England 2; United States 1

Headed down to Soldier Field yesterday to catch the Americans take on the English. Weather was pretty good. Only a few sprinkles, and it stayed pretty cool all day. My buddy Phil and his wife Claudia flew in from LA for the game. I pretty much root for England over anyone except the U.S. In fact, I still have the St. George's cross hanging in my front window that I put up during the 2002 World Cup, then never took down. That said, I was surprised at how many Americans I saw rooting against the U.S. Like, for example, Phil and Claudia.

The crowd representation on TV had to look pretty English. They had the flags all over the place.

Lots 'o flags

Americans don't really go for that, so it looked worse than it was. No doubt, there were a lot of England fans there, but I'd say the crowd actually cheered about 60/40 for the U.S.

We actually had better seats than I expected. We were in the third row at field level, just this side of midfield. I usually prefer to sit a little higher for soccer, but from where we were, you could see most of the game pretty well, and we got a great view of the little things that you don't always see from farther away.

Sideline action

One thing very noticeable from our seats was the size of Sol Campbell. He is a big dude.

Sol Campbell is big

Anyway, England jumped out to a 1-0 lead on a beautiful curl from Kieran Richardson, playing in his international debut. From just outside the 18 yard box he curled one over the wall and away from Kasey Keller. He added another goal just before halftime on a great finish of a Joe Cole pass. The U.S., who actually had some excellent chances (especially from Landon Donovan), managed to draw within one with about 12 minutes to go on a Clint Dempsey goal.

Celebrating our only goal

This game had more action in the first 30 seconds than the entire 90 minutes of Bayern Munich vs. Man United last year. Which leads me to ask, why the hell are they called Bayern Munich? Shouldn't they be either Bavaria Munich or Bayern München? That's always bugged me.

Anyway, not much to report other than that. There's a couple more pictures at my buzznet site. The weather held up, the game had some action, our seats were good, and we didn't have to wait for trains very long (seriously, we had perfect timing). A good time was had by all.