I know. I'm actually back. But in the interest of posterity, I should blog the last few days of my trip.
First off, the USA-Algeria game. If you take pride in being alive, chances are you've seen the highlights, so you know what was at stake. So Alexis and I were already pretty psyched heading into Loftus-Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria. Now let's bump it up a notch. We sneak into the lower section of the stadium, and we search for friendly faces with which to blend. As long as we're this close to the field, we ask a nice older dude with a Bocanegra jersey to take our picture. He asks where we're sitting, we explain that we're squatting, and he encourages us to hang around as long as we can. He's sitting next to some other Bocanegra fans, who are sitting next to some Dempsey fans, who are sitting next to some people in Marcus Hahneman shirts. Hm. Weird. Not to offend, Marcus, if you're reading, but I've never seen a real live replica jersey of our third-string goalkeeper, let alone 4 in a row.
We started to clue into what was going on as we continued looking around. All the Oguchi Onyewu fans looked a bit like Gooch (black and large), all the DeMarcus Beasley fans looked a bit like Beasley (black and skinny), and there were about double the number of people with the name Bradley on their backs. Finally, we spotted a guy who was sporting a Tim Howard jersey, and he was...a dead ringer. I tentatively went up to him and asked, "do you know Timmy?" I mean, you gotta act like you belong.
"Yeah, man, he's my little brother!" The guy is totally Jersey, which is where the Howards are from, it turns out, and Alexis and I go off. We introduce ourselves to DeMarcus Beasley's mom, I chatted up Stuart Holden's mom (her name is Moira, and Moira was rocking the red/white/blue Venetian shades), Alexis became best friends with Gooch's brother and eventually got her face painted by Beasley's wife or sister. She had had to re-do her own face paint, since Clarence Goodson's wife had forgotten she wasn't looking at a mirror, but rather a face, as she carefully wrote "A-S-U." See, these are the stories you get from the family section.
So if we thought the stakes were high before we walked in, imagine what we were going through when the whistle blew. Any mistake we saw for the next 90 minutes was accompanied by a group of 4-6 people hanging their heads, clasping their hands, and screaming as quietly as possible to no one in particular. When Dempsey hit the post late in the second half and followed it up with a complete shank on an open goal, things got very quiet around the Dempsey clan, as Americans around the world got the feeling that this just wasn't their day.
Until The Goal.
It's a funny thing when a goal is scored late in a game. The players on the scoring team forget they've been running for 90 straight minutes, and all of a sudden they're sprinting around, chasing the hero, who after exerting all that effort is running faster than anyone. The failed defense, all of a sudden, is a study in stillness. That's what happened on the field, and that's what happened in the crowd. The Algerians, who represented quite well, had been jumping and singing for the whole game, completely content to go through the tournament without a goal scored, if it meant points against England and the Americans. But when Donovan pounced on one of the biggest goals of his career, it was like someone had hit the pause button on half the stadium. The green and white in the stadium all seemed to stop moving.
In the American sections though, it was like someone had just reported a bomb threat. People couldn't stay in their assigned seats, they had to run somewhere. Anywhere. They climbed over seats, they pounded shoulders, they yelled at strangers, and they hugged anyone they could find. I hugged some African dude I was sitting next to, I ran down an aisle, and I was caught in a bear hug by that big bearded man, otherwise known as Mr. Bocanegra.
We left, talking to Mrs. Holden and Herculez Gomez's best friend from childhood in Las Vegas. Eric was rocking the dreads, along with a red, white and blue vuvuzela and a USA makarapa. "Dude, I bought these as soon as I got to the airport," he said, before he ran screaming out the gates into the USA-dominated night.
