Those who value Anglo-American relations should send a small (very small) bouquet to the fumbling Mr Green. The World Cup draw, one might say, has poured oil on troubled waters. The goal Robert Green let in is a salve to the American inferiority complex about English soccer (and maybe the English accent, etc). They dream of that notorious 1950 win over England as the English dream of 1966 and that glorious final against Germany. The New York Post's headline expressed the point perfectly: "USA wins 1-1". Fair summary of the game. Until then you'd have thought the war had broken out again. I mean Bunker Hill, 1775 and all that, when the redcoats came and were redirected. The morning of the game the Post splashed with a full-colour redcoat with musket, and that follows weeks of bashing BP.
If you follow such things, I predict a sharp falling off now in the contributions to Twitter's hateenglandweek, notable for thoughtful contributions to amity such as "they've been whining for help ever since 1942 …"
Soccer dramatises the perennial rivalry and periodic bouts of resentment between Britain and the US. Wall Street and Washington resented London's emergence as the financial capital of the world, hot competition that made its own contribution to the big meltdown. Britain resents the way the Americans talk a good game on free trade but get crafty on the tariffs and quotas, with Congress including "Buy America" clauses in its legislative processes. Brits rightly resent that their soldiers proportionately do more of the dying in Afghanistan, but you'd never know it here in the US. There's rivalry in the art market, in business innovation where the Brits' genius for invention is so often dissipated in a lack of follow-through: nobody in America knows that the concept of the electronic chip in everything from missiles to the iPad was spelled out by the British scientist Geoffrey Dummer six years before Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce in the US. Dummer faced the kind of negativism that led to Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, emigrating to the US after the war.
"Kick-ass" Obama has also sort of cooled things down with his telephone chat with David Cameron. He'd been emphasising the British in British Petroleum though the name was changed a decade ago to reflect the fact that BP, while based in London, is a global energy company. It has not been a great time for Obama. His remarks are not in the same league as George Bush's own goal "Heck of a job, Brownie" when New Orleans was drowning, but he was slow off the mark and after more than a year in office has failed to kick ass in his own administration. Rolling Stone's exposé of the corrupt relationship between the regulatory agency and the oil industry is bad news for Obama – and disastrous for BP.
It is revealed as reckless in its manic cost-cutting, its obscene haste to get the well on stream, and its dereliction in having no credible plan to deal with a blow-out that has devastated vast areas of the Gulf. Instead of complaining about the harm that US hostility is doing to British BP pensioners, a more cogent response would be to quietly ask Obama to share the blame. When Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, says he'd like his life back, so would millions on the Gulf coast who suffer. "We're dying down here," yells James Carville, the Democratic campaign guru.
The oil disaster is a global disaster. It ought to underline yet again how closely connected America and Britain are in so many things, and fundamentally in their Enlightenment values in the face of common threats to their wellbeing. As a Brit-born American citizen I cried in pain when Mr Green couldn't hold that wretched Adidas ball, but I tell myself I shouldn't hold it against America that they tried so hard to restore their pride in our game.