World Cup: From fall guys to contenders, the US mean business against England in Group B clash

Published

1 year ago

November 25, 2022

admin

“Soccer’s coming home,” they sing, to the tune of the Skinner and Baddiel classic.

It’s a chant of choice for American fans ahead of the World Cup showdown, poking fun at their English opponents.

We heard it from the crowd watching the University of Maryland take on Fairleigh Dickinson University.

The gag is, of course, the replacement of the word “football” with “soccer” – for UK listeners, it’s a lyric that could only have been written in fingernail on a blackboard.

As supporter wind-ups go, it’s at the benign end of the scale, far removed from the terracing attrition in the land where the game began. Some cultural traditions, it seems, take longer to transfer.

US soccer is football, but not quite as we know it in the UK, certainly not as we speak it.

It’s where players “turn and burn”, wear “cleats” on their feet, not boots; take “PKs”, not penalties and, yes, take liberties with the very name of the game.

From fall guys to contenders

However you word it, the US men’s team have come a long way. They are fall guys-cum-contenders in a sport that America found late.

As the game grew worldwide, it struggled for space in a crowded sporting marketplace, squeezed out by American football, baseball, basketball et al.

America’s male footballers have long been in the shadow of the country’s women’s team. They are a sporting superpower and serial winners of the World Cup (a record four times).

The women’s game has reaped the benefit of a college system that was attracting many of the country’s best female athletes to soccer scholarships, while their male counterparts leaned towards more traditional US sports.

The US Soccer Hall of Fame at FC Dallas hosts a display that recalls the 1950 World Cup match when America’s men, famously, beat England 1-0.

It was such a shock that they made a film of it: The Miracle Match. Seventy-two years on, there would be nothing miraculous about a US win against England in Qatar.

Men’s soccer has ‘taken off’

After a stilted journey towards an established soccer set-up, the US men’s team are ranked 16th in the world.

FC Dallas president and chairman Dan Hunt spoke to Sky News about how the men’s game, domestically, has grown.

He said: “The success of American soccer really goes back to 1994. Having the World Cup here in the United States kicked off a new generation of players on the men’s side.

“The women’s game was already successful and doing well, but the excitement and energy that brought really kickstarted soccer again in this country.

“It’s been a history of fits and starts and stops. You look at the big win against England in 1950, which was such a reference point, and then we basically went dark for 40 years, between 1950 and 1990.

“The old NASL (North America Soccer League) has come and gone. The promise that we had to make as a country was to create a first division professional league, and that’s what brought MLS (Major League Soccer) to life.

“The early years of MLS were incredibly difficult but, for me, the most pivotal moment was the 2002 World Cup where the US team did really well with a number of MLS players.

“Some had already gone abroad and had success in Europe, but that really was the foundation because, only a year earlier, MLS had talked about going out of business and that was the little bit of momentum we needed.

“Since then, the MLS has really taken off.”

While football club academies in America have, increasingly, become a feeder to the highest level of the sport, the college system still provides a pathway to the professional game.

The University of Maryland is a powerhouse production line of talent – graduates from its scholarship programme have played in the last five World Cups.

Sasho Cirovski is the university’s coach, whose career has spanned decades of growth in the American game.

He told Sky News: “The American college system is unique to the whole world. It’s the one place in the world where you can combine high level academics with high-level soccer in a residential setting with tremendous facilities.

“You’re prepared to deal with being away from home, you’re prepared to deal with the expectations of performance.

“You’re scrutinised by the media, you’re challenged by the coaches, and you’re around players who also want to be high-level pros and win championships. So, when you have that kind of support network where you can grow, and you can blossom, it allows players to realise their dreams.

“We have the great advantage in this country of being able to watch and experience and learn from other sports. There is a character and competitiveness about the American athlete – a winning mentality, a toughness that is bred across different sports.

“For a long time, we had to learn from watching the Bundesliga or English Premier League – now we can see it in our own country. But we can also see it from other sports, so there’s a wide array of learning around you that really shows you what it’s going to take to be great.”

US

In Washington DC and Gaza two very different families are united by one very rare disease

Published

2 hours ago

May 5, 2024

admin

In Washington DC and Gaza two very different families are united by one very rare disease

It is a paradox that humanity at its very worst so often also brings out its very best too.

This is a story about the kindness of strangers. It’s a story about hope over hopelessness. It’s about the war in Gaza but also about the rarest of diseases.

It is about two families in worlds far apart. It is a story about two little girls, Julia and Annabel.

I don’t yet know how it will end. But this is how it started.

It was two weeks ago when my phone pinged: a message on Instagram from a friend-of-a-friend. Her name is Nina Frost.

Nina and I first met a few years ago at a party in Washington DC where she had told me about her daughter Annabel, a little girl with an ultra-rare genetic disorder called AHC.

I remember Nina explaining how it was a disease like no other.

‘The human time bomb disease’ she had called it, based on the all-consuming parental nightmare that their little girl could have a fatal seizure at any moment.

I’ve followed Nina’s Instagram, @HopeForAnnabel since we first met.

The good news is that Annabel is doing well, albeit with that eternal danger hanging over her. She requires constant care, attention and love.

Nina’s message to me wasn’t about her own daughter. It was about another little girl, in Gaza.

Rare diseases like AHC, which stands for Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood, generate tight networks; the families living with the condition. Only about 1,000 people worldwide have been diagnosed with AHC. It really is rare.

“There is a little girl stuck in Gaza with the disease,” Nina wrote to me.

“Julia is three – after the last few months she has become paralyzed and unable to eat as her symptoms have worsened dramatically. We are desperate to help as she is massively vulnerable – literally on the brink of death.”

Nina told me how she and her husband, Simon, are trying to organise the impossible: to get specialist drugs into Gaza and, ultimately, to try to get Julia and her family out.

Nina was modest about an endeavour that I now know has been all-consuming and expensive.

To tell this remarkable story of kindness and hope, I asked Nina to share with me Julia’s father’s number. Our local colleagues in Gaza then tracked the family down to a tent in the southern city of Rafah.

Julia Abu Zaiter is from northern Gaza originally. But with her father Amjad, her mother Maha and her older sister Sham, she was forced south by the Israeli military.

“My girl is three and a half years old. I want her to go out and play with the other children. Now, she cannot move at all,” Julia’s mother told our team, cradling her severely disabled little girl.

Rafah is on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Safety is so close and yet beyond reach unless the right strings are pulled with different authorities and governments in a labyrinth of wartime bureaucracy.

The images filmed by our team confirm what Nina had feared in her message to me.

Julia and her family are in the toughest of conditions. The house next to the tent was bombed a few days before our team visited.

The Abu Zaiters are now stuck in the city that could be the next battlefield and with a daughter whose condition is compounded by just the slightest stress, a little girl with, as Nina had told me, the ‘time bomb disease’.

“I told myself ‘it’s over, my girl is gone’,” Julia’s mother told our Gaza team, showing them Julia’s semi-paralysed state.

“Then a man named Simon contacted us and told us he will see if he can help, because his daughter’s situation is similar to mine.”

Five thousand miles away, and a world apart, in a leafy northwest suburb of Washington DC, I am now sitting with Simon, Nina and Annabel.

It is humbling to listen to their words – about their own daughter, but about their fight for a stranger too.

“Annabel lives with the most challenging condition that we can imagine – a neurological degeneration – and she lives with it with a smile on her face,” Simon says. “And we’re imagining the same for Julia in the most dire of circumstances.”

We look at videos of Julia which Amjad has sent to Simon.

“Our kids are all so similar… we feel a sense of connection to so many families and our world of rare disease,” Nina tells me.

“This is like that but on steroids. I mean, we feel so distressed for the situation that they’re facing.”

“Julia’s circumstances are exponentially worse, but I think we’ve always embraced the idea that we can do something to help, we must do something to help and that we should. I mean, I think it’s always been if not us, then who?” Nina adds.

Amjad’s message highlights concerns he has about his daughter. He is looking for reassurance from Simon.

Julia is experiencing some severe paralysis and via a translated SMS and a few photos, Amjad wants some encouragement which Simon can’t give.

“They don’t have the medicines they need and the doctors that they need to really treat and properly prevent episodes and to address them when she has them,” Simon says.

“So we’ve been trying to gather a group that can support her. It’s been constant communication and really difficult with the translation issues,” Simon tells me.

Over in Gaza, Julia’s mum is desperate. “Our conditions due to the war are below zero.

“Our situation is horrible. I cannot provide my daughter with any food or drinks. I can get medications through lots of difficulty, and I tell myself that getting these medications is more important than getting food for us.”

Against the odds, Simon has managed to coordinate with the right people to get the right medication into Gaza for Julia.

Through the tight AHC network, one doctor has prompted another who knows another and another. That’s how this works. Threads of kindness stitched together.

Now the challenge is getting Julia out to Egypt and then on a medical flight to Abu Dhabi. It will be hard, maybe impossible.

“And it seems like she’s really declined,” Nina says looking at the latest videos of Julia.

“I mean, it seems like exactly what we would have predicted has happened. She has gone from being a happy three-year-old with a profoundly difficult disease to being this shell of herself.”

“I feel like I am losing her,” Maha says with Julia in her arms. “She is dying right next to me and I cannot even do anything. The thing I fear the most is losing my daughter.”

There is some chance of an extraction to safety soon. It is not guaranteed but it is some hope for one little girl in a place where uncertainty is all around.

This is a story about two families worlds apart but bound by a disease.

I don’t yet know how it will end. This may feel sometimes like a world of hopelessness, but I have some hope.

US

‘Part of the American spirit’: Arrested student denies protests are violent

Published

1 day ago

May 4, 2024

admin

'Part of the American spirit': Arrested student denies protests are violent

Much has been said about the students whose protests have gripped America this past week.

Their cause has been framed in polarising ways. A violent Hamas-sympathising mob? Or peace activists striving for equality?

Within a frenzied spectrum of views and noise, one young student sat down with me for a conversation.

Aidan Doyle, 21, is a philosophy and jazz double major at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

He was arrested early on Thursday morning for being part of an encampment at the university.

He told Sky News he was shocked that the police arrested so many student protesters, despite not intervening in an attack on the protesters by a pro-Israeli group the day before.

He said his arrest had not deterred him from continuing his protest, which he likened to the Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s.

Mr Doyle rejected the notion, from President Biden, that the protests are not peaceful.

“Graffiti, putting posters up, that’s all peaceful,” he said, commenting on the president’s statement from the White House.

“I also think that President Biden needs to actually take some introspection and realise that maybe the reason so many of these protests are happening is partially due to him.”

Mr Doyle added: “Protests in general are part of the American spirit. They’re part of being an American. And if we were to just stand around in circles and sing and dance, and pretend everything was fine, then nothing would change and nobody would care at all.

“Part of a protest is causing disruption and causing at least a minor level of chaos that is, again, not violent but that actually disrupts things.”

He denied any accusations of antisemitism, but conceded there is a spectrum of opinion within the movement.

“If you’re going to criticise a movement, I think you have to look at the movement’s goals and their mission, not what fringe members of the group say or do.

“You have to actually look at what we say, what the organisers say, and what is in the mainstream, and what our mission and our goal is: the peace and prosperity of the Palestinian people.”

Asked if he believed in Israel’s right to exist as a country, he said: “I think Jewish sovereignty is incredible. I think it’s an amazing thing.”

He added: “I think that if there is a country for Jewish people that protects the Jewish people, that is of utmost importance, especially with the vile and rampant antisemitism that exists across the world that I see every day and that I try and combat as much as possible.

“But doing that and then simultaneously repressing another group of people, dehumanising them and brutalising them, then the question of whether your state has the right to exist becomes secondary.”

US

The protests at US universities are about much more than Gaza and Israel

Published

2 days ago

May 3, 2024

admin

The protests at US universities are about much more than Gaza and Israel

On the grass outside the university library, it is as though it never happened.

The tents have been removed. The pavements have been sprayed. The graffiti removed.

Order and control have been restored. The protest has been silenced. For now at least.

A few streets away, at the university police station, an officer calls the names of the students arrested the night before.

On the steps in front of him, the bedraggled are waiting.

Students, charged and released with a date in court, are here now to collect their belongings. They’re missing bags, belts, shoes, all lost in the chaos of the night before.

From the very heart of the protest encampment, our cameras had captured the chaos.

Officers moving in. Tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse. Stun grenades to disorientate.

They were scenes which have stirred an already fevered debate about Israel and Gaza, yes, but about much more too. About America, about policing, and about free speech too.

President Biden said yesterday: “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations – none of this is a peaceful protest.”

‘Wrong’ say the protesters. Their movement, they say, is the very essence of protest; of civil disobedience which is threaded through US college campus history.

They reject any notion that they are threatening or violent. Yet the deeply divisive history of the Israel-Palestine conflict ensures that the beholder will so often be offended by the actions of the other side.

It was the students perceived antisemitism through their pro-Palestinian slogans which had drawn a group of pro-Israel protesters to the encampment earlier in the week.

The chaos of that night was reflected in a statement by the university’s student radio station which has been covering every twist.

“Counter protestors used bear mace, professional-grade fireworks and clubs to brutalize hundreds of our peers, UCLA turned a blind eye. Police were not called until hours into the onslaught and stood aside for over an hour as counter-protestors enacted racial, physical and chemical violence,” the statement from the UCLA Radio Managerial team said.

Watching the clear-up after the nighttime police sweep of the protesters I spotted two people embracing. A young man and an older woman.

It turned out to be a thread of history. One was a student who’d been arrested the night before.

The other was a student from a past time. Diane Salinger had been at New York’s Columbia University in 1968, at protests which now form a key chapter in American history.

“I’m so proud of these people here. I’m so proud,” she told me.

“You know the civil unrest of the students back in ’68 and it continued for several years, it actually changed the course of the Vietnam War and hopefully this is going to do the same thing.”

But then, back at the police station, a conversation that hints at the wider challenges for America.

‘Tom’ is a protester who wanted to remain anonymous – a graduate who feels politically deserted in his own country. For him, no government is better than any on offer.

“The problem with our system is that we can’t rely on the police, we can’t rely on the military to keep us safe.

“When we need to make our voices heard, we need to make them heard, and the only way to do that without being repressed is by keeping each other safe and I think that last night and the last few months have really exemplified that,” he told me.

These protests are about more than Gaza. They are aligning a spectrum of dissent.