RED, DICK AND ENGLAND

On a Thursday afternoon in June 1950, in a World Cup Group 2 match at the Independencia stadium in Belo Horizonte, Joe Gaetens scored the goal heard around the world seven minutes before half time.

The USA held on against an England of Tom Finney, Stan Mortensen, Wilf Mannion and Alf Ramsey and so began a relationship with the game we call football.

Thirty years later the sportswriter Red Smith of the New York Times, a baseball man with no time for football, encountered the world game at the Meadowlands and wrote of the New York Cosmos and the pre-match song and dance,

"When at last the field was left to the players, the quality of entertainment declined somewhat."

Starring for the Cosmos that day were World Cup winning captains Carlos Alberto and Franz Beckanbauer, Holland's Johan Neeskens and the renegade Anglo-Italian Giorgio Chingalia.

They got off lightly.

Dick Young of the tabloid Daily News had heckled Pele in his first Cosmos press conference and thought the game was for, as he put it, Commie pansies.

One won a Pulitzer prize but both articulated how most of their countrymen felt.

Four years later the Cosmos, along with the rest of the North American Soccer League, imploded and punctured football in America.

Thirty years further on and the story has a different lead.

Since the 1990 World Cup in Italy a stream of Americans, mostly goalkeepers with names like Kasey, Brad and Boaz, have flowed though English professional football.

America hosted the show in 1994; the national team reached the last eight in the 2002 and are about to play in their sixth consecutive tournament; Major League Soccer is in its 15th season; where there were hundreds of local teams and clubs there are now hundreds of thousands and millions of American parents ferry their kids to and from endless practise and games.

Football is embedded and it was no surprise when an American friend of a friend attended a recent Arsenal game and needed no introduction to the context of the match or the Premier League. Bill's son wore an Arsenal hat and they had a ball.

Earlier this year Landon Donovan of LA Galaxy raised the bar for US imports with a 13 game star turn on-loan at Everton whose request to keep him was refused.

Donovan is a key member of a side ranked 16 in the world which last year, in the World Cup warm-up tournament, beat European Champions Spain 2-0 in the semi finals and in the final held a 2-0 lead over Brazil before losing 3-2 .

On a Saturday evening in June, in the opening game of Group C at the Royal Bafokeng stadium in Rustenburg, the USA play England.

Revenge is a dish best served 60 years cold.