After half a dozen years the jury was still out on the attempt to operate a world-class professional league in America even before the events of the past month.Ironically, ratherthan bolster itschances ofsurvival, this year'ssuccess may wellhave constituteda body-blowto theleaguebackhome

To put this in historical perspective, in the eyes of most Americans, the most significant soccer event of the past century was not the shocking 1-0 upset of England at the World Cup 52 years ago, nor was it the US breakthrough against the Colombians in the 1994 World Cup.

It wasn't even last week, when German defender Torsten Frings reached out, with impunity, with his left arm to swat Tony Sannah's apparent equaliser off the goal-line - although that incident will suffice to allow those Americans who care at all to knowingly grumble "We was robbed!" for the next four years.

No, the moment to which we refer came 40 years ago when an American U2 spy plane returned from an overflight of Cuba with pictures showing that a massive playing field had been cleared near a mysterious construction site. The field in question was plainly not a baseball diamond, and since the Cubans regarded baseball as their national pastime even more than we do, Kennedy-era CIA analysts concluded that if it wasn't ours and it wasn't theirs, it must have been a field constructed by some soccer-playing nation.

Even in the age of that oxymoron known as "military intelligence", it didn't require inordinately acute deductive reasoning to figure out that the soccer field in question had been built by the Russians, for the diversion of their technicians who were busily erecting the missile silos next door. Thus was precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which in turn very nearly precipitated World War III.

Cuban soccer hasn't advanced much over the intervening four decades. Ours apparently has, but even now, as then, to many Americans it remains a game to be treated with suspicion.

That the World Cup should be of transitory interest to Americans should hardly be surprising. The eyes of the rest of the world might be riveted on the Orient, but since this tournament has commenced, it has competed in this country with the heart of the baseball season, the NBA play-offs, ice hockey's Stanley Cup tournament, the Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson fight, and the US Open at Bethpage, to say nothing of Major League Soccer's regular season (albeit with teams bereft not just of our own national team players, but those called to the national teams of other World Cup participants).

Americans who had taken to rising at three in the morning to see how our lads were getting on in South Korea are only now resuming their normal sleep patterns, and unless one badly misses one's guess, the prominent spot the sport had briefly come to occupy in the national consciousness will concomitantly subside to its normal state, which is to say, near-oblivion.

The US team's astonishing run to the World Cup quarter-finals did create an undeniable buzz, but then we've seen that before, too. The whole country went soccer ga-ga in '94 when we hosted the World Cup, and while many may have forgotten it, the Americans went through from their group that year, too.

That accomplishment rested largely on the strength of an upset win over Colombia, which came on an own-goal by a Colombian player, an error deemed so egregious that its unfortunate perpetrator, the late Andres Escobar, was executed upon his return to Medellin.

With our boys having reached the round of 16 that year, America was officially deemed to be in the grips of Soccer Fever, setting the stage for the FIFA-backed formation of Major League Soccer two years later. In retrospect, MLS' chances of success would have been far greater had it begun play in 1995 rather than '96. His attention span has never been one of the strong suits of the American sports fan.

AFTER half a dozen years the jury was still out on the attempt to operate a world-class professional league in America even before the events of the past month. Ironically, rather than bolster its chances for survival, this year's US successes may well have constituted a body blow to the league back home, which, if it does endure, might as well be renamed Minor League Soccer.

Many of the top American players were already plying their trade overseas: Claudio Reyna with Rangers, Joe-Max Moore at Everton, and Eddie Lewis with Fulham, to say nothing of both goalkeepers: Brad Friedel (Blackburn Rovers) and Kasey Keller (Tottenham Hotspur).

A couple of other players came to be members of the US squad by the tried-and-true method which has traditionally proven successful in this country (as well as in Ireland): Although Earnie Stewart was born in Holland and played for NAC Breda, for instance, he did have an American father; someone similarly unearthed an American ancestor for Martinique-born David Regis of FC Metz.

If the aforementioned were all known quantities going into this World Cup, some of the younger, home-grown players who have been showcasing their talents with MLS clubs were not. If the 2002 World Cup represented their first moment on the world stage for the likes of 20-year-old Landon Donovan (San Jose Earthquakes), 24-year-old Josh Wolff (Chicago Fire), 25-year-old Clint Mathis (New York MetroStars),

and 28-year-old Eddie Pope (DC United), it will hardly be their last.

Of this quartet only Donovan has played in Europe (signing with Bayer Leverkusen at 17, he spent two years with the reserve squad without ever getting a Bundesliga game before returning to the US), although Pope was courted by Feyenoord a couple of years back.

The strong suspicion here is that following their exposure this summer, all four players will be in demand by various European leagues, and that, moreover, if somebody waves enough money in their faces, MLS' owners, who have watched millions go down the sinkhole of their American venture over seven seasons, will be only too happy sell them.

This, needless to say, is a result which could over the long run only benefit the national team, but would hardly be useful to MLS' already marginal prospects of long-term viability.