IT IS CERTAINLY THE CASE THAT THE AMERICAN STYLE WILL EXPRESS CONTEMPT FOR THE WAY THE GAME HAS BEEN PLAYED:

An American Style Is Born (JESSE PENNINGTON, 6/22/10, NY Times)

When Landon Donovan rifled a shot right at and over the Slovenian keeper — in the soccer equivalent of chicken — I couldn’t help thinking as I played the goal over and over that, well, it seemed like such an American thing to do.

A striker, or winger, operates as a kind of maverick on the field and certainly has the option to attack the keeper directly. But the law of angles dictates that this path yields the least fruit. With such proximity, the keeper cuts off the angle almost entirely, reducing the scoring opportunity to something out of the N.H.L., where the window for a goal is minuscule and shrinking. That is why a striker, if he has the ball at the edge of the field to the right or left of the goal, will typically pass the ball into the box, dumping it off like a Jason Kidd alley-oop in the hope that a member of his squadron is there to pummel it home on a wider target. Countless soccer drills embed this impulse until it becomes rote. Players use a shake, a wiggle to buy a fraction of time, and then pass into the middle. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred this is what the Spanish, the English, or the Dutch will do. Furthermore, a forward is also taught to shoot low. Donovan ignored that too.

That’s why it seemed like such a quintessentially American moment. The orthodoxy of the game was shredded, in one blissful and bold moment, in favor of cowboy logic. A kind of American impatience with custom and formality brought forth a different sensibility, a bit more roguish one.

Not only are central defenders these days pretty awful, but three of the 6 best goalies in the Cup are on our team and there's nothing more obvious than the idea that you should exploit the infinite space above the shoulders instead of aiming at the clutter and de facto limitation of space from the waist down to the ground.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 23, 2010 6:24 AM