Tournament has completed its first week and while the logistics have sometimes been challenging, the people and the football have been good<\/p>\n
It was quite a contrast touching down in sleepy Kansas City hours after having witnessed the bedlam on the streets of New York when the Knicks won the NBA Finals <\/a>and Brazil drew with Morocco<\/a>. But this is a World Cup full of contrasts, from Fifa\u2019s never-ending quest to make a quick buck ($5 a pop for a bottle of water in the media centre) to the warmth shown by locals I\u2019ve encountered in the Big Apple, Kansas City and Dallas. Then there\u2019s the football. It\u2019s been hard to keep up with the volume of matches, but the opening round served up some classics, with DR Congo\u2019s draw against Portugal <\/a>on the same day as England beat Croatia<\/a> capping a thrilling first week of action. Let\u2019s hope it continues. Ed Aarons<\/strong><\/p>\n It took nearly the full opening round, but a US scene that is usually focused on other sports has fully turned its eyes to socc\u2013 sorry, I mean football, forgot to code-switch. Fitting, actually, because at times this state of affairs has been awkward, like when the standard \u201cloud men yelling\u201d sports talk shows are forced to reckon with international football being the No 1 talking point and employing nobody that knows the scene. But these are growing pains. The sport is on at bars and delis, it is being discussed at school pickups and on the rides home. It\u2019s beautiful and exactly what so many of us here in the States have been fighting for. Alexander Abnos<\/strong><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tournament has completed its first week and while the logistics have sometimes been challenging, the people and the football have been good It was quite a contrast touching down in sleepy Kansas City hours after having witnessed the bedlam on the streets of New York when the Knicks won the NBA Finals and Brazil drew … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}