This is a little late, but I was in Mexico City for the U.S.-England game, and it was awesome. With the quarterfinals coming up, it’s time to relive the glory.
The bar was the Black Horse, a self-styled English pub in the Condesa, a part of Mexico City that was a run-down formerly-Jewish area when I first moved here and is now more hip than Bo Jackson. I got there an hour early, figuring that there’s a big group of English expats in the D.F. The outside seats were already taken, but the inside was pretty empty. It didn’t stay that way. My friends showed about 15 minutes after I got there. (I managed to claim a slew of bar seats.) With a half-hour to go, it was SRO ... with U.S. fans. None of whom knew each other.
Which made it awesome. The U.S., see is not a big soccer nation. So we had to make stuff up as we went along. First thing we did was try to launch into “America the Beautiful” over “God Save the Queen.” That didn’t work, because nobody knew the lyrics — this after nine seasons of singing the damn thing at the seventh inning of every Yankee game — so we switched to “This Land is My Land” That got everyone going.
The drama of the game has been recounted elsewhere. But it was great. We yelled, we screamed, we chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and in the most perfect touch, yelled “The roof! The roof! The roof is on FIRE!” after the U.S. tied.
We drank out the bar’s entire stock of Sam Adams, some midwestern beer I’d never heard of, and Budweiser. The party then moved outside.
I love the world cup!Tomorrow, I hope for the triumphs of Brazil and Uruguay. Go Mercosur!
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