Soccer Watch

With just a week to go until World Cup 2006 kicks off, the U.S. team finished its preparations with a couple of solid shutout wins this week, 2-0 over Venezuela and 1-0 over Latvia, and looks to be in pretty good shape heading to Germany, with no new injuries and a settled lineup: Lewis and Cherundolo flanking Onyewu and Pope on defense, McBride and Wolff in attack, Landon Donovan right behind them as the midfield playmaker, and Beasley and O'Brien on the wings. The one sore spot for coach Bruce Arena has to be the supposedly minor injury to veteran midfielder (and captain) Claudio Reyna, which kept him out of the tune-up matches – especially worrisome because the Europe-based Reyna hasn't trained with the team that much recently, and he's being expected to fill a new role as the defensive midfielder and leader of the defense. Can he fill that role at the World Cup, having never gotten a chance to try it out in a game before? We shall see, quite soon.

Good news for the U.S., meanwhile, is that the favorite in their group, Italy, is in disarray as the national match-fixing/referee-tampering scandal keeps unfolding. It now appears that no players will be directly implicated and have to sit out the WC, but league champion Juventus of Torino, for whom five key players play, not only could get their title stripped but they could get demoted to the second division. It's a huge distraction – front-page news in all the national papers, with the WC barely rating a mention any more – and while one assumes the players have kept their focus on the task at hand, you never know, do you?

Elsewhere in group D, Ghana beat Jamaica, 4-1, and the Czech Republic beat Costa Rica, 1-0.