The Save Heard Around Some Of The World

The English sports media rarely needs prodding to make a lot of noise about some subjects, and certainly not for their prospects in South Africa next summer. The ink was barely dry -- or, in my case, still in the metaphorical pen -- on all the World Cup 2010 draw headlines about the USA-England matchup when the Premier League served up a stoppage time penalty kick to be taken by possible English national team forward Jermaine DeFoe against presumptive USA goalkeeper Tim Howard in a match between Tottenham Hotspur and Everton.

As noted in several English newspapers, the score after the first post-draw "matchup" between the two countries is America 1, England 0.

With a handful of Yanks playing over on that "little island with all the rain," as Eric Wynalda likes to call it, I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of these sorts of stories in the next six months. Hopefully a bunch of them have to do with Jozy Altidore and Clint Dempsey scoring bunches and bunches of goals.

As for the draw, there's not much to say that hasn't been said. It's good for the U.S., England can't take us lightly, and we can't take Algeria or Slovenia lightly. We don't really need the result against England as long as we take care of business in the other two matches, and if we can't take care of business, then all criticism of the U.S. program is probably warranted. For everyone else, most of the seeded teams should get through, and by and large, it was one of the more equitable draws I've seen in a while. It looks weak on paper, but Group 1 will be interesting if South Africa can ride the wave of home support to beat Mexico.

Eventually, I'm going to dive into Nate Silver's new Soccer Power Index for ESPN and the way it's set up to predict outcomes in the groups, but as a stats guy, I need to go through the methodology pretty thoroughly before passing a knee-jerk judgment just based on the rankings.