Michael Davies:

 

I've got to tell you my admiration for the U.S. players is only eclipsed by my admiration for the U.S. fans here in the stadium. They are awesome. The soccer haters should be embarrassed of their lack of patriotic support.

 

Reuters:

The second half was old school football -- raw and gutsy -- and also put paid to another lingering stereotype about the United States and the game of soccer.

The thousands of U.S. fans outshouted the Italian supporters, roaring their team on and hurling abuse at some of the refereeing decisions with the kind of passion found at Spanish or English stadiums every week.

The American fans as well as their players deserve to be taken seriously.

NY Times blog:

 

That's one thing we've noticed doing this blog. We're getting readers from all over the world, and many of the people logging in from the United States are fans of other teams. But the largest segment of our audience, based on traffic and the items you post the most comments about, is composed of fans of the U.S. National Team. And those fans are every bit as knowledgeable, excitable, paranoid, obtuse, proud, melodramatic, obnoxious, gracious and obsessed as fans of any other country's soccer.

 

Now, all of that is nothing new to those of us that have been following the US team for some time.  However, the crowd is growing, and that's great. 

 

One place where there is plenty of room for improvement: the play by play on ESPN(2)/ABC.  They're using too many generic, non soccer-specifc play by play guys.  I don't normally like to bitch and moan about stuff like this, but if we want soccer to be taken seriously, we need serious soccer broadcasts.