World Cup: Super Ally stars as America celebrates

Watching the World Cup when your team isn’t taking part is a difficult business to get right and on Saturday I realised how wrong you can get it. A crowded New York bar for England versus the USA should have been a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours but it ended in my familiar weekend combination of bitter muttering and a frustrating walk home. At least that dreaded one-two usually comes in the early hours of Sunday morning, to encounter it at 3pm on Saturday was desperately disappointing.

In the UK the World Cup always brings out red-faced morons in their brand new shirts and spectacular lack of football knowledge and amongst ex-pats that’s a tradition keenly upheld. On Saturday I found myself next to a pack of these individuals who generously gave me ninety minutes of “knock it about more” and “get tighter”. At one point, late in the game when Wright-Phillips fired that chance straight at Howard, one of them shouted “For Christ’s sake Heskey”. I turned to him. “Wright-Phillips”, I offered. “Yeah mate”, he answered cryptically, “Spot on”.

The Americans weren’t any better though I feel bad saying that. There’s a reason that newsreaders don’t have lisps or stutters or maniacally wavering voices, it’s so they can be taken seriously, and that’s the same reason that people talking about football shouldn’t be American. It doesn’t matter how informed they are, or how well they can play the game in the case of Landon Donovan, it’s just an impossible concept to buy.

Over here, the result is still being celebrated. I was in a taxi late last night and listened to the radio DJ gleefully read out an Evening Standard column predicting a thumping English victory, while the match has projected the US team’s World Cup involvement into the news programmes.

If it draws more viewers to ESPN’s North American coverage then all the better because that is where Scottish charmer and Rangers assistant manager Ally McCoist is putting in one of the finest performances of the tournament. I’m not quite sure how Super Ally made it from Question of Sport to sending his words into American homes but I’m glad he did or I and many others would have missed out on what must surely be his “phone voice”. Never has a Scottish accent been so smoothly flattened since the days of Sheena Easton.

It was her new transatlantic accent that was blamed for Easton being booed at her 1990 Scottish homecoming concert when bottles were notoriously lobbed at the stage after she employed an accent that belongs somewhere around the Azores (you can hear it around 5.45 in this video if you genuinely have nothing else to do). Easton vowed afterwards never to play in Scotland again and, heartbreakingly, has kept her word. It has to be hoped McCoist takes note of her fate and that his July return to Rangers training ground does not see a similarly disappointing reaction.

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