In For The Hat Trick

Many of us woke up this morning to the news that the Ghanaian Football Association has suspended Kevin Prince Boateng and Sulley Muntari from Ghana’s World Cup squad. According to early reports, Boateng launched an Anelka-esque verbal assault on coach Kwesi Appiah (“words like ‘fuck off’ were said”) and Muntari attacked an official from the Ghanaian FA.

I’m incredibly curious about Muntari’s “unprovoked physical attack”: Was it a Zidane headbutt? A Joey Barton right hook?

Did it, dare I ask, involve biting?

An op-ed in today’s New York Times describes the Mexican president’s plan to sneak controversial legislation through the Mexican Congress as the distracted masses cheer on the national team in Brazil: “To debate and pass laws that could open Pemex, the nationalized oil company, to foreign investment, the Mexican Congress scheduled legislative sessions from June 10 to 23, dates precisely coinciding with you know what.”

I kind of doubt this ploy would work in the United States. Soccer is increasingly popular here, but if the Democrats had somehow passed immigration reform during the second half of USA-Portugal, people would have noticed.

Yesterday, Joe Biden met with the leaders of several Central American countries to discuss illegal immigration. According to The New York Times, Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez “sent a top aide to the meeting but skipped it himself in order to watch Honduras play in the World Cup in Brazil.”

The American ambassador to Honduras, Lisa Kubiske, was unimpressed: “Today there is a very important game, but the country has priorities for which the top leader should be present.”

To be fair, watching Honduras play football is arguably even less fun than being lectured by Biden, who visited Natal last week to see USA-Ghana. Honduras is one of the dirtiest teams in the tournament, and a panelist on The Guardian’s World Cup Football Daily podcast said its match against Ecuador was “like watching Stoke under Tony Pulis play Stoke under Tony Pulis.”

I bet Hernandez wishes he’d attended the meeting. He could’ve tried out the WatchESPN app.

When Berlin-born center back John Brooks scored the United States’ winning goal against Ghana, fans watching the game in bars across the US celebrated wildly. I know this because I’ve seen it on YouTube. Videos of American soccer fans wearing replica jerseys and red-white-and-blue scarves as they cheered on the US national team became an Internet sensation after Landon Donovan’s last-minute goal against Algeria in 2010, and a handful of similar clips cropped up the morning after the Ghana game. I love these videos. I happen to think it’s pretty cool that Americans are excited about soccer.

Not everyone agrees with me. American soccer fans are under assault – not by partisans of other American sports who consider soccer slow and boring but, surprisingly, by fellow soccer fans. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Why I Hate American Soccer Fans,” Jonathan Clegg, a British expat who writes about the New York Giants for a living, calls American fans an intolerable “scourge on my beloved game” and “the most derivative, excessive and utterly ridiculous collection of sports fans on the planet.”

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Earlier this morning, the Premier League released the 2014/15 fixture list. Manchester City will face Newcastle on opening day. Manchester United will play Swansea. Liverpool will host Southampton in what I have decided to call the Rickie Lambert Derby. Most years, I get up early to see United’s fixtures and then spend about half an hour poring through the rest of the schedule. Not today. I don’t feel like reading the Premier League fixture list; indeed, I’m offended by its mere existence. After all, Holland-Australia kicks off in less than three hours! And Spain-Chile is on ESPN this afternoon! It’s day seven of the 2014 World Cup, and, frankly, I couldn’t care less about Chelsea’s run-in.

 If you could care less: BBC Sport’s guide to the Premier League fixture list.

Today’s World Cup Google doodle features an old friend from 2010: Paul the psychic octopus, the “animal oracle” who correctly predicted the results of all seven of Germany’s matches in South Africa.

The 2014 World Cup is less than a week old, but some fans are already calling it the best international tournament since Spain ’82. I’m not so sure. Paul died in October 2010, and the animal-related news emanating from this year’s tournament is pretty bleak: two of the three doves released from the center circle before Brazil’s match against Croatia crashed into the stands and died. The third dove flew into the press box and instantly became a Twitter celebrity. Welcome, symbols of peace, to the 21st Century.