Onward Sam's Army!

South Africa here we come (again)!

Last night the US Men's soccer team punched its ticket to the 2010 World Cup. It took an exciting, back and forth 3-2 win over host Honduras to finally get the job done, but with victory they secured enough points in CONCACAF qualifying to make it.

Not a bad couple days for American international relations, with one Nobel Peace Prize and one World Cup slot. Maybe today we'll hit a trifecta and North Korea will decide to disarm .

I did have one gripe about the game, namely that I couldn't watch it, and neither could a lot of our nation. Since the game was in Honduras, they technically owned the broadcast rights, and for some reason US networks couldn't or wouldn't work out a deal to broadcast in the states. To make things worse, the Hondurans apparently are crazy about their rights and were constantly shutting down any attempts to stream the game over the Internet. As a result, a lot of fans like myself were reduced to getting updates via "match tracker", which is basically someone typing what happens during the game, or even worse *ugh* Twitter. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to try and track the last minutes of a tight match via Twitter?

Imagine the absurdity of this situation. The richest, most advanced nation in the history of the world, who's President is so dreamy he won the damn Nobel prize 24 hours earlier, is somehow unable to secure a TV feed for a match which could qualify it for the biggest sporting on the planet. There are tons of two bit countries where everything, even war, will stop for these games, and we can't even get a feed on ESPN2. I wondered if we could invoke the Monroe Doctrine or something to get the Hondurans to share the broadcast.

I also thought it was funny that Honduras is having this huge government crisis and they they still managed to host their CONCACAF games. Their government was overthrown this year, and the United States does not recognize the new regime as legitimate (which probably has something to do with the lack of broadcast rights). But even though they are an illegitimate regime denounced by the world, they damn sure are gonna put on the game as scheduled. That's just good sportsmanship.