Perhaps my initial feeling that the "pressure was all on England" is not correct.For England, the U.S. seems to be sort of a generic opponent, like the teams that lose to the Harlem Globetrotters. During coach Fabio Capello's nine-minute prematch news conference, there was not a single reference to the Americans. While England is ranked eighth in the world and the U.S. 14th, it might as well be first and 207th.
The US is now ranked about 14th in the World. That's not really a slouch out of 202 some-odd countries on the globe. We're in the top 10 percentile, right? By any measure, that's good.
But, the US soccer team is not respected by the big dogs, England, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Argentina, Holland, and a few others, and hardly respected by anyone else. The reason must be that we haven't won very much of consequence in World Cup competition.
As the US has slowly clawed its way from irrelevance to now being at least a team that makes the first round of the World Cup every time, we need victory in order to be taken seriously. Clearly the US needs to advance to the next round, but we also need to defeat a superior foe. I think, perhaps, the pressure is all on the US in the sense of - if they make the knockout round without beating England, the world has an excuse to look at the US's matchups and say "yeah, you just made the next round because of weak competition. You lost to who you were supposed to lose to, and beat who you were supposed to beat. Ho Hum." If they want anyone's eyebrows to raise, the must beat England. This game is partly about respect. Without a win against England, even advancing to the knockout round will not get the US any respect.
