Black Stars Shine at WC

So the United States’ World Cup dreams ended on Saturday with a 2-1 loss to Ghana’s team, also known by their nickname the “Black Stars.” While it’s sad to see Team USA lose, it’s also nice that there is an African side still playing in the tournament that has become a continent-wide event. With that in mind, I wanted to link to this story by Dan Wetzel from Yahoo! Sports (assuming that you can actually read it, thanks to the bizarre choice of background design…), which takes a look at the match from an African point of view, showing just how much the entire continent has embraced the team from Ghana. For example, consider this quote from Ghana’s Dede Ayew: “we feel we have a continent behind us and the whole of Africa behind us and that’s given us a lot of energy to fight more.”

On a side note, given that the World Cup is a truly global tournament, with two years of preliminary matches to decide on the 32 tournament berths and that the seedings for the eight four-team pools are done by random draw, how bizarre is it that the United States has been knocked out of two consecutive World Cups by the same team and by the same score each time?