Sept. 28, 2006
Finding Grace in Odd Places
Last night we invited our Under-10 soccer team to practice on the indoor soccer field we built in our basement. When some of them didn't show up, Mario wanted to call them. I discouraged the idea, thinking it would be better to not bother people about their decisions. But it turned out that one player and his two brothers and their friend were free. They ended up coming over at 7:30 and staying until about 9 p.m. for an impromptu soccer and pingpong party. Gabriel was thrilled when he got home.

Sept. 25, 2006
Victory at last!
The Under-10 soccer team I coach had their first win of the season on Saturday, overcoming Penn Manor 2 to 1. They are starting to play much better, but sometimes there's this nervousness or lethargy or something that I don't quite understand. They seem to play harder against each other practice than they do against the other team on Saturdays. I told them to do a slow jogging cool down after the game on Saturday and they sprinted at full speed across the field. The ref said, "I didn't see them run that fast in the whole game!" I laughed ruefully because it was true. I'm going to try to think of ways to teach them to run hard to the ball and off the ball. I had fun in my game, but I didn't score and we lost 3 to 0. Oh well. It was a beautiful fall weekend.

Sept. 21, 2006
I wrote the following article about a trip I took with my mother, my husband and my two children about two weeks before my husband's death with cancer.
A Dying Colombian Soccer Fan's Last Hurrah
By Rebecca Thatcher Murcia
The weirdness of the initial phone call turned out to be an accurate omen for what would become our horrible but wonderful trip to Giants Stadium. Saúl, my Colombian husband had incurable cancer -- metastatic Chondrosarcoma. The disease was in his spinal column and gradually taking away his mobility. In March 2005 I was reading sports news on the internet in the bedroom of our house in Akron, Pennsylvania. I saw that the Colombian national soccer team was playing a friendly game against England at the Giants Stadium on May 31.
I called my husband at his office – he was co-director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Mennonite Central Committee -- and asked if he wanted to go. He said yes, and I went on line to order tickets, but I found out that handicapped visitors cannot order tickets online. I called Giants stadium and a ticket seller told me she could sell me the tickets, but not send them to me. I told her that sounded like discrimination against people with disabilities. She told me she could send me a letter explaining how the policy of forcing wheel chair users to pick their tickets up at the stadium was not a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. By that time, I was annoyed. “What good would you sending me that letter do?” I asked. I went ahead and paid for the tickets anyway.
For the next few weeks, the symptoms of Saúl’s advanced cancer grew worse. His legs became weaker and weaker. Swelling in his hands and legs was painful and further limited his mobility. But as his body failed him, Saul’s spirit and will to live grew. We were constantly cooking big meals and entertaining visitors. On April 28, Saúl’s 50th birthday, we bought an electric wheel chair and celebrated with a big party at the office and another big party at a friend’s farm. Saul had grown up playing soccer in Colombia, and he always loved to watch and play the game. When writing about his childhood, he said soccer gave him a “primordial reason to exist.” He discovered the game while attending a Mennonite boarding school. “That was where I fell completely and permanently in love with this sport that all by itself gave me the structure of running with a purpose, to compare the game with my life and to be part of a team,” he wrote.
In recent years he had been so busy working, however, that he had had not had very much time to play or go to games. But that spring, as weak and sick as he was, he went to his son’s outdoor games and tournaments. He even went to watch my over-30 women’s team play.
During the first few weeks of May, Saul’s swelling, or edema, became so bad that he could no longer operate the joy stick on his electric wheelchair. I hunted around for a solution and found out that a nearby occupational therapist could show us how to bring the swelling down with compression bandages. We went to her and she wrapped Saul’s arm up in layers of cotton and non-elastic compression bandages. He was thrilled when a day or two later he could “drive” again. But the therapist could do nothing about the advancing disease and she despaired as she helped me heave Saúl in and out of our mini-van. His legs were getting so weak that it was beginning to take all my strength to lift him from the wheelchair to the car back and to the wheel chair.
The weekend of the game, my mother, who works as an occupational therapist in Sullivan County, New York, came to help out and go with us. By then we were all excited about the trip. Our children, Mario, 8, and Gabriel, 9, made a sign calling for peace in Colombia. They planned to wave it at any television cameras they saw pointing at them. Friends at the Mennonite Central Committee’s office in Bogotá had alerted a staff person for the Colombian national team and efforts were underway to organize a meeting with Saul at the Sheraton, the team’s hotel. We made reservations at the hotel and asked the reservation person if a recliner could be provided for Saul, because his pain and paralysis made it impossible for him to sleep in a bed. The person on the phone said that would be no problem and we took his word for it. The day before the game, Saul’s right leg was swollen as usual, but it was also hot and red. My mother thought that maybe we should cancel the trip. Michelle, our dear hospice nurse, sat on the floor in front of Saul and diagnosed an infection that would have to be treated with antibiotics. She called a doctor, told him about our travel plans, and persuaded him to let Saúl go on the trip. The next morning we loaded up the car with our bags and then wondered how to get Saúl inside. His feet no longer fit into his old shoes, and we had bought him some large sneakers that had made the transfers even more difficult. His feet would not pivot on their own any more, leaving his legs to twist painfully as we lifted and turned him into the car. My mother improvised a transfer disk – a device that allows paralyzed people’s feet to turn when they are being lifted -- out of cardboard. It did not work as well as a real transfer disk but it made it possible to get Saul into the car. I’m a fairly strong woman but by then Saúl probably weighed 200 pounds and could not help very much.
Once Saúl was in the car, I asked my mother if she had stowed her improvised transfer disk in the back. “Yes, if we lose it we’d have to stop at a dumpster and find some more cardboard to make another one,” she cracked back to me. I turned the car toward Reading with my mother driving behind us. Twenty five minutes later, Saul was in pain. We stopped and turned him outward so he could stretch his legs. We drove on, and did the same thing 20 minutes later. We continued like that all through the 143-mile drive to the hotel. It took about five hours. Finally we arrived at the hotel. We got Saul back into his wheel chair and went inside. Almost immediately, Saúl came up Yulian Anchico, a young member of the Colombian national team. Saul remembered when Anchico scored a penalty kick against Uruguay to help the Colombian national Under-20 team qualify for the World Cup in 2003. Anchico was obviously pleased that Saul remembered his moment of glory in Uruguay. We took pictures. We met more players. Many of them took time to talk to Saul. They signed his jersey and a soccer ball we had brought. Saul was thrilled.
We got back in the car to drive to the stadium. There the nonsensical treatment of the handicapped, which had begun with the staff’s refusal to mail us our tickets, continued. We had to pick up our tickets at Gate C, with no nearby handicapped parking. But we could not enter the stadium at Gate C. No, handicapped people had to enter at Gate A, a long walk around the stadium from Gate C. My mother, the occupational therapist, was aghast. She noted that Saúl was not too bad off with his electric wheel chair, but that many handicapped people use canes or manual wheel chairs and that the stadium’s treatment of handicapped people was really mind bogglingly shabby. Finally, we made it to our seats. At least they were good seats. We were behind one of the goals, but we could see fairly well and the upper deck shaded us from the sun. The atmosphere in the stadium was electric, with about 50,000 soccer fans, many of them hard-drinking, vocal, English soccer fans. “Oh inaccessible glory! Good germinates in the furrows of pain!” Saúl whispered the lines of the martial-sounding Colombian national anthem, a few tears brimming from his eyes. The game was great, with one of the players we had met at the hotel, Mario Yepes, scoring on of Colombia’s two goals. David Beckham bent in a ball from the right corner that teammate Michael Owen volleyed in, leading to England’s 3 to 2 victory over Colombia. Saul was a little disappointed that Colombia lost, but not surprised. “They played like they never have and lost like they always do,” he said with a laugh.
We drove back to the hotel, which according to the website, had the latest in handicapped accommodations, exceeding the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. When we got to the room Saul needed to use the toilet. My mother took the children for a swim in the hotel pool. I looked in dismay at the low toilet seat. I knew I could get Saul onto it, but how would I ever get him off? We called the hotel operator and asked if they had an attachment for the seat, or a higher toilet anywhere in the building. The response was negative. Praying that there would be no disasters, I lifted Saul out of the wheel chair and onto the toilet without a problem. A few minutes later, I used every last ounce of strength to lift him back into the wheelchair. I wheeled him out into the room and we started talking about where and how Saul would sleep. At home he slept in a electric recliner which we could move and adjust during the night to keep him comfortable. The Sheraton and promised us some kind of recliner, but all they had given us was a sort of couch chair and a foot rest. As we brainstormed about what to do I burst into tears of exhaustion and desperation. Then Saúl wept a little. We dried our tears, ordered room service and welcomed my mother and the children back to the room. They were thrilled because the Colombian national team had also gone swimming.
We improvised a recliner-type set up with pillows on the coach chair and the leg rest. Somehow, perhaps with the help of the beer Saúl uncustomarily drank with dinner, we got through the night with just occasional adjustments. We had a wonderful breakfast, with lots of cheerful talk with the waiter about the game. Almost the entire Colombian team had left at something like 3 a.m. that morning. But one player, Fabián Vargas, who plays for Boca Juniors in Argentina, was scheduled to fly to Mexico later in the day. We met him while we were checking out and congratulated him for his performance the day before. We wished him good luck in his club’s upcoming game in Mexico.
We drove home, thrilled with our trip and talking about the future. Maybe we could rent a handicapped van and take a longer trip when the children finished school, Saul wondered aloud. A handicapped van or a wheel-chair accessible mobile home, I thought. We were all happy with the trip and hopeful that we could do something similar again. The euphoria perhaps blinded us a little about the reality of Saul’s health. The children finished school 10 days later on a Thursday. They came home at noon. Saul had been mostly unconscious for about 24 hours. The children went upstairs to play some computer games. Saúl took a deep breath at about 5:30 p.m. and then stopped. A day or so later, I was sitting at a table with family members and our pastor. We were brainstorming about Saul’s memorial service. At our church, we always have a time in which the children are called to the front of the church for a story or activity designed especially for them. I’ve often thought that the children’s stories are so good and creative that they upstage the main sermon. I thought of our trip to Giants Stadium and wondered if I could write a children’s story about it that would – in the Pilgrim’s tradition – be the best part of the service.
I decided to try. I found pictures of us with the Colombian players and newspaper pictures of the game. I retold the story in a simple, straightforward fashion, treading lightly or skipping entirely over some of the darker moments. Then I concluded: The family is very sad. They miss this dear, dear man very much. But they are happy that almost until the day he died, he did what he wanted to do, even if it seemed a little crazy or impossible.”

Sept. 20, 2006
Despair
I've been feeling so despondent lately; small or even beautiful things can turn my thoughts to death. Yesterday at the supermarket there was a big display on bulbs and I almost burst into tears. While Saul was sick with cancer, I read E.B. White's account of his wife's illness. He admired the way that she planned her tulip patches in the fall, even though she was profoundly ill. He called it, "planning her resurrection."

Sept. 18
Too Long a Break!
We had a wonderful weekend at Ocean City, New Jersey. We rode bikes on the board walk, played in the arcades, and drove the go-carts. Oh, yeah, we also swam in the ocean a little. But we neglected the Spanish, as seems to be our custom. When we got back to El Sobrino del Mago tonight, I asked Mario a question about the book and he said, "Yo no sabe," which is a terrible mistake to make, sort of like, "I is" in English. But we kept at it for about 30 minutes and Mario started to loosen up and speak a little more and a little better. But there is a lot to do!
Once the boys were asleep, I wrote a review of two new books published by ediciones iamique in Argentina, Los libros no fueron siempre asi and El cine no fue siempre asi. They were nicely written books, full of good graphics and details, but definitely too factual to be interesting to my children at this point.
I scored my first outdoor goal of the season in my game on Sunday, and then had to leave early to take Gabriel to the Olympic Development Program tryout. Once again there were abou 120 players there, and they all seemed incredibly skillful for 11- and 12-year-old boys.

This article was published in Central PA (www.centralpa.org) magazine last February:

An Unexpected Widow
By Rebecca Thatcher Murcia

When I met Saúl in Brownsville, Texas, in 1999, I was a young, hard-charging investigative reporter. I fearlessly tracked down drug traffickers and murderers and wrote stories about them. My dentist told me he needed x-rays in case he had to identify my body.
Saúl was one of the first Colombians I had ever met. He had dark, sparkling eyes and a broad smile that left me completely enamored. He was a kind and gentle soul who had just graduated from Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Indiana, and joined Mennonite voluntary service. They had sent him to Brownsville to work in home repair. They say opposites attract, and in our case the attraction was fierce. We were inseparable almost from the day we met. We married a few months later.
Soon after we began living together, we realized that while opposites attract, they don’t always live together easily. His quietness drove me crazy at times. My need for communication sent him over the edge. But we survived those difficulties and flourished in the border city. His supervisors asked him to take over leadership of the Mennonite voluntary service programs in Texas and New Mexico. Later he earned the job of national coordinator. Editors at the Austin American-Statesman noticed my hard work and offered me a job there.
We loved Austin. Our first son, Gabriel, was born in 1995 and Mario came two years later. We agreed that our children should be bilingual and tried to speak to them mostly in Spanish. Every two years, we took them to his parent’s farm in Colombia and enjoyed visiting with relatives, playing in the river and exploring all the nooks and crannies of the little hillside property.
When Gabriel was a baby, we carried his car seat from the farm to the nearby road on the back of a mule. I wrote a funny story for the newspaper about how nervous I had been about that idea. The newspaper published the picture of Saul sitting on the mule, holding the car seat, with little Gabriel’s face just peaking out over the edge – the pacifier firmly between his lips. People loved the picture and the story.
Saúl’s talents as a leader and an administrator did not go unnoticed. When the Mennonite Central Committee, a relief and development agency of the Mennonite church, had an opening on their Latin America desk, they called Saúl and asked him to apply. In the summer of 2001, we moved from fun-loving, cosmopolitan Austin to tiny Akron in Lancaster County. Saul became the agency’s co-director for Latin America.
We bought a house just off Main Street in Akron and built a new life in a small town. I worked part-time as a free-lance writer and Saúl threw himself into the challenges of running development and aid projects in places like Bolivia, Paraguay, Colombia and Jamaica. The children made friends and joined soccer teams. Life was good.
Saul shocked me in the summer of 2003 when he said, “I think I’m going to die.” He showed me a lump on the left side of his chest about the size of half a tennis ball. A wise radiologist at the local hospital had already said he thought it was Chondrosarcoma, a rare kind of bone cancer.
I researched the implications of a large Chondrosarcoma tumor and the information was disheartening. The articles said the chances of a fatal metastasis following the discovery of a large tumor were high. In Saúl’s presence, I tried to be calm and reassuring. When I was alone or on the phone with my mother, I cried.
Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital removed the tumor in December 2003 and treated the area with radiation. Saul was in the hospital for a week and came home with a big scar and Gortex where he used to have ribs. He seemed fine and we hoped that we had dodged the bullet.
In the summer of 2004 his back started hurting. The cancer had spread to his spine and lungs. It’s easy to say that the last year was a nightmare – as we struggled with the paralysis, the surgery, the recuperation, and the return of the cancer. In many ways it was a nightmare. It’s awful to see some one you love decline to the point of total dependence. At a certain point, Saúl couldn’t even raise his hand to scratch his nose.
But there were many good times. We came together as a family and we relied on an incredible church family – Pilgrim’s Mennonite in Akron -- to help us with everything from cleaning bathrooms to sleeping on the floor next to Saúl’s bed and waking up to turn him every two hours. Saúl never lost his dry sense of humor nor his charming smile.
On Saturday, June 4, we were expecting three of Saúl’s old friends from Goshen College days. He sent me to a little Colombian market in Ephrata with a long list of his favorite Colombian foods. I bought it all and created a feast. The friends arrived and we managed to push Saúl’s wheel chair out onto the porch. We sat in the sun and ate and talked. The next day we all went to a soccer game. By then Saúl was very weak and it took two people to get him from his wheel chair back into the car.
The end was mercifully swift. Saúl was sleepy on Monday and delirious on Tuesday. On Wednesday he was mostly unconscious and breathing with difficulty. On Thursday afternoon, I sat at his bedside, unwilling to let him go so quickly. “Your cousin Tony is here,” I bellowed, hoping for at least another brief return to consciousness. Instead he closed his mouth and seemed to go in peace. I cried there at his side for a little while, then I went upstairs to say the two hardest words I’ve ever uttered to my children, “Pappy died.”
Mario, 8, threw himself on the floor of my bedroom in tears. Gabriel, 10, ran to his bed to cry. I went back and forth, wanting to console them but not dictate how and where they cried. The next few days were a blur of visitors, the burial, the memorial service – and lots of writing. I wrote an obituary, a eulogy and a children’s story for the memorial service.
Soon people began asking if we will stay in Akron. It’s as if they’re thinking, “Why would a Massachusetts-educated New Yorker who lived in Texas for 14 years stay in small-town Pennsylvania?”
It is a hard question to answer but at this point it feels right to stay here. People here cared for us in a time of trial. The children like their friends, their schools, their soccer teams and their church. And even if all those things weren’t the case, Akron has grown on me. This is where Saúl was laid to rest, on a beautiful hill just down the street from our house. No, it’s not Austin, but it’s home for now.

Rebecca Thatcher Murcia is an Akron writer.

Laughing About Gestures and Politics
Sept. 13, 2006
Today at reading time I was gesturing wildly and using funny voices to help my children understand what was happening in El Sobrino del Mago. For example, the wicked queen was saying: "El nuestro es un destino superior pero solitario," which means something like: "Our destiny is higher but lonely." I raised my hand high to show the kids what the sentence meant, trying to be expressive and dramatic. Gabriel, 11, thought I should focus on one language at a time. "We don't know sign language, mom," he said. I tried to calm down a little and the rest of the time went well. The rest of the queen's speech sounds oddly like George Bush's rhetoric. We laughed about that.
The amazing thing was that Mario got home from bowling at 5:15 p.m. and we were eating dinner by 5:30 p.m. Even with the early start, we didn't have much time to read. Both children had too much homework, which they did too slowly!

Sept. 13, 2006
Car Pool Day
Yesterday it was my turn to drive three boys to and from soccer practice in Lancaster. By the time practice was over and everybody was home, it was well after 8 p.m. I insisted on reading just a few pages from El Sobrino del Mago (A translation of The Magician's Nephew from Editorial Andres Bello). The fact that we had not been reading or talking in Spanish lately really showed. Mario had a hard time following the interesting description of the world in which Polly and Digory land in chapter 5. Today we have no soccer so we should have lots of time to get caught up on homework, house work and reading. We'll see how it goes.

Sept. 12, 2006
Desperate Days
Forget raising good boys who speak English and Spanish fluently. Yesterday was just a matter of trying to survive. Mario, 9, came home with tons of homework he wanted help on. He worked on it while I made dinner and then we hustled off to soccer practice. When we returned, Gabriel, 11, said he needed to bring book socks for all his textbooks to school. We went to two stores -- staying out until 9 p.m. (!) looking for the stupid book socks, which apparently are in high demand this year. I put them to bed without reading in any language, but then I was too worked up when I got home to go to sleep.

Sept. 10, 2006
Just Soccer -- No Spanish
It was not a good weekend for Spanish. We were way to busy with soccer. Gabriel's Under-12 Lanco United team opened their season with a 4 to 0 victory over a team from Concord, Delaware. Mario's Under-10 team, which I coach, lost 4 to 3 against Manheim Central. Almost as soon as Mario's game was over on Saturday, we made some sandwiches, dropped Mario at a friend's house, and headed to the Olympic Development Program tryouts in the Harrisburg area. I had never seen anything like it. There must have been 120 boys there, and a lot of them were really, really good soccer players. The tryout lasted for 90 minutes, but when we got home at about 9 p.m., Gabriel wanted to play tennis under the lights! I was tired and I had not played a game and done a tryout. We did it anyway and had a good game. I can usually beat Gabriel easily but he was beating me.
This afternoon, my over-30 women's team began its season by losing 6 to 0! It was probably the best team in our league. I had fun anyway.
Tomorrow it's back to working on Spanish!

Sept. 9, 2006
Return to C.S. Lewis

After two nights of being too busy, I overruled the boys' strenuous objections and said we were going to read a lot and then go to bed early. (Usually on Friday nights we watch movies in English) We're on the sixth book of the Chronicles of Narnia, El Sobrino del Mago (the Magician's Nephew). It's not easy since even the English terminology in these books can be a little archaic. But the stories are good and the kids have been able to follow along even though there are lots of words we don't know.
I used to stop and ask questions that checked for comprehension. But I read somewhere that it's better to grapple with the story by asking what will come next, or what you would do in situations like that. So I try to do that and tonight when the boy and the girl protagonists released a queen from a spell and she immediately wanted to know who had done it, I asked my sons what they would say. I had to help Mario formulate the sentence from beginning to end, but he understood what was happening and knew what he wanted to say. That's good. I can't believe we've almost finished the series. It's taken about two years, but it's been worth it. Although Gabriel once said, "Reading the Chronicles of Narnia is supposed to be a wonderful experience for children, and you're ruining it by making us read them in Spanish." I hope he does not still feel that way.

A Hectic Day -- Without Spanish
Today we did not practice Spanish at all! This happened because we had so little time together with Gabriel, 11, at his team's soccer practice and Mario, 9, and I had his team's scrimmage. After the scrimmage, Mario and I went to the Ephrata Middle School open house. Gabriel's teacher said he was doing a great job interpreting from English to Spanish for a child that just moved here from Ecuador. "I would love to be able to speak two languages fluently," she said. She asked Mario if he was also completely bilingual and he said, "sort of." The truth is that while Gabriel has an excellent foundation in Spanish from staying home with us and Spanish speaking baby sitters until he was four. Mario, on the other hand, went to an English-speaking preschool when he was two. His Spanish has never been very fluent. Tomorrow we will read and converse, Dios mediante!

Haner Scores with Soccerhead

When I read Soccerhead, I felt an incredible kinship with Haner, who has basically gone through the same changes I've gone through in the last few years, gradually turning into a "soccerhead." The big difference is that Haner did not mention playing himself. I play all the time -- my over-40 team won the gold medal at the Keystone Games in July, 2006. I wrote this review for topdrawersoccer.com.

Soccerhead: An Accidental Journey into the Heart of the American Game
By Jim Haner
North Point Press $24 275 pages

If Jim Haner had only written about his personal transformation from soccer know-nothing to soccerhead, this book would have been fun and interesting. But Haner had an even better idea. Into an artful account of how he developed a love of soccer over three years of coaching his son’s team, he weaves the for-the-most-part-unknown history of American soccer. For good measure there’s lots of interesting – sometimes biting – analysis of why soccer can be so hard on the typical, offensive-loving, American sports mindset.
Haner, a long-time investigative reporter for The Baltimore Sun, begins the book with the story of how his wife pushed him out the door one night with instructions to attend a meeting for parents of six-year-olds who were going to play soccer. He was a diehard football fan who had never paid much attention to soccer and went reluctantly. Somewhat to his horror, he ends up volunteering to coach and leaves the meeting with a trunk full of cones, soccer balls and other paraphernalia .At first he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, but he began to get more and more interested and found wisdom in unlikely places. The Salvadoran grandfather of one of the children he coaches tutors him on game strategy. He attends classes, and reads books. His son uses a video game to explain rules that Haner does not quite understand.
Little by little, Haner realizes that all he ever talks about and thinks about is soccer. He goes on a quest, to old New Jersey soccer clubs that have been around for a hundred years, to the Soccer Hall of Fame in New York, to whoever can tell him the story of soccer in this country for the last hundred years. The stories he digs up, the old players he interviews, are fascinating and completely belie the conventional wisdom about there being no history of soccer in this country.
Toward the end of the book, Haner’s son is chosen for a travel team and the writer gets a chance to step back and take a broader look at the American youth soccer scene. Like the investigative reporter he is, he takes note of the ugly side of youth soccer, the horrible incidents of coaches abusing children and parents abusing referees. He packs a file full of such stories in his briefcase and heads off to the National Soccer Coaches Association convention in Charlotte, N.C. hoping to get some answers. He regales the reader with tales of convention craziness, and finds some answers to his questions.
Haner recalls how Anson Dorrance, the storied coach of the University of North Carolina soccer team, “sucked the air out of the room” when he told the attendant coaches of children under the age of high school juniors to “just let them play.” The next day Haner tracks down Freddy Adu and asks the young professional his opinion of the “drill versus play dilemma. Adu said, “Just play. I learned by kicking balls of paper around, you know? Anything round, it didn’t matter.”
As the book ends, Haner tries his luck with changing his coaching tactics. No more laps. No more drills. “We did nothing but play games – weird games, some with no nets and some with four, some with two balls and some with ten.” At games, it almost kills him, but Haner tries to stay quieter on the sidelines. He’s a changed coach, and a changed man, but no less of a soccer nut, and no less a patriot. He writes, “When the United States finally wins the World Cup, it will be with Italians and Nigerians in the goal’ Germans and Koreans in the backfield; Jordanians and Indians at the circle; and Brazilians and Latinos up front. For we are the only nation on earth that can possibly figure out how to meld it all together – and we will be attacking, ever advancing, in the name of all that is holy and good.”
Okay, so he goes off the deep end a little bit at the conclusion, but we can cut Haner a little slack. He has written a brilliant book that contains lots of good analysis, great story telling, and more than a little soccer wisdom.

Soccerhead is available at www.amazon.com.