"WE won't get fooled again". A certain suspicion dominated the media's reaction in the United States as top class soccer or something close to it arrived back in the US on Saturday night.
Eric Wynalda's silky 88th minute move and curling winner for the San Jose Clash against DC United just about spared this scrappy opening match of Major League Soccer (MLS) the "boring, boring" jibes. But without the American's skill - he also hit a swerving free kick that was touched onto a post - the sport could have been out of oblivion and straight into the pillory.
As it was, for most of the media it stayed in oblivion. The Sunday newspapers on the east coast didn't exactly wait up on Saturday to squeeze a match report into their sports supplements; most failed to mention it at all. And, elsewhere, coverage followed the lead of the Associated Press, which led its short report with an arguably racist sniff about the "foreign atmosphere" at the game (the California sell out crowd was full of Mexican Americans), then went on: "After 87 frustrating minutes, there was even a goal".
Attention is elsewhere. While the basketball and hockey seasons drag on, last week's start of the baseball season saw a rush of media affection for the fading national pastime. Major League Baseball's TV ad campaign on the ESPN sports channel may even be targetting any shift toward "foreign" soccer with its patriotic tag line: "It's Baseball, and You're An American".
MLS, with its April to October schedule, is definitely targetting baseball. Some of the media, perhaps noting this contest, have reminded us that soccer - the second biggest youth sport in the US - has been nothing but a fad.
ESPN screened the match, and its coverage had a promotional tone - certainly the electric atmosphere in San Jose must have boosted the game's image as a good night out. But the camera work was distinctly limited, and "colour commentator" Ty Keough - a genius who told World Cup 94 viewers on ESPN that Roy Keane had fought a few fights as a professional boxer before taking up soccer - is a liability.
Coverage, even of this "historic" first match, was kept strictly inside two hours; it switched off quickly to make way for a show featuring a busty woman introducing footage of spectacular crashes and spills from the world of sports. ESPN will show nine more MSL games, and the less widely available FSPN 2 plans two dozen more - but it's obvious the network has no plans to break the bank on soccer.
Other networks are not likely to take up the slack. However, NBC's weekly sports show, an adrenalised effort called George Michael's Sports Machine, did feature Wynalda's goal as its `Play of the Week'.
Intriguingly, with so little else to go on, sports hacks go all sociological when they talk about soccer. You'll see more down to earth acknowledgment of the position of immigrants in a soccer report than anywhere else in your newspaper, for example. The New York Times sent columnist George Vecsey to San Jose, and headlined his piece (at the bottom of page five of its sports supplement) "Generation X Must Carry the New Soccer League".
Will they do it? Vecsey's tone was generally optimistic, but it's all still to play for. Ominously while Saturday's game attracted 31,683 people, the Clash have sold only 3,000 season tickets. Even with venues scaled back to allow an average of about 20,000 seats for the course of the season, there could be a lot of empty spaces.
