Against the Czech Republic, the US team played very poorly. Whenever an American had the ball, he avoided Czech players as if afraid they would take the ball from him. They did. When the Czechs had the ball, they dribbled past and through the Americans and took shots at will. Nonetheless, international football is such an inherently low-scoring game that the Czechs still only managed to score their goals through either defensive ineptness and superbly lucky kicking. None of the Czech goals resulting from pure skill and planning, and the Czechs went on to lose their two other games and crash out of the tournament.

Against Italy, the US players played at a far higher level. For large stretches of the game, they were several quanta above the Italians in demonstrated passing and dribbling; they made a number of breathtaking moves of the sort where one or two or three players or limbs or heads go in many directions with great quickness while the ball is directly with alacrity in another direction (the proper jargon for such things exceeds my vocabulary but I believe "drop pass" merely hints at the marvels on display) and somehow the American players and their body parts and the ball all regroup on the other side of the defends and continue at great speed towards the goal. It was the sort of thing that I thought only Brazilians did, but the Americans did it many times throughout this game.

Against Ghana, I was horrified to see two things: the return of the Americans to their poor normal form, and the poor gamesmanship of the Ghanians. They dove as if taking lessons from the Italians. The rest of the world seems to agree with blogger Matthew Baldwin when he says "my favorite aspect of the World Cup is the theatrics. ... any two players that pass within 70 ft. of one another will immediately drop to the ground, clutch their right knee, and writhe around in unbearable agony—and then, five seconds later, and completely irrespective of whether the official calls a foul or not, leap back to their feet and charge back into the action. There is more dramatics in a 90 minute soccer game than an entire season of your local repertoire theater." I'm with King Kaufman, who says "I've learned in this World Cup that we Americans are more offended by the diving than the rest of the world is. It's actually seen as a weakness of the American team -- a team with no shortage of weaknesses -- that it refuses to take part in the injury faking ... I understand why we don't like the diving and don't know enough about enough of the rest of the world to understand why it doesn't bother them as much. But no matter ... the diving has got to go."

I've watched parts of other games. Since I have no TV, I watch in the rec room of the building at 7 am, and I often enjoy the company of the Hispanic building maintenance crew. When a Mexican player whacked a penalty kick over the crossbars, one guy jumped up in despair and moaned (in English), "stupid Mexican! Stupid Mexican!" I guess we are all influenced by our surroundings.

After watching a few of the games heavily altered by penalties, I think the real problem is not the refereeing, it's the moral hazard. Its accepted in baseball and tennis and many other sports occasional bad calls are part of the game. But in most cases the players have very limited power either to generate situations which require calls or to influence the outcome of a call. A baseball player trying to touch a base before a fielder catches a ball can't do anything other than run as fast as possible, and if the call is blown it's usually by milliseconds, so viewers don't blame the umpire excessively. Probably the American sport that comes closest to soccer in the moral hazard area is basketball, where referees have to make complex and arbitrary judgements about high-speed mid-air collisions of many players. But even in basketball, there aren't too many dives. Why? Six foot ten inch 280 pound men don't like to go face-first into solid wood floors at 15 mph from three feet in the air. Implication for soccer: play on asphalt and you'll cut down a lot on dives.