This year’s Black Friday won’t belong to Hawkeyes or Huskers

Let’s talk Nebraska-Iowa football, and right now.

Yes, the Hawkeyes have won the last seven games in the series and this isn’t the most-intriguing game on Iowa’s schedule. But this year, the Huskers and Hawkeyes will clash on what has the potential to be the most-memorable Black Friday in U.S. sports history.

Alas, that has absolutely nothing to do with Nebraska-Iowa in Iowa City. Unless that game has more overtime periods than the nine in last year’s unfortunate llinois-Penn State tilt. And I do mean “tilt.”

No, that day’s main event is at 1 p.m. (CT) on Friday, Nov. 25. The United States will play England in a group stage men’s soccer World Cup match in Al Khor, Qatar.

Hear me now and believe me later. This will be a big deal. The U.S. should (operative word: “should”) beat Wales and England should defeat Iran in their World Cup openers four days earlier. The winner of U.S.-England would be the prohibitive favorite to win that group and have a good draw in the round of 16.

But the reason the game will be riveting to so many is that it’s the U.S. against England, our longtime ally and former overlord. Pubs in both nations will be packed with fans nervously watching the telecast of the game. It might not be every pub in the U.S., but it will be many.

Shocking statistic: The U.S. is 1-0-1 against England in World Cups. The teams played to a draw in 2010.

In 1950 when the two met in Brazil, the Americans were 70-to-1 underdogs. They came in with a seven-game losing streak in international competition, scoring two goals in that time to their opponents’ 45.

Yet, they beat the Brits, 1-0.

Harry Keough was a player on that U.S. club. In 1987, Keough said “We would have been happy with a 2-0 loss because we would have thought, gee, they would have walked all over us. In our wildest dreams we didn’t think we’d ever win.”

“Boy, I feel sorry for these bastards,” Keough told teammate Frank “Pee Wee” Wallace after the game. “How are they ever going to live down the fact we beat them?”

They never did, of course.

Wallace, by the way, had spent 16 months in a Germany camp for World War II prisoners. He probably wasn’t too intimidated by skillful English soccer stars.

The stunning result made no ripples in the U.S. Soccer wasn’t the sport of the future here then. It was the sport of never.

Only one American sportswriter was at the match, and he was there on vacation, not assignment. He went to Brazil on money he made from winning a Kentucky Derby office pool. He was from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and his name was Dent McSkimming. I kid you not.

McSkimming said the Americans’ victory was as “if Oxford University sent a baseball team over here and it beat the Yankees."

Leading up to that day, England’s team had been called “The Kings of Football” by its nation’s press. That’s how Nebraskans once described the Huskers.

In 2022, the two nations will square off in the Middle East on a Black Friday. People in the U.S. — passionate and casual soccer fans — definitely will care who wins this time.

The U.S.-England match will immediately be followed by the Nebraska-Iowa football game, at 3 p.m. That’s American football, for those unfamiliar with the sport.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com