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🗓️ 4 June 2018
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Fresh off their impressive showing at the Copa America tournament, the U.S. team was feeling ready to take on the world. Or, more specifically, the World Cup. That was coming up in 1998 and the players were primed to begin the qualification run.
“We were a confident team,” remembers defender Marcelo Balboa. “When we walked out on the field, we knew that we could beat anybody in the world.”
But exactly who would walk out on that field was the question nagging at every player. Even if the team qualified for the World Cup, not every player would make the final 22-man roster. Even fewer would get starting roles.
The yearlong qualification process, thus, became a kind of ongoing audition for the World Cup roster, with Steve Sampson serving as casting director. And with his interim-coach days now behind him, he felt confident about making decisions, even bold ones that would not make everyone happy.
His first big move was to take the title of team captain away from the calm-under-pressure veteran Balboa and give it to the scrappy, tenacious Jersey boy, John Harkes. And this title didn’t come with “interim” before it. In fact, Harkes was known as “Captain for Life.”
The change didn’t put Balboa in the best frame of mind for the march toward the World Cup. To make it, the U.S. would have to survive an initial round of six games and qualify for a second round of 10 games, dubbed the “Hex.”
For players, this test is both physical and psychological. Stifling heat, waterlogged fields and in every city they traveled to — a stadium filled with people who truly hated them.
Balboa remembers a dummy dressed in a U.S. national team uniform that was swung from the top tier of a stadium with a noose around its neck. Jeff Agoos says a bag of urine was probably the worst thing thrown at him — though the C batteries hurt, too.
It was an added degree of difficulty for players who were battling other teams and trying to outshine one another for playing time.
The next big move by Sampson as he started to whittle the team down was to bench the team’s highest-profile player, the closest thing it had to a star, Alexi Lalas. “It sucked,” says Lalas. “Because I felt that you dance with the ones that brung you.” But the players weren’t the only ones with jobs on the line. U.S. Soccer was already courting the Portuguese coach Carlos Queiroz as a replacement for Sampson.
By November 1997, there were just three games to go in the “Hex” and the American position was tenuous. With doubt setting in, the team arrived in Mexico City for a crucial game, knowing the U.S. had never beaten or even tied Mexico on their home turf.
Once inside The Estadio Azteca, the team would battle the triple threat of altitude, smog and the noise of 105,000 frenzied Mexican fans. The Americans played shorthanded after Jeff Agoos was sent off the field with an early red card. Yet, somehow, they tied, 0-0. Their performance was so impressive that the Mexican fans gave the American team a standing ovation as they left the field.
That game proved to the team they could win anywhere in the world. Just one week after Mexico, the U.S. qualified for the 1998 World Cup in a shutout game against Canada.
Cue: the celebration. The flowing champagne, giddy embraces and heartfelt speeches were all captured for posterity, including that moment Sampson threw an arm around his Captain for Life, John Harkes, and said to him, “Your third World Cup. Can you believe it?”
But not all the players celebrating in the locker room that day would actually get to play at the 1998 World Cup. Some of the team’s most experienced veterans would go to France, but never set foot on the field. Others wouldn’t make it there at all, including, of all people, John Harkes.
Just two months before the World Cup, the Captain for Life was captain no more.
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0:00.0 | 1995. It was the year of the OJ Simpson verdict. Sign felled. Frappuccinos were unleashed |
0:09.1 | across America and a little website called Amazon sold its very first book. 1995 was also |
0:17.3 | the year 22 soccer players from the US national team flew home from Uruguay feeling they were |
0:23.8 | ready to take on the world. They beaten Super Power OJ and Tina. They made a soccer |
0:29.7 | god Diego Maradona cry. They were primed out to start a qualification run for the 1998 |
0:36.3 | World Cup and in their naive yet hard pounding little soccer hearts they thought they could |
0:41.5 | be giant killers. Dark horses, a team with an outside shot at shock in the world and |
0:47.6 | maybe laying claim to the cup itself. Well we had a swagger but that was an arrogance, |
0:53.7 | that's confidence. Confidence and arrogance are completely different for me. We were a |
0:59.1 | confident team when we walked out on the field we knew that we could beat anybody in the world. |
1:02.9 | That's the United States captain Marcelo Balboa. He was a defensive rock who also played club |
1:10.4 | soccer professionally down in Mexico. Balboa had long been a fixture at the national team and he was |
1:17.2 | now gearing up to lead it into a World Cup qualifying run. It's a protracted process in which |
1:23.6 | the US would play 16 games against their neighbours from across North and Central America and the |
1:28.8 | Caribbean over the course of 12 months. And enough good results and they'd be in. But World Cup |
1:36.0 | qualification is an ordeal in its own right. Victory, it's never a given. And so the team's coach, |
1:45.8 | Steve Samson, he got to work and he had some decisions to make. His long-term goal, that was to |
1:52.9 | qualify to win his way into the World Cup. But day in and day out, it was as if Samson was holding |
1:59.5 | broadway auditions which players would make the cut who don't a starting role and in what position. |
2:06.3 | The worst thing that I ever did as I started thinking okay what does Samson want from me that I |
2:11.6 | can do in this game today to get myself back a starting spot. That's what got to me. |
2:15.9 | There were two different Steve's. There was a Steve sort of at the beginning of when he took the |
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