USA '94 (aged seven)It was around this time that I would’ve started playing for a Sunday league team, and, being a goalkeeper, I was particularly fascinated by Jorge Campos and Gianluca Pagliuca during USA 94. Campos obviously for the seizure-inducing jersey, Pagliuca I’m not too sure. I don’t know if I would’ve had the capacity to be captivated by handsomeness at seven, but if I did, that probably would’ve been it. I felt bad that Houghton looped one over him; it was like seeing an archetype of Italian cool kicking back and exuding innate nonchalance outside a café on the streets of Rome, only for some Irish oik to come along and spit in his espresso and tip him out of his chair.
I remember reading the post-tournament magazine on the toilet a lot that summer (I wasn’t ill or anything, it’s just all I read on the shitter for weeks), and my parents buying me the USA away shirt after the thirteen year-old son of their close friends (who I always wanted to copy), got the home strip. Despite both shirts essentially being what the Stars and Stripes might look like on crack, nostalgia still forces me to regard them as design classics.
For some reason, despite this tournament coming at such a young age for me, it’s still the one that I have the most vivid memories of. That hazy, soft-focus picture that American telly always seems to produce appears so sharp in my mind's eye thinking back to this World Cup. Maybe for the same reason that you remember your first snog, with the rest mostly merging into a shapeless blur of regret and missed opportunity, and very rarely, if at all, taking on the clarity of triumphant success*.
Something about Roberto Baggio’s hair.
Something about Alexi Lalas’s beard.
*IF YOU HADN’T NOTICED, I’M USING MY CRAP LOVE LIFE AS A METAPHOR FOR THE FAILURES OF THE ENGLAND TEAM, YEAH? HOW VERY NICK FUCKING HORNBY OF ME.
by Michael Wheeler
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