USMNT runs afoul of the fashion police

This soccer site can't hope to compete with the snark that one sees on the truly great gossip/celebutard/fashion websites like Pink Is the New Blog and The Superficial (female friends told me about them, I swear!), but I had a Joan Rivers gag-me moment when I saw this sartorial note about the USMNT. The AP reports that the Yanks will roll out in their blue kits for the first two games of the Cup, then revert to white for the final group game against Ghana (unis for the second round, if necessary, are TBD).

My bad reaction to this news had nothing to do with how the kits look. I'm pretty indifferent to white versus blue, though I think the latter is preferable (and certainly better than the disastrous shirts the US wore for the 1994 WC, which looked like Jackson Pollock took acid and tried to paint an American flag).

The problem is that our record in the blue shirts in World Cup play is abysmal. Last time around we wore blue for two games, and white for three, with very consistent results. When wearing white, we were 2-1-0, including our two great wins against Mexico and Portugal and that gritty tie against South Korea. By contrast, when wearing blue we went 0-0-2, with the embarrassing 3-1 loss to Poland and the hard-fought but ultimately disappointing 1-0 loss to Germany in the quarters. The pattern is not hard to spot.

I realize that choice of jersey is determined to an extent by the need to avoid color clashes, and that this is all the product of irrational superstition. Still, I can't ignore the cold hard facts of our relatively poor performances in blue, and the ominousness of the choice to wear blue against our two most formidable first-round foes.