Lynne Kiesling
An entire month of international football (ok, soccer) begins on Friday! Skip Sauer kindly provides the television schedule in the U.S., which I also went out of my way to find yesterday.
I’m not optimistic about Team USA this year, particularly given the group they’ve drawn. As usual, I’m cheering for England as well as USA (and weakly cheering for Spain because of Xabi Alonso, even though Liverpool isn’t one of my teams), and this year I may have a winner, or at least a finalist, on my hands. Even if Wayne Rooney’s foot doesn’t heal in time for him to play, Team England looks good to me. I don’t remember Michael Owen being as good (or as cute, for that matter!) as he’s been in the friendlies we’ve watched.
I’ve also been impressed with Owen Hargreaves, but wasn’t familiar with him because we watch lots of English Premiere League and FA Cup and little else. So I was interested in Brian Goff’s post on him at Sports Economist, referring to his being booed by English fans. Hargreaves is Canadian but is eligible for Team England due to his father being British, and he plays at Bayern Munich (a team chock full of talent). So why would the English fans boo him? Because he doesn’t play for an English team?
BTW, while you’re at Sports Economist, see also Skip’s interesting post on international differences in league governance, with lots of interesting information about league decision-making vs. team decision-making. There’s lots of fodder for an NIE/governance analysis there!