This Saturday England will play the USA in the South Africa World Cup 2010. Personally, I’m hoping England won’t be as complacent as it was in 1950.
Back then, the first World Cup saw after the Second World War saw the two teams face each other for the first time. After winning 23 of its preceding 30 games, England was feeling pretty confident. What did the Yanks know about football anyway? When the match kicked off on 29th June, the USA took the lead in the 38th minute. They won 1–0 (that’s “One Nil” BTW).
Some Americans may still be unfamiliar with this bizarre “soccer” game. But Generation Facebook And Twitter generally find themselves a lot more globally connected than those before them. And that’s to be embraced, no?
England is not doing so well right now and beset with injuries. By contrast the USA has seen recent victory over Australia. It will be a nail-biting game.
If you want to Geek Out with the World Cup we recommends the following iPhone apps:
The ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup app [iTunes]
The South Africa 2010 Tracker which has Live updates from every match [iTunes]
iSouth Africa 2010 [iTunes]
If you’re actually going (you lucky bastard) there is South Africa Essentials [iTunes]
World Football Live [iTunes]
World Cup Factoids and History [iTunes]
World Cup Trivia Challenge Lite [iTunes]
And here are some decent sites to keep you updated:
Football365
ESPN Soccer
The Guardian World Cup Fans Network
But to give you a taster of what it would be like if the two Brits on the TechCrunch team (myself and Paul Carr) faced-off against TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, Erick Schonfeld and MG Seigler, here’s something put together by the nice guys behind behind mloovi and learn10.