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Zach Dundas

Urban Outfitters

Portland has arrogated to itself the title “Soccer City USA” — an overreach, but it points up that football in the United States has become a game of cities, a confederation of weird Austins and sweet home Chicagos that is the true Red State. “Football, the most global sport, has ironically become the vessel for the most fervent and eccentric localist impulses. In a world of unacknowledged city-states, our clubs allow us to rally to the flags that matter.” (Zach Dundas/The Run of Play)

(Image credit: MuddyRavine/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Reads of the Day: There is No Methadone for This

The party’s over, and we’re already forgetting what she looked like. Futfanatico says reality has already been digested by the Spanish metanarrative, while David Gendelman at Fair Play says we’re all already losers. At True/Slant, Zach Dundas argued before the match that the two squads embodied the two sides of soccer: control versus incident, era versus accident. Fake Sigi says it wasn’t the worst World Cup ever, just “crap soccer masquerad[ing] as the pinnacle of the sport.” And The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle enjoyed watching the upending of North American notions of sport as a series of Hallmark moments.

Stop Defending Tony Meola’s Haircut

On the one hand, Americans are still faced with the “Soccer is Gay and Foreign and Makes My Shriveling Mind Hurt” genre of xenophobic sports journalism — which hasn’t evolved in two decades. But the counter-genre — “Will Soccer Now Make It in America?” as exemplified by Hendrik Hertzberg’s recent piece in The New Yorker — has grown equally tiresome and obsolete. The argument is over, and the TV ratings for the World Cup prove it. “It’s not 1990 any more; we don’t have to defend Tony Meola’s haircut.” (Zach Dundas/True/Slant)

How José Mourinho is Like Leonard Cohen

“Inter’s display was not Champagne Football — rather a concoction of dark tannins and bitter tones, made to be sucked down at 4 am when love has died and the world is against you…Inter’s hour-long, man-down goal-line stand — in which this team of interchangeable, husky, aging men with shaved heads posited a form of football played entirely without a ball – put me in mind specifically of some lyrics from [Leonard Cohen's] “The Captain.” (Zach Dundas/True/Slant)