I'm not sure how many of you are aware of this - although I know many of you soccer fans are - but today the US soccer team is squaring off at Wembley Stadium against the English national team. It's just a friendly, but anytime a game of this magnitude happens, it's worth tuning into. By the way, it's at 3pm EST.The game is also significant on some level because Landon "Babycakes" Donovan will earn his 100th international cap and he'll likely square off against his LA Galaxy teammate David Beckham.
But best of all, the match up allows us Americans to pull out memories of our greatest soccer victory ever.
In the 1950 World Cup, Joe Gaetjens, a dishwasher originally from Haiti, scored in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to lead the US to a 1-0 victory over England. Gaetjens wasn't actually an American citizen, but was allowed to play for the US team in the World Cup because he said he was seeking US citizenship. However, he never actually became a US citizen.
Anyway, the first 30 seconds of the video below recount the American win (unfortunately it's in German, but whatever, it's all we got).
One newspaper assumed that couldn't be the case and printed the score as 10-1 for England. Meanwhile, the popular UK newspaper the Daily Mail, reported that England lost to "a team that I never knew played football."
In all honesty, this is the greatest upset in American sports history. Bigger by far than the 1980 Miracle On Ice.
Anyhow, I know most Americans, myself included, don't really care much about soccer. But it's still nice to know that we'll always have this.
Plus it's great for pissing the hell out of of Brits in pubs when they make fun us for being bad at soccer.




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