Posted on 06/02/2010 8:40:54 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
IRENE, South Africa, The slogan on the side of the bus reads "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Victory!" with the Stars and Stripes painted alongside. The U.S. World Cup team is making itself at home in South Africa, ready at last to play the games that matter most.
The Americans are staying in the 74-room Irene Country Lodge, a luxury hotel north of Johannesburg and south of Pretoria protected by stone walls and barbed wire. There's a lake on the property, with an adjacent farm filled with cows and enough roosters to make alarm clocks superfluous.
"It's been a long time," captain Carlos Bocanegra said Tuesday in the interview tent, pitched on the dairy farm. "Now it's finally here. We're in South Africa. So we're excited for the games to start. It feels real now that we're down here in South Africa and we're set up at our hotel and you see all the World Cup fanfare."
The 23-man roster and about an equal number of coaches and support staff left Washington Dulles International Airport on Sunday evening and arrived 17 hours later to a warm welcome. After a night of rest, practice resumed Tuesday ahead of the U.S. team's World Cup opener against England on June 12.
"The travel seemed quite easy. Maybe we're used to it by now," U.S. coach Bob Bradley said.
Practice is not too far away in Pretoria's Pilditch Stadium, a lush green field surrounded by an eight-lane running track with about 5,000 seats on one side. Berms topped with palm trees wrap the other segments of the field, and the leaves are starting to fade to brown as autumn approaches winter in the Southern Hemisphere. This will be the first World Cup south of the equator since 1978 in Argentina.
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God I love Brazillian women.
Please read the rest of the thread to gain the proper perspective on my original post.
Lawn Fairies.....
I don't care for soccer but the World Cup is fun to watch when the home team is involved. I remember many years ago I was on vacation in Honduras during the World Cup and staying at a small oceanside resort. They had an outdoor bar that would be packed with Hondurans watching the cup matches and just whooping and hollering like our Super Bowl bar parties here.
It was great fun being around those folks who know the game and really get into it........
In this day and age of globalism, it’s refreshing to have one month of solid nationalistic fervor.
My sentiments also apply to cycling and the Tour de France.....
On my numerous trips to Honduras, you would see these little kids in small villages out in the cow pastures running around barefoot playing soccer with beat up old soccer balls...None of them had shoes and they probably never saw a new soccer ball in their lives......but they were really having fun.
I bet they were thrilled when Jonathan Bornstein scored that goal against Costa Rica that clinched the spot for Honduras.
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