Jamaican me crazy

Tickets for the US friendly versus Jamaica on April 11 in Cary, NC sold out in under 90 minutes this past weekend. Any indications that the South is in the grips of World Cup fever have to be taken with a grain of salt; there were only 8,000 tix on sale to begin with. Still, the notion that any US game would sell out that quickly is kind of surprising.

Perhaps there's an unusually large Jamaican expat community in the Raleigh-Durham area that I didn't know about. Perhaps Ticketmaster got crossed up and routed people seeking Duke basketball tickets to SAS stadium instead. Or perhaps Occam's Razor applies here and people everywhere--even in the deepest darkest American South--are psyched about US Soccer and the upcoming mundial.

For what it's worth, though, there's a bit of bad history in Cary. Last time the US played there in a pre-WC02 scrimmage, they went up against the Richmond Kickers, and needed a late Earnie Stewart goal to escape with a 2-2 tie. As everyone knows, that game was a dead-on indicator that the US was doomed in the World Cup.