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World Cup Wake: If I had told you the USMNT…

Now that the World Cup has passed, we can properly lay it to rest with a series of wakes: drinks and thoughts on our favorite World Cup teams, players, themes, and moments; the parts of the Cup we will miss the most.

There’s a game we play with sports, and we’ve been playing it with this World Cup, so it’s not unfamiliar. It’s the “If you had told me…I would’ve taken it in a heartbeat” game and it goes like this: If you had told me in December the United States would survive the Group of Death, I would’ve taken it in a heartbeat. Or: If you had told me in May the U.S. would be banging down Belgium’s door just trailing by a goal in the 120th minute in the Round of 16, I would’ve taken it in a heartbeat. Or: If you told me on June 12th that we’d be getting an Argentina-Germany final, I would’ve taken it in a heartbeat.

This game can serve as both a healthy perspective-granting exercise and as an unhealthy reality-ignoring exercise. Playing the game with the United States remembers that Ghana, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium all have superior rosters with more talented and polished players and the U.S played all but about 20 minutes against those teams without their best scoring threat and still ended the tournament as one of the best 16 teams in the world. It also forgets that the Americans had no real Plan B after Jozy Altidore went down, never consistently attacked Germany or Belgium (tactics that made those teams look vulnerable), Bradley had 3 of his worst games in a U.S. shirt, and our back four gave acres of space to teams that knew what to do with it. It remembers Timmy Howard’s and John Brooks’s and Jermaine Jones’s heroics and Clint Dempsey’s consistent will to “try shit." It also forgets that Team America still lacks the kind of clinical touch, sense, and tactical nous that seem to come naturally to teams of a higher caliber, and it’s hard to see when and from where those attributes will come.

What the “If you had told me” game really does, is the reverse of what Brian Phillips talked about on Grantland yesterday:

The reality of everything that happens is too immense to hold on to, so we take the highlights and arrange them into an order that at least feels plausible. In sport, though, we’re constantly setting out the stakes ahead of time. If the prince with the silver shield takes the black castle, he has a chance to be the greatest king in history. We tell stories with no endings. We tell stories that may not come true.

Of course the preordering happens – we create our expectations and then hold athletes and sport to have met, exceeded, or fallen short of them. Be we also re-shape sport from the future, after the fact. We tell ourselves that Germany were the inevitable champions when they trailed Ghana, snuck by Algeria, and could’ve given up 2 or 3 goals to Argentina in the final. Or we tell ourselves that Germany weren’t all that great when they clinically dispatched Portugal and Brasil, never lost a game, never needed penalties to win, and never even trailed a game for longer than 8 minutes. We tell ourselves that Messi shrank from the moment after he scored the highest percentage of his teams goals, created the most goal-scoring chances, and took on more defenders than anyone in the tournament. Or we can tell ourselves he was a deserving Golden Ball winner even though he failed to score or assist in Argentina’s last three games and had as many chances to win knockout games as Rodrigo Palacio (and failed as many times).

When we play the “If you had told me” game, we tell stories that may not be true even though we know the ending. Or, at least, they didn't get to the end in the way that we expected them to. If you had told me on June 11th that Messi would lift the Golden Ball after the World Cup Final in The Maracana, I’m sure I would’ve taken it, only my mind would have filled in an entirely different narrative for the four weeks in between. Now that it’s happened, which narrative do I pick to explain it?

And how about this: If I had told you, maybe sometime around June 8th, maybe I whispered in your ear to you: “Don’t worry- you’ll be in a bar on July 1st, and your heart will be swimming in the beer in your throat because Kyle Beckerman played the three games of his life, and because Jermaine Jones was marauding all over the park having scored one of the best goals of the tournament, and because DeAndre Yedlin was a blur on the right touchline, and because Clint Dempsey scored one of the five fastest goals in World Cup history, and because Rocket Pops are undefeated, and because NO WE DID NOT lose the Ghana again, and because Michael Bradley is gonna drop a dime against Belgium like he dropped a dime again Turkey, and because there were hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands huddled and clenched and bouncing in front of communal screens in every corner of America, and because the “Little Trout” scored in the 107th minute, and because Timmy Motherfucking Howard was once again standing on his motherfucking head…”

…would you take that in a heartbeat?

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