A rarity occurred this past Saturday. I had the day off, there were a slew of World Cup Qualifiers on TV and the internet and I was able to actually watch some. I prepared my day and planned to watch the dreaded Mexicans and the United States hopefully qualify of South Africa 2010. Before those games were played I was able to catch Portugal inch closer to a possible qualification playoff by defeating Hungary 3 nil. The Mexico-El Salvador game was televised first and of course Mexico managed to out play and out score the mighty team from El Salvador and secure a spot in South Africa. Mexico once again relied on the previous generation to get them through as Cuauhtémoc Blanco and Francisco Palencia provided the goals. At this point the day took a downturn. First, let me say soccer in the past decade has exploded here in the States. I’m talking the ability to watch games from England, Germany and Spain on a regular bases. With the internet and cable, one has the ability to watch any game, anytime. While I was watching the Mexico/El Salvador game, I also was keeping an eye on the Argentina/Peru game on my laptop, live. This is huge. I remember the days when the only soccer I saw on television was “Soccer Made in Germany” on PBS hosted by Toby Charles on Saturdays! Taking that into consideration, I was extremely pissed when I learned the USA/Honduras game was not on television, cable, satellite, or TV Pay Per View. The only feed available was a couple of extremely unreliable streams from Ustream and JustinTV. This was absolutely ridiculous. If the US won this game, they would stamp their ticket to South Africa and no US Network was carrying the game. Word later filtered down the Honduran Federation sold the rights to the game to some miniscule Closed Circuit company which only was providing the feed to businesses. OMG, what a disservice. So, I made the best of what I had. The feed was off more than on, I along with everyone else who was chasing the game on the internet saw small blocks of the game. The first half ended 0-0. By the time the feed came back on, the game was tied 1-1. I did see Conner Casey score his second from a masterful pass from Landon Donovan. The best play of the whole game. Donovan later scored his own on a free kick outside the box catching the Honduran keeper leaning the other direction. The feed at that point went off and on as Honduras pounded the US goal eventually scoring a chaotic goal which should not have counted because of an missed offside call. The Honduran Carlos Pavón missed two chances to tie with a failed penalty and point blank header. I didn’t see the end of the game but assumed the US held on. I had to wait a while to confirm the final on the internet, and didn’t even try to follow up on TV cause the lack of interest of the US media has pissed me off in the past. Moral of the story is, who saw this? I was able to watch Mexico secure their ticket, but I am embarrassed as an American I did not have that option as a follower of the US team. Its a real shame this has to be like this.