Pointed Questions

Is it a coincidence that the US Men's National Team is playing a Copa America soccer game against Panama in the exact same city (Atlanta) on the exact same night (tonight) as the first presidential debate? Well, rest assured, reader, I've done my own research and I can tell you that sometimes things line up just a bit too well to be truly accidental. Yeah, no, though, this is clearly a scheduling fluke with no political, spiritual, cosmological, societal or medical implications. I guess it's too early to say that, though. If one of the candidates goes full Mitch McConnell and blank out on stage, we could maybe put it down to vibes or juju or whatever from the energy in the city (including this match) if it wasn't for the fact that both of these people are one thousand years old. Good luck to both of them and their respective teams of medical specialists.

I've of course only got the space and emotional bandwidth to deal with one of these events, so I've chosen to focus on the only one that really matters. Here, then, is your live blog of USA-Panama, Copa America Group C Matchday 2. It's a fake live blog as I'm obviously just posting this after the fact, but luckily all the real pedants are going to be watching Jake Tapper ask Donald Trump about tax policy. Enjoy yourselves, nerds, we'll be over here not missing you. (That's actually not true, I love you all equally, please come back). Anyway!

4': Goal already! Weston McKennie puts in a point-blank ball laid off by Tim Ream from an obviously offside position. Even though the video assisted referee (or VAR, the European name for instant replay, probably because it's translated from French or some other made-up language) reached the indisputably correct decision, I've reserved the sports fan's right to feel not just hard done by, but persecuted. This will be used to justify the eroding of my decision-making and morality undergirding all of my actions for the remainder of the match.

11': A Panamanian player (I forgot to look at that in the seventeen replays they've shown since it happened) goes full speed into USA goalkeeper Matt Turner, causing a delay for medical treatment. When we're playing the regional rivals, sometimes there's little difference between American football and American football.

15': Tim Weah yellow card for judo chopping an opposition player in the back of the neck way off the ball. I know this is a South American tournament to which we've been invited, but given the teams, this is what we call "CONCACAF-ing."

18': Ope, never mind, that got upgraded to a straight red card. Now they're trying to tell us it's not strictly legal to throw a right hook to an opponent's melon. Fucking strict-ass CONMEBOL rules. I don't know how those dilettantes play down there in Sudamerica. Sounds like it's all "kicking" and "passes" and stuff? Unclear.

22': Flo Balogun with a laser in off the post, which will definitely count. For any Canadians reading, this is what we call a "short-handed goal." Weah is out for the rest of the game though, to be clear, there is no penalty box.

26': Goal Panama. Just too many swipes at it and whiffy-kicks USA defense sort of escorting the Panamanian player down the center of the field leading up to the 18 yard box. We needed that 11th player to more thoroughly snap the attacking player's shins in half.

32': Yellow card for Antonee Robinson. We're supposed to call him "Jedi" but that's at his own insistence. You don't get to pick your own nickname, bud. Besides, if you really were a jedi, you would be choking these guys out with your brain powers, not just clattering into them like some sleemo nerf-herder.

39': A bunch of errant passes and broken moves, I may have fallen asleep a little bit.

40': Ooh, a penalty shout for contact against Christian Pulisic, god's favorite princeling, but like most of those, it's wishful thinking from the home crowd, which is traditionally done by shouting expletives meant to denigrate the parentage of the refereeing crew.

44': Deep runs into the US area and dangerous balls played into the penalty box by Panama. It's like nobody told them we were supposed to win this fairly easily, which is rude.

45': Joe Scally the recipient of yet another NFL tackle, resulting in a yellow card for Eduardo Guerrero. Did I only know his name because they flashed the replay as I was typing? Look, don't worry about how I do my research, you just consider the fact that this content is 100% free.

45'+: Five minutes of stoppage time announced. Seems short. In the Qatar World Cup, it would have been like 14.

48': Balogun breaks free and hits the bar with another laser. But called offside in the end. Apparently we just have the one player allowed to be dangerous this match. I forgot Gio Reyna was in the game until he was announced touching the ball a few seconds ago, I assume by accident. I hope it didn't interrupt whatever else he was thinking about at the time.

My halftime analysis is Panama don't seem to be interested in just laying down and letting us win, which seems pretty ungrateful since they owe the existence of their whole independent country to the efforts of cynical American moneyed interests in 1903 to exploit the accident of their geography for our benefit alone to the exclusion of the Panamanian people for almost an entire century. We can begin negotiations to reattach you to Colombia immediately, depending on the outcome of the last 45 of this match.

Now we're at the point where I realize I'm not so committed to this not-really-live-blogging bit to finish the whole game this way. Plus my writing style, which some have described as "voluminous" or "verbose" or "vomit-escent," would make a full-game write-along somewhere in the range of an unabridged Christian Bible, length- and density-wise. Plus if I get to the end and the US lose, it will probably get slightly Revelation-y up in here, and we don't really need that kind of negativity on the same day we are already enduring a Biden-Trump debate, as a nation. I accept your gratitude. Good night and god bless America.