June 18, 2006

Day 11 - STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

The stadium in Kaiserslautern sits up on a hillside overlooking the city. It is a pretty amazing setting for soccer. Unfortunately to get up to the stadium, one must walk up about 1000 stairs (that's no B.S.). I ended up doing it twice.

No elevators or escalators and whenever I asked somebody where I could enter the stadium with my media credential, it always seemed to be the next gate down. And this is in weather that's 80 degrees, 8 degrees Celsius...I think (you just drop the "0" right?)

The stadium seats 46,000 fans, but just goes straight up on all four sides. No tiers or decks, just seats. The game last night between the U.S. and Italy was great to see live. On television you probably couldn't see all the holding and battles going off the ball, but there were many.   Bruce actually stood up for most of the second half. I don't know what got into him. Maybe somebody on the bench had some real bad gas.

The ref tried to get involved too early by controlling the game with cards, and it ended up ruining what should have been a great match. It was a hard-fought game, and there were a couple of inexcusable fouls, but he handcuffed a lot of players early and it affected the quality...for that he should not be forgiven.

Why did Bruce Arena have to shove the Eddie Lewis experiment down our throats in the first game? If he hadn't and had played Bocanegra there, we could be looking at having a realistic shot at the second round. But because the Eddie Lewis experiment was his idea, he had to prove that he knows more than us and play a life-time midfielder at left back against the second-best team in the world.

I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but giving that game up so critically damaged our chances of advancing. Last night's tie might have come with a little bit of luck, but the guys worked their asses off.

If you think that Eddie Johnson belongs on the field, you're not alone. Landon didn't even touch the ball in the first half last night. It wasn't until the game opened up late that he took a little bit of initiative and took people on. He shouldn't even be starting anymore, but that will never happen.

The days and nights are blending together now, which is not just a good thing...it's the whole reason that I am over here. We left for Kaiserslautern on a train out of Frankfurt yesterday at noon. With the 9 pm kickoff and a 1 am train home, we arrived in Frankfurt at 3 am. From there, we took what was supposed to be a 20 minute walk home and turned it into an hour unwanted tour of the city at dawn when Baby Bruce got us lost.

You better believe that he got a smack to the head for that one! I gave him another one from all of you since he's the reason there's been this painfully long gap in the posting of my blog (still don't know what that means yet).

I can consistently sleep through earthquakes, invitations from my wife to take the dogs for a walk at dawn and even a few of the early (6 am in the States) starts for these World

Cup games (I'm not proud of that last fact, but I have a DVR, so relax). But after sleeping for only a few short hours today, I was able to get myself up out of bed and run down to the free breakfast buffet in our hotel before it closed at 10:30 am.

We made it, ate and went back to sleep until early afternoon. With the days lasting until about 10 pm, it's hard to figure out when to start partying and when to stop partying...so we figured out that the best thing to do is to KEEP partying.

The streets scenes and public-viewing parties have been great as you can OBVIOUSLY see in these photos. I don't know where I was when all these photos were being taken...but I think I was at a museum or maybe reading a book by the river.

AND...even though my Dad didn't click over when he was on the other line when I called from Germany at probably $7 a minute the other day borrowing somebody else's phone...and then put me on hold when I called back the second time...I'd still like to wish him a Happy Father's Day.

Tomorrow: Spain vs. Tunisia in Stuttgart.