It's Not Football - It's Personal

With Ghana being the last African team with any hope of advancing to the quarter finals, they stepped onto the pitch with an enormous amount of expectation laden on their shoulders and delivered a fairy tale result.

Football is arguably the only truly international team sport so when the World Cup rolls around every four years, it is literally anyone’s game. When Americans contemplate their chances of winning the World Cup, they genuinely believe they can do it. When they crash out, their fair-weather fans are bitter.

Take a look at some of the post match comments I found on Yahoo Sports

‘I believe Ghana is only known for it's internet scamming and soccer.’

‘We lost to a country where a basket of fruit is the national hat?’

‘The slaves finally get their revenge’

‘It's nice to see that a secondary sport (areana football is bigger than soccer in usa) that americans play in we can still compete on the world stage. Grats on barely beating us on something we barely put any of our talent pool in. In the end we lost a soccer game, but we are still the only superpower in the world’.

‘USA is much better than Ghana in everything! What is an African country known for besides poverty, starvation and world leader in spreading deadly diseases. I wouldn't step foot onto AFrica. Enjoy it because this is the only victory Ghana will have against a western nation. Look at the World Cup 2010.......so much disorganization, hardly any people at games when non-African country plays because its a dirt poor country who can't afford tickets. And stadiums are in really poor conditions. Without other industrialized countries giving billions$ and billions$ in aid, Africa would cease to exist as a continent!! So be thankful!’

What I find particularly amusing about these responses is that they are fuelled solely from nationalism – not from any understanding whatsoever of the beautiful game. The US, sadly, are on their way home, but they can hold their heads high in the knowledge that their sports minister hadn’t prebooked economy seats for their flight home.

Ghana on the other hand should be relieved that George W Bush III is not the current American president. In the words of a fellow tweeter (@abigvictory) ‘ If Bush was still in office, we'd invade Ghana now.’