Road to Cup Is Nothing to Write Home About
Once again, it’s the United States versus Honduras. Once again, both teams have the chance to move closer to securing a place in soccer’s 2002 World Cup. Once again, the stadium will be sold out, the atmosphere electric.
But this time there will be some significant differences. Perhaps they won’t be visible to the players on the field Saturday at RFK Stadium, but they certainly will be evident to those whose job it is to convey the drama to a wider audience.
It doesn’t take much effort to recall the last such encounter, in steamy San Pedro Sula, Honduras, in March.
A quick flashback:
I am standing in a room that is little more than a cell. I have just paced it out and it is six feet wide by seven feet long. The walls are cement block, painted a hideous shade of green. The ceiling has gaping holes in it.
Behind me there is a door without a lock. It can be pushed closed but can’t be shut. Wandering strangers with furtive looks are forever poking their heads inside.
In front of me there is a metal-frame, sliding-glass window. If it and the door were not left at least partially open, the temperature in the room would top 100 degrees.
Scattered on the floor amid the dirt there are chicken bones, cola cups and assorted other debris. The place isn’t clean. Not by a long shot.
The room has no furnishing at all. Not even a table. What there is is an electric outlet in one wall and a bit of wire hanging precariously from another wall. This would be the telephone jack.
The noise is deafening. Immediately outside the window are more than 40,000 blue-and-white-clad fans. They are standing and blocking our view, or at least they would be blocking it if we were seated. But we aren’t. There are no chairs.
The noisy folk nearby would be the supporters of Honduras. We would be the U.S. media.
The cell, one of half a dozen similar enclosures high atop Estadio Olimpico, is what is laughingly referred to in San Pedro Sula as the press box.
Working conditions, you will understand, are not great. If you think they are, then try writing a game story on deadline on a laptop computer you have to use by either kneeling on the floor or holding it in one hand while typing with the other.
Press meals? Forget it? Lineups? Not a chance. Game clock? No way. Toilets? You don’t want to go there.
But we are smiling. In fact, we are trying not to laugh out loud. After all, we still have to make our way through this heaving multitude to the van that will ferry us out of here in a convoy of flashing red lights and bristling guns, back to the first world, back to our downtown hotel.
This is no time to be gloating. Better to hide the emotions when all around is doom and gloom. Small girls in blue and white blouses are in tears.
Grown men have angry scowls.
Nevertheless, we are smiling. At least inwardly. And we are doing so because Clint Mathis has just curled a delicious free kick into the back of the Honduran net, off the hands of goalkeeper Noel Valladares to give the U.S. an almost unimaginable 2-1 victory in a World Cup qualifier that was supposed to be a lost cause.
End flashback.
Saturday, it will be different. RFK Stadium will have more than 55,000 fans in red, white and blue. The noise will be equally deafening, even for a bizarre 10 a.m. start.
Up in the press box, the visiting Honduran media will not have to contend with any difficulties. Unless trying to contain their awe becomes a problem.
They will be fed. They will be provided seats at a table with an excellent, unimpeded view of the field below. They will have electric and telephone lines aplenty. If they’re lucky, they’ll be handed a 368-page, full-color media guide that will tell them more than they could possibly want to know about soccer in the United States.
Game notes, game clock, postgame statistics, postgame interviews, more food at halftime, there will be all that and more.
The U.S. finds it incredibly difficult to be anything but a gracious host. It is never an intimidating experience for visiting players, fans or media to come to these shores.
Perhaps that’s the way it should be everywhere, but it isn’t and never will be.
Next week, the U.S. travels to San Jose, Costa Rica, for a Wednesday night match that ostensibly could see the winner qualify for Korea/Japan 2002.
Once again, the U.S. media will be in tow, knowing full well that no matter how sumptuous their hotel might be, Saprissa Stadium is going to be like a descent into hell.
Press facilities will be either primitive or nonexistent. U.S. Soccer already has warned that it might be impossible to not only file stories from the stadium but even to write them there.
“We are attempting to procure better conditions than we’ve had in the past,” a federation spokesman said, referring to the usual practice of having the media seated on concrete bleachers in a lower corner of the arena, without power or phone lines.
Saprissa is the same spot where U.S. players were pelted with rocks and coins and batteries and assorted other debris when they played there a few years ago. The same spot where handmade signs in the stands made crude reference to the players’ wives and mothers.
If Costa Rica defeats Trinidad and Tobago, as expected, on Saturday, a victory over the U.S. on Wednesday night would clinch its first World Cup place since 1990. The postgame celebration would be bedlam, at the stadium and in town. It could take hours to return to the hotel, even with the armed convoys that escort American soccer teams and media whenever they venture into Central America.
Should the U.S. win, the reaction does not bear contemplating. Intimidating? Sometimes, but understood and accepted. The U.S. players are experienced enough to know that the road to the World Cup is always potentially dangerous and always unpaved.
It’s the Americans at home who don’t always realize just what getting there entails.
