Over the last week, the US national soccer team has experienced levels of triumph and grief worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy.
On Saturday, the Americans booked their World Cup berth with a 3-2 victory away to Honduras. Five days later, on home ground at Washington’s RFK stadium, they were down 2-0 to Costa Rica at half-time, only to tie the game with a Jonathan Bornstein equaliser in the dying seconds – meaning that they will arrive in South Africa next year as the winners of the CONCACAF Qualifying Group. In between those two epic games, Charlie Davies, one of the great young hopes of American soccer, endured horrific injuries in a car accident in which a female passenger was killed.
Airlifted to hospital in the early hours of Tuesday morning, Davies thankfully survived, but his doctor’s report was grim. The 23 year old suffered a lacerated bladder and fractures to the tibia and femur bones in his right leg, as well as facial fractures and a left elbow fracture. Translated into career terms, when Davies left the field in the 80th minute of the Honduras game, he may have done so for the last time. Recovery could take a year, effectively ruling him out of the World Cup.
Davies’s breathtakingly cruel fate was not lost on US soccer fans. At the Costa Rica game, the crowd held up signs marked simply with ’9′ – his shirt number. Fellow forward Jozy Altidore made sure that the spectators and the TV cameras knew that underneath his own shirt, he wore another bearing both the number 9 and Davies’s name. Outside the stadium, too, the spontaneous outpouring of sympathy – for example, the thousands of emails sent to charliedavies9@yahoo.com – is a measure of the respect which Americans have for athletes and a tangible sign that soccer really is putting down roots here.
While Davies made his debut for the national team in 2007, it was this year, at the FIFA Confederations Cup in South Africa, that he first showed what he was capable of. Routed in their first two matches by Italy and Brazil respectively, the Americans turned up to their match against Egypt probably expecting to be flying home shortly after. As it turned out, they soared to a 3-0 victory largely spurred by Davies, who scored one of the goals. As they prepared to face Spain, Vincente del Bosque, the Spanish coach, specifically cited Davies as a threat. “The other day this player we did not know, Davies, played a very good match,” he told a press conference.
The US went on to beat David Villa, Fernando Torres and their teammates 2-0 in a match in which Davies was outstanding. For a while, it seemed as though they might win the tournament. In what may well be the best 45 minutes of US football ever played, the Americans closed the first half of the final 2-0 up against Brazil. Notwithstanding this titanic effort, the Brazilians, presumably smarting from a Dunga lecture at half-time, netted the requisite three goals to win.
Nonetheless, the US returned from South Africa looking like a serious prospect – and Davies, who plays for the French club Sochaux, joined Altidore, Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, Oguchi Onyewu and Michael Bradley in the upper echelons of a young, enthused and purposeful American side. In the wake of his ghastly accident, it’s no wonder that some soccer writers, like Grahame Jones in the LA Times, have reached the gloomy judgment that Davies is irreplaceable. Donovan is needed in midfield, DaMarcus Beasley is well past his prime, half of the top scorers in Major League Soccer are foreign nationals; what on earth is coach Bob Bradley to do?
For now, Bradley is trying to balance the expectations of his team with the pressure of the World Cup – and particularly the group stage. “We can only control this situation when we get there,” Bradley said, following the Costa Rica victory. “You have to be able to play those three games in a certain way. You have to adapt after the first game.”
Arguably, the adapting has to begin now, when the likelihood of a World Cup without Charlie Davies – a player whom Bradley praised for understanding “the total responsibility on the field in terms of not only being somebody who has speed and can break through the defense, but somebody who has to combine it with his teammates” – is just sinking in.
Written by Ben Cohen
That is a great tragedy – especially when US football players are not in abundance like in other countries. It’s of course as striking as it happening in any other countries from a humane point of view – will be amazing if we see him back playing football again, hopefully it’ll be one of those great comeback stories.