Wynalda to the rescue

John Carlin in Washington reflects on tentative success for the new US soccer league

THOSE who thought Stan Collymore's injury-time winner against Newcastle 10 days ago was about as dramatic as sport gets, think again. It had nothing on Eric Wynalda's 88th-minute strike to decide the game last week between San Jose Clash and DC United. In the Liverpool v Newcastle game all that was at stake was the English Premiership. On the Clash-DC game rode the future of professional football in the United States.

The inaugural game of the United States' new professional league had been drab, clumsy and scoreless until Wynalda curled a right-foot shot into the top corner of the DC net, "Thank God for Eric," said Sunil Gulati, the mightily relieved deputy commissioner of Major League Soccer. He was speaking for all those who have invested their hopes and money on the bet that after the fiasco of the North American Soccer League - into which Pele, Beckenbauer and Cruyff were unable to breathe sufficient life - the game will at last catch on.

So fine is the line between victory and failure that had the game ended in a 0-0 draw, or rather a "tie", the consensus among sports commentators was that MLS would have been history by the Fourth of July. Americans abhor a scoreless vacuum. "America really does believe a tie is like kissing your sister," wrote Tom Weir of USA Today. The Washington Post, whose local team is DC United, gracefully acknowledged that "the last thing MLS needed was 90 scoreless minutes". The Sacramento Bee noted that MLS officials greeted Wynalda's goal with "a sigh of relief that threatened to blow down Spartan Stadium".

The first hurdle has been overcome, but what reasons are there for believing that soccer will succeed as a spectator sport in the way that it already has in America's school playing fields? What first catches the eye of the hardened foreign observer are the gimmicks.

There are cheerleaders, of course (a baffling phenomenon given America's obsessive attention to political correctness), and control over how long the game lasts has been removed from the wristwatches of inscrutable referees. Large clocks are to be placed around MLS stadiums to provide spectators with a precise countdown, in the manner of basketball and American Football. Thus, two minutes after Wynalda's goal, supporters joyously chorused "Five- four-three-two-ONE!" secure in the knowledge that on "ONE!" the referee would blow his whistle.

Another innovation, one which Fifa might look at with some interest, confronts the eternal dilemma faced by the rest of the world when knock- out games end in draws. Since it is un-American to suggest that sport, like life, is anything other than a contest in which there are winners and losers, all MLS games that remain unresolved after 90 minutes will go to a shoot-out. But not a penalty shoot-out. Players will still go one to one against goalkeepers but starting with the ball 35 yards out. They will have five seconds in which to shoot.

And there are still more important structural reasons why soccer might take off in the US this time. Alan Rothenberg, president of the MLS, noted last week that the game now has a foundation among children, backed by parents who take a fanatically all-American interest in school sports competitions. No less significant has been the impact of immigration, especially the huge influx from Latin America. "You've got 30 million Hispanics in this country who weren't here 20 years ago," Rothenberg points out.

DC United is heavily weighted with Bolivians and Salvadoreans (notably Bolivia's talented Marco Etcheverry) because Washington has a particularly high percentage of residents from those two countries. Mexico's Hugo Sanchez has been signed by Texas's Dallas Burn; Mexico's national goalkeeper, Jorge Campos, will play for Los Angeles Galaxy; and the blond, dreadlocked Carlos Valderrama is playing for Tampa Bay Mutiny, in Florida, where the Colombian connection is particularly entrenched.

Ethnic sensitivities also help explain why Frank Stapleton has been signed up as coach for New England Revolution, based in Boston, and why the best player in the MLS, the former Milan star Roberto Donadoni, has been charged with the responsibility of igniting Italian-American passions with New York Metrostars.

Working against the MLS, however, is the fact that most true soccer fans in the US have proved resourceful enough to find ways of catching Italian, English and Latin-American games live on satellite TV. The question that will decide the future of American professional soccer is this: will the public have the patience to endure second-best for however many years it takes for the game to take root and flourish? If not, even Eric cannot save it.