WORLD CUP SOCCER ’94 / THE FIRST ROUND : It’s Do or Die Today : Group E: Key matches on a Super Tuesday will result in the elimination of at least one top team.
Super Tuesday will begin early in Pico Rivera.
The sports bar at Gloria’s restaurant in Latin Village usually doesn’t open until 2 p.m., but the seven television sets will be switched on this morning at 9.
Fans draped in Mexican flags will gather to watch the telecast of a decisive first-round World Cup game between Mexico and Italy.
Cooks and busboys will listen for anything that sounds like, “Gooooooooal, “ then stampede to the kitchen door for a peek.
“The World Cup only happens every four years and right now . . . we are so close,” said Faviola Rubio, Latin Village secretary.
Super Tuesday will also begin early in Boston.
Paddy Burke’s Pub opens at 10 a.m. Within an hour there will be more than 300 hoisting mugs of Guinness and watching 13 TVs.
Their lads from Ireland will be playing Norway in the other decisive Group E first-round game. If the Irish win, somebody will bring in a guitar, somebody else a goatskin drum and the pub will be full until Wednesday.
“To be an Irish-American today is like being a German on the day the Berlin Wall came down,” said Tony Giblin, Paddy’s co-owner.
But if the Irish lose?
“We will not lose,” Giblin said. “We have been waiting too long for this.”
The Mexicans, Italians and Norwegians also say they consider a loss unthinkable.
But in what has been called “the Group of Death,” this is execution day.
In one dramatic two-hour span, from 9:30-11:30 a.m. PDT, teams from countries with more than 60 million descendants living in the United States will compete in soccer games in Washington and New York.
Only two of those teams are certain to advance to the World Cup’s second round, although as many as three might. But one of the four is certain to be sent home.
And that is certain to set off reactions of jubilation and anguish from Baltimore’s Little Italy to the Scandinavian suburbs of Minneapolis, from the Irish areas of south Boston to the Mexican-American communities of Los Angeles.
“I’m walking out of work to go to a sports bar for the first time ever,” said Kris Bjerkness, an executive from the Minneapolis suburb of Blaine. “If any of our other Norwegian employees want to come with me, they can. For us, this is unbelievable.”
The World Cup’s now-giddy organizers feel the same way.
Even before the tournament started, this was their special group, with three of this country’s five largest ethnic groups represented.
Who would have guessed that in 10 days it would have gotten even spicier, with each team going 1-1 in its first two games, each accumulating a zero goal differential?
Now comes Super Tuesday, with tickets being scalped for $200, with police on alert in ethnic communities everywhere, with dreams being held hostage by players who remind those dreamers of home.
In terms of a one-day sporting spectacle, perhaps only Super Bowl Sunday will affect the disposition of more Americans.
Even then, a football game has never induced computer executive Dan Longo to walk out of his office in the middle of the day and join 100 other Italian-Americans at a lodge in Baltimore.
Several miles from that city’s famed Little Italy, they will cook Italian dishes, drink Italian beer and sit around a rented big screen TV cheering for their Azzurri.
Longo will be joined by his Sicilian grandfather and father in one of many reunions that will bridge age and communication gaps.
“A lot of first-generation Italians have spent many years telling their offspring of the tradition of soccer in Italy,” Longo said. “But after a while, just talking about it makes it lose its flavor. Today, by seeing it, that feeling will be sparked again.”
If any team is a favorite to survive, it is the Italians, even without legendary defender Franco Baresi, who is injured, and goalkeeper Gianluca Pagliuca, who has been suspended.
Arrigo Sacchi, Italy’s enigmatic coach, has made peace with star Roberto Baggio. Removed in the middle of a victory over Norway, Baggio has not only been restored to the lineup, he has been made a captain, despite a sore Achilles’ tendon.
The Mexicans, who will play the Italians before probably a mostly pro-Mexico crowd at RFK Stadium, claim this transcends sport.
“It will be a game of life or death,” veteran Mexican striker Hugo Sanchez said.
But will Sanchez be benched again, as he was in the 2-1 victory over Ireland?
Miguel Mejia Baron, Mexico’s coach, would say only, “The atmosphere could not be better.”
Those in Giants Stadium might disagree. The matchup between European strongmen Ireland and Norway could be a 90-minute brawl, a clash of similar styles that could produce similar scores. As in zero and zero.
“Giants Stadium. That’s an appropriate place for a giant battle,” Norwegian striker Jan Age Fjortoft said.
Defenders Denis Irwin and Terry Phelan will sit out the game for Ireland because of suspensions. And Coach Jack Charlton has been suspended, too, for one game by FIFA, soccer’s governing body, for arguing with on-field officials.
Charlton’s dominating presence is already being missed at Paddy Burke’s, where co-owner Giblin says, “Our nation has had an inferiority complex, but Jack Charlton is taking that and throwing it in a garbage can.”
