So that didn’t work out well at all.

I haven’t seen the second half yet, but whoa, that really was not the way you want to open the tournament. Not just the loss, but giving up the three goals — makes it really really tough to win tiebreakers when you’re down three in the goals column. Yikes. And to make matters worse, Koller got injured, making the tasks of Italy and Ghana that much easier.

The USA really didn’t look like they knew what to do with the Czechs. You wonder what might have happened if Reyna’s shot had gone in, but, in all honesty, the Czechs just had a ton more class out there. Yikes. I guess they were more “experienced” than “old” today. And they scored some beautiful goals.

This will require further scrutiny tonight after work. Until then, I’ll be watching Italy - Ghana and hoping for freak non-serious injuries.

Just got a call from the folks over in Germany. They are live from the stadium, in the upper deck, over one of the corner flags. The official F.C. Camena flag is in effect. You could hear people chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” (which is actually as close to acceptable as it gets in the context of footy) in the background.

Needless to say, we’re pretty excited.

The lineups are up. Mastroeni, Reyna, Beasley and Convey get the start in midfield for the US — meaning no JOB. I like this midfield a lot, especially the part where Mastroeni is out on the field. We need someone to enforce some justice out there and keep Reyna out of the nasty tackles. Landycakes looks like he’ll partner McBride up top. I also feel very good about this. Landycakes needs to be in space, running at people — not trying to be a distributor in the middle of the field. For the Czechs, there’s no Milan Baros. This is a good thing.

Let’s go U-S-A.

And we are fewer than 12 hours from kickoff. Much like Milan Baros, I’ve had something of a late injury scare and it looks like I’m not going to be able to watch the match live in its entirety. Day job. Sigh. But I have a feeling I’ll be able to keep an eye on it from afar.

F.C. Camena already has some boots on the ground, though. We have reports trickling in from our folks who are heading to the first game. We can only hope we’ll hear from them as we head closer to game time.

As for the actual game, I’m cautiously optimistic about tomorrow. I wish we were opening with Italy (because I’m convinced that their act is not quite together), and I wish we were playing a team that wasn’t going to have a chip on its shoulder (which I think that Czechs do). Also, it’d be nice if they didn’t have quite so many good players, or if their good players were more prone to doing dumb things on the pitch.

But whatever. Game time beckons! And if Eric Cantona thinks we have a shot, who am I to argue?

(In other news, I have a really odd feeling about Australia. I think they’re going to make something happen.)

In what is most certainly a good omen for tomorrow’s opening match, the USA thoroughly routed a strong Croatia shirt to take the 2006 Shirt Cup Presented By F.C. Camena ™. While the USA surely enjoyed a bit of a hometown advantage (I don’t imagine we had too many visitors here on the site from Zagreb over the weekend), given Croatia’s performance to date, the result was a bit of a surprise. Congrats, of course, also go to the folks in Oregon — to have the hometown shirt win an all-Nike final? Well played, indeed.

Thanks to everyone who voted.