The young miss and I might have arranged our work schedules to attend this game. Tickets were available. The national teams never came to Seattle when we lived near there. They never come to Iowa, where she grew up. Who knows when the next chance to see a World Cup team might come? Negative wind chills in an outdoor stadium. My wife was baffled. Aren’t there indoor stadiums for the game? Not in Minnesota. espn+ commentator Craig Burley ripped the small-mindedness of it.
Dan Wetzel, from a different sports outlet:
This is the US though. It wants bad conditions. It wants tiny stadiums so it can keep visiting fans out. It wants to play as far as possible from where immigrants of opposing teams reside, hence a disproportionate amount of games in the Midwest and few if any on the East Coast.
Everything is about protecting and pampering, like the American players can’t take on even Honduras in 70-degree air or with a few opposing fans present and chanting for their side.
Could be true. The US women’s team has outperformed its male counterparts at every turn: trophies, championships, home attendance. I’ve opined about the pay gap on this site before, and I agree there should be one. The women should be paid more than the men. For every World Cup or Olympic gold they win, a 10% hike above the other team.
Honduras coach Hernan Dario Gomez:
I’m not going to analyze my team, the game or my players performance. It’s not possible and I’m not capable of doing it under these circumstances. Inside the locker room my players are receiving IV fluids and many of them are in pain.
Canada has no choice but to play winter home matches in the snow zone. The US, this was as opportune a time to squeeze in two mid-week qualifying contests. They avoided the other football’s final four weekend. Basketball and hockey are in the dog days of long seasons. Baseball and NASCAR are off.
Maybe if the opposition were Brazil, it would be clever to freeze them out. The Honduras team is ranked about seventieth in the world. The US is at least fifty places above them in the computer rankings. If they wanted to play a small stadium, maybe Tulsa or Chattanooga or Richmond would do. Me, I don’t see a problem with playing in Atlanta or Kansas City.
It illustrates why the mentality behind the men’s national team is such that this group will never get close to winning the World Cup. Thanks to its leadership, these men will always be closer to not-qualifying (as in 2018) than winning the trophy.
image credit of the 2019 women’s team: By Howcheng – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80380120
Catholic Sensibility 