Outside Oberlin

USA Beats Mexico in World Cup Qualifying Match
By Blake Rehberg

World Cup 2002 may seem like a long way away, but not for the U.S. national team. They played their first game in the final group stage against Mexico on Wednesday winning 2-0.
The game was not far away from Oberlin, in the Columbus Crew stadium. The site was selected to limit Mexican fans and make the Mexican team uncomfortable because of the cold. It was apparently successful on both counts. The stadium was full of American fans, with an attendance total of 24,624. Several players commented in online interviews that they definitely felt a home field advantage. The temperature was in the 20s and I can’t help but think that contributed to the victory. 
The qualifying rounds for the Confederate of North, Central American & Caribbean Association Football is a sort of hexagonal round robin featuring the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Honduras, Mexico and Costa Rica. Each team plays 10 games, one home and one away against each opponent. The top three teams advance to the World Cup.
Wednesday’s match got off to a very slow start. The first half was pretty uneventful. I didn’t even bother to pay all that much attention to it. Neither team successfully built an attack and there were very few chances. 
The key events of the first half were injuries. U.S. Striker Brian McBride took a serious hit to the eye in an aerial challenge and had to leave the field. His right eye was immensely swollen, making it impossible for McBride to see on that side. Josh Wolff, who turned 24 on Sunday, took the field in the 15th minute as McBride’s replacement.
McBride has been plagued by injuries for a while now. A blood clot in his arm and a fractured cheekbone caused him to miss at least four games of the previous qualifying round. 
McBride is a key part of the U.S. offense. McBride scored his 14th international goal in a recent game against China, his fourth straight in a national team game to tie a record set in 1954. He was also the only national team member to score in the 1998 World Cup in France, where the U.S. finished last. 

U.S. team captain Claudio Reyna appeared to injure his groin about midway through the first half. He stayed on the field until Clint Mathis, who is also 24, replaced him in the 43rd, but was visibly strained and pulled back from several balls that he would have normally won.
Reyna is also one of the most talented U.S. players. He has a very skilled touch on the ball and is a vital playmaker, directing the offense from midfield. 
The second half was a largely different game. Both teams were far more organized, maintaining possession and putting together attacks on goal. Within three minutes the U.S. had scored on a combined effort from the subs.
Mathis played a long ball into space and Wolff took advantage of his speed to capitalize. Mexico’s goalkeeper Jorge Campos came way outside the box to field the ball but apparently didn’t figure Wolff would be as fast as he was. Campos and Wolff reached the ball about the same time and Campos seemed pretty much frozen. He could have gotten the ball first and then Wolff and there would have been no foul. Instead he tried to contain the rapidly advancing Wolff. The ball bounced off of Campos and Wolff had an open net in front of him. 
He even had time to spin around and find the ball after apparently losing it for a minute and the Mexican defenders still didn’t catch him. What makes this goal more amazing is how impregnable the Mexican back line had been the entire first half. The U.S. had other good chances in front of the goal, but after a while they slipped back into a defensive set and Mexico dominated the possession and tempo. There were several dangerous opportunities, but U.S. goalkeeper Brad Friedel made several nice saves to keep the shut out.
In the 71st minute Mexico’s Francisco Palencia got a through ball to the six-yard line but Friedel didn’t balk at the powerful shot that Palencia unleashed. Friedel also made a nice diving save to pluck a cross from the feet of Luis Hernandez.
Friedel had a strong back line in front of him to help keep him from having to make saves. Tony Sanneh, Eddie Pope, David Regis and Jeff Agoos combined to effectively negate the Mexican attack.
The U.S. transitions from defense to attack showed how well they played as a team. In the last few minutes of the game one such counterattack resulted with Wolff in the corner with two Mexican defenders. Wolff showed he has more than speed nicely touching the ball with his heel as he spun past the defenders to run straight down the baseline. Campos came out on him again and Wolff passed the ball off as Ernie Stewart ran into the box to put it away into the empty net.

Unfortunately, the game did not end on that high note. Back on the defensive end Hernandez gave Sanneh an elbow to the chin. A skirmish followed, but luckily the U.S. remained calm and avoided getting any yellow cards. A card would be really bad since they carry on through the group phase. On the television Hernandez’ elbow was a blatant foul worthy of a red card, but the referee’s view was obscured and Hernandez got away without a card.

The victory was the U.S.’s first over Mexico in a World Cup qualifier in 20 years. However, the U.S. has beaten Mexico in their last three meetings. All three have been shutouts.
This shutout is more important than those. Jamaica beat Trinidad and Tobago 1-0 and Costa Rica tied Honduras 2-2, leaving the United States in first place on goal difference.
This is only the first game in a 10 game series, but if the U.S. can keep up this level of play they stand to do better than last World Cup, which shouldn’t be that hard considering how horribly they played last time.

As a soccer fan who was unfortunately born in the U.S, I am glad to see that soccer is gaining some popularity. There is a large enough fan base to warrant its own title, Sam’s Army. This results in younger kids getting interested in soccer and cultivates better players for the U.S. There are players going straight from high school to Major League Soccer. Landon Donavan is a testament to younger core of American players. Donavan is only 18 years old but has earned a place on the national team even if it is not as a starter.
Hopefully this growth in American soccer will continue. Maybe one day we will win the World Cup, or at least not be the laughing stock of it.
The Americans play Brazil in an exhibition game Saturday in the Rose Bowl. Although they don’t stand much chance of winning, it will give them the chance to test themselves against the tougher competition they will face if they do indeed make it to the World Cup. They will travel to Honduras on March 28 for their next qualifier.

McGwire Proves Why He is Still a Fan Favorite
By Zach Pretzer

I will be the first to admit that before St. Louis Cardinal’s slugger Mark McGwire started to bust through with his record breaking numbers I wasn’t a particularly big fan of his. I have always been a die-hard Cleveland Indians fan, and when he played for the Oakland Athletics he was an American League opponent of ours.
But, like so many sports fans, I was in awe of how he shattered Roger Maris’ home run record and proved himself to be the best power hitter to ever play the game of baseball. Call me a front-runner if you want, but ever since then he has been of my favorite players.

With that said, let me also say that I follow the game of baseball pretty extensively and usually know at least the general idea of what’s going on in the Major Leagues. One thing I didn’t know, however, was that McGwire was a potential free agent, and very well could have chosen to play somewhere other than in St. Louis this season. But despite St. Louis’s disappointing season last year (they made the playoffs, but didn’t advance as far as they were expected to), McGwire chose to stay loyal to the team and stadium that made one of the most popular athletes in the sports world today.
So is he making a lot of money? Well, if you compare it to the average worker in our country, or anywhere else for that matter, he’s making a hell of a lot of money. But when you compare his salary to the rest of the players in Major League Baseball, and take in account his never before seen abilities, he is grossly underpaid.

At the age of 37, McGwire signed a two-year, $30 million extension with a large amount of money deferred — so basically, he is not seeing anywhere near the $30 million total due to the deferrals. So where does he stand in comparison to the rest of the league? Well, presently he falls right between outfielders Shawn Green, who will make $14 million this season, and Carlos Delgado, who will make $17 million. Delgado certainly has a lot of pop in his bat, is young and is going to be a superstar for a long time, but he and Green don’t command the ticket sales or fanfare that McGwire does. More importantly, however, McGwire isn’t making any amount of money close to that of Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez, who are the two of the three highest paid players in the sport. And if you take into account the fact that McGwire is a much bigger gate attraction than Ramirez and Rodriguez, the Cardinals are perhaps receiving one of the biggest bargains in all of the sport.

The only thing that McGwire has going against him is that he has rarely been able to play an entire season healthy. It’s no secret that’s he getting older, but for the most part he had only been getting stronger and more powerful with his age. If he stays healthy and averages about 50 home runs over the next three seasons in St. Louis, he will be close to breaking Hank Aaron’s all-time record of 775 dingers when his contract with the Cardinals expires. Tell me what team in baseball wouldn’t pay a fortune to have him on their squad if he breaks Aaron’s elusive record. Imagine the ticket sales!
Despite the examples that Rodriguez and Ramirez set upon the sports world as the best players wanting all the money they can fit into their locker, McGwire has proven that greed isn’t necessarily synonymous with the top Major League Baseball players. Of course, home runs aren’t everything, and they are only one dimension to making a solid all-around player, but McGwire consistently bats around .300, is able to knock in more runs than anybody else, walks a 100 times a year and is an extremely good defensive first-baseman. There couldn’t be anything more you could want from a player who has already captivated a nation with his heroic 70 home run season. 

So does he want to be paid more money than the rest of the players? His salary this season is a good enough answer to that question. McGwire just seems to have something a lot of professional athletes don’t have — common sense. He already is rich as can be, is popular throughout the world, has all of the television endorsements a professional athlete could possible wish for and above all, holds one of the most prestigious records in all of sport. He knows when the good gets good, and now is just going to enjoy himself for the rest of the career, and not fuss about satisfying some form of ego problem by wanting to be the highest paid player in the league.

Perhaps you might think that McGwire is a rare exception to the greedy persona that a lot of professional players exude. Well, he certainly doesn’t represent the majority of the league in his generosity by taking less money to help out his franchise. But he isn’t the only recent example of a superstar taking less money for the good of the team, and for that much, for the love of the game. For surely a player who takes money to give his team a better chance of money has a love for the game. After all winning is fun, and losing makes it hard for a player to love what he is doing. 

For example, take Randy Johnson. He has won back-to-back Cy Young Awards, and is flat-out the most intimidating pitcher in baseball today. But does he complain about wanting to be paid more than anybody else is? After all, he would have a rather legitimate argument. No, he hasn’t complained at all. In fact, he deferred over 50 percent of his salary over the next three years of his contract to help his financially struggling Arizona Diamondback franchise. $19 million is no little sum of money, either.

With the blockbuster signings of Ramirez and Rodriguez, it is a good thing that there are a few superstars out there on the diamond who are willing to lay off the temptation of being the richest player and rather play to win and for the love of the game. Professional baseball needed something like this to help the fans realize that the league is still something more than just a business. Not all, but at least a few still have the desire to win at all costs just like they did when started in little league.