Mosquito and Goliath

As serious students of the game will tell you, it's all that and then some. The Brazilians play as they live, with a wide-open, unstructured style that gives free rein to individual flourish and feats of athletic heroism. They call it samba, after their national dance. It's high risk, fraught with injuries, wild swings in momentum and soaring scores. The Dutch, in stark contrast, play a highly organized variety of soccer that features precision dribbling and close-quarters passing. The aim is not necessarily to score early, but rather to maintain possession of the ball until an opponent fades from exhaustion late in the game. It is soccer by geometric attrition, and it suits a lowland country where civil engineering is a religion and meticulous attention to detail is all that holds back the raging sea.

Among other notable styles of play, the Italians are stubbornly defensive on the field and famously voluble in the clutch. It is soccer as opera. British teams, on the other hand, are regimented and play a breakneck offensive game that is more than a little violent. The Irish and Nigerians are just plain mean, masters of the "hard tackle" and the discreet elbow to the nose. And so on. And so forth. And all of these things are fairly well understood all over the world -- except in the United States.

Thanks to his French-speaking, Togolese nanny, my Irish-Polish-German boy plays like a Brazilian, a seemingly improbable lineage that is increasingly common for young American soccer players, many of whom now have Latino coaches or team trainers. Or multilingual coaches of uncertain ethnic origin. During the summers, they attend high-priced soccer camps that have become totems of middle-class arrival for an increasingly diverse white-collar workforce. They are the children of tech immigrants, African American strivers and newly minted professionals with no-collar roots -- parents like me who made good on a working-class upbringing and found ourselves pulled in by the almost irresistible gravity that soccer exerts in suburbia. Because of this game, our kids know things about the world that we never imagined at such an early age; and from the tutoring of foreign-born teachers, some of them have that rarest of skills: ambidextrous feet.

THE BELTSVILLE DEFENDERS RUSH IN, and Ben suddenly comes to a dead stop in front of them -- pooching the ball back toward the center of the field with the outside of his left foot. Both defenders fly past him, through the vacant space where the ball was supposed to be, in a classic case of "overplaying" and underestimating their opponent. Just as their error is dawning on them, Ben jukes left, pokes the ball with his right toe, and jets back toward his buddies at midfield with the prize.

Six of the seven Beltsville kids on the field are now out of position, trailing far behind. The Hornets are all holding their spots. Two minutes to go, with the score 3-2 in his favor, Pinchotti stands with his arms folded across his chest, beaming. Could it be that the runts from College Park might tie the score against his awesome juggernaut?

Ben nudges the ball once more, pushing it back on course, straightening it into a beeline toward the goal, then looks ahead to find his man. Sure as cornflakes in the morning, Kevin Guerrero is way out in front of him, smack in the middle of the wide open field, looking over his shoulder on the fly, waving his right arm for the pass, yelling to his teammate, "La pelota! La pelota!" The ball. The ball. Give me the ball.

Streaming down the opposite touchline, Bryan Basdeo paces himself to be the second man at the net, the striker who cleans up any errant shots or fumbled saves by the goalkeeper. He is so good at these mop-up shots that he is the Hornets' second leading scorer, the one they call Bigfoot. More often than not, however, "The Ben and Kevin Show" leaves nothing to clean up. On his third touch, Ben's right foot explodes on the ball with enough torque to spin him bodily into the grass. The ball sails up straight and true. At its apex, it seems to hang in midair for a small eternity before landing six inches in front of the charging striker. All the math is now in favor of the Salvadoran Terror. Momentum. Distance. Timing. Velocity. Kevin flicks out his right foot at a full run, cushions the ball's landing with his instep, pushes it out in front of him . . . and fires.

It's a head-high shot from close range, straight at Beltsville's goalie. Heeding a primal survival instinct, the kid squats to save his nose, shuts his eyes, throws up his gloved hands, and hopes for the best. The ball has other plans. It rockets over his outstretched fingertips and splashes into center net, untouched.

"Goal! Goal! Goal!"

The Hornets go berserk on the sideline -- Michael, Braulio, Robbie, all the relievers and coaches, leaping and tripping over one another. Shelby's father, Terry, grabs me in a bearhug and squeezes the air from my lungs, then drops me back into my shoes, wheezing. Ben, Shelby and Thomas slap five at midfield. Kevin sheers away from the net and cuts a U-turn, flying back up the sideline, grinning his famous foot-wide grin and pumping his skinny arms. His parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins leap up from the island of blankets they have spread in the grass. His grandfather and family patriarch, Rafael Guerrero, raises his arms in the air, yelling, "Goal! Goal! Goal!"

"Okay, guys, we got a little less than a minute to go, and it's their ball," I shout to the kids on the field. "They're going to come at us with everything they've got. So be ready."

If I have learned anything about coaching the game after dozens of crushing defeats and near victories turned to ties by last-minute goals in an opponent's favor it is this: The ecstatic moments after you score are when the other team is most dangerous. Your guard is down, and their fangs are bared. But Beltsville doesn't have much fang left. Sluggo and his associates mount a halfhearted attack that peters out in a defensive trap. The clock expires. The referee blows his whistle. Final score: 3-3.

In the traditional end-of-game ceremony, the two teams line up in columns, then run past each other, touching hands. Then, Pinchotti -- Coach Dave, the boss of mighty Beltsville -- walks over to congratulate the rivals. "I've been watching soccer for a long time," he tells us, "and that was one of the most beautiful plays I've ever seen. You guys have done a hell of a job with these kids. If they're only 8 now, imagine what they'll look like in another year." In the lore of the Hornets, this would be remembered as a defining moment -- the Play and the Day. It would be discussed for months, even years, to come. They had gutted it out and stuck together to match the best team in the league. At 8 years old, they had built themselves a small monument. Whether they could preserve it was another question.

Jim Haner is a writer living in Rockville. This is an excerpt from his first book, SOCCERHEAD: An Accidental Journey Into the Heart of the American Game, published this month by North Point Press, an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC. Copyright 2006 by Jim Haner. All rights reserved.