nothing to fear, unless you fear competition.
Slate had an article about the constant change in the US National Team uniform design/color. Sure, every country’s kits change over time, but you know that Italy will be wearing blue, Mexico in green, England and Germany will wear the white, etc. The United States in the last 15 years has featured red, white, blue, stripes, no stripes, and last but not least, this weird design that looked like denim with a bunch of stars all over the place, as seen in the picture of Marcello Balboa in all of his mullet glory.
The issue has affected fans, particularly those in Sam’s Army. In the late 90s through 2001, the United States would wear red, so Sam’s Army (which really doesn’t have any sort of centralized leadership) encouraged fans to wear red if they wished to stand in that section. Then Nike/USSF decides to switch to blue in 2002, thus screwing all of us over although red remained the color of choice for the fans. Still, I’m no longer sure what to wear nowadays.
Leave a Reply