The World Cup Soccer coming to the US and North America is a gigantic bright spot in a world sometimes not so nicely glistening.  So far, the US has enlightened, charmed and otherwise impressed the hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors experiencing the magic of what it means to be fortunate enough to be within or borders.  The opportunity to continue that charming winning streak is about to come to and end I’m afraid.

As I write this, the match between the US and Belgium is about 60-minutes away.  As you probably have heard by now, our star scorer was prohibited from playing in this game because of a Red Card violation in the prior game, requiring him to sit this one out.  Long story short, President Trump intervened in the situation and now, miracle of miracles, this player is back on the pitch, ready to play tonight.

What a monumental mistake.

If I were the US coach, I would call a news conference and announce that even though we are able now to play our best scorer, thanks to presidential interference, we are not going to do so and that player will remain on the bench for this game and not play.  I would further declare that I was resting him for the next match and that even though we could play him, we understand the optics are bad and in the interest of fairness and the appearance of manipulation, we choose to take the original penalty and carry on.

If we did that, the world would admire our sense of fairness and our sportsmanship and even our harshest critics would be hard pressed to find fault with our choice.

If we prevail over Belgium without our best scorer, that really says something.  If we lose, we lose, fair and square; we go home heads held high.

We have a chance to demonstrate to the world what it means to be an American, in the spirit of fairness and the perception of it, we can show the world that we walk the walk not just talk the talk, but it looks like we will not take that path.  What a shame.  We saw an opportunity to interject something into the system and we took advantage of it.  Now we can’t win for winning and we can certainly be assured of losing something much more important than a soccer match.

I hope we lose to Belgium, just so the criticism stops because the further we go into the finals of this tournament with the albatross of inside dealing hanging around our neck; the worse it looks for America and her supposed sense of fairness.

We had a chance to make a real statement in doing the right, but hard thing but in a few minutes, we will blow that opportunity.  What a shame.