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hoffahawk wrote:

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So I know nobody likes moral victories and I am no soccer expert, so does this help or hurt the team's confidence moving forward for the world cup?

It absolutely has to help the team. Playing against the big boys, and being effective, is much better than getting run off the pitch. How it affects people's perception of the team doesn't really matter, but it's probably a mixed bag of pros and cons. It was nice that people seemed to actually support the team during this tournament, but expectations always need to be tempered a bit. I always have mixed emotions about our success coming too soon though. It would help exposure in this country and possibly draw a few more kids who are athletically gifted into soccer rather than chasing other sports. On the other hand, I always have this nagging sensation that if we do win a major tournament the prevailing media heads will scoff and say 'see this sport sucks so bad and we're so awesome that we can dominate these fools without caring and this sport not even being on our radar.' Our draw is going to play a massive part in our outlook for the World Cup. We're simply not good enough to expect to advance to the second round. That may sound a little harsh, but there's always a handful of world powers who have much higher expectations than we do who don't advance to the second round. One other thing we have going for us is location. It's not on that dreaded continent of Europe next year. We always play like garbage there (as evidenced by awful showings in Italy 90 where we were a laughing stock, last place I believe in France 98 and gaining a single point in three games in Germany 06), and have a decent showing off the continent (advancing out of the first round in US 94 and Korea/Japan 02).