Men In Blazers’ man Roger Bennett’s love affair with RSL Captain Kyle Beckerman just keeps on marching on.
We touched a bit on this last week, but wanted to highlight Bennett – who is co-directing ESPN’s six-part documentary series on the USMNT that will begin tonight – talking about Kyle last night on ESPN2 show “Olbermann.”
Video above (the Kyle bit starts around the 2:20 mark, but watch the whole thing, trust us) and quote below:
“Kyle, I love Kyle. I wrote a piece about a year ago called "All Hail Kyle Beckerman," Bennett said of Beckerman, who – along with RSL goalkeeper Nick Rimando – was called into the U.S.’s 30-man preliminary World Cup squad yesterday. “To me he’s the perfect U.S. footballer. He’s very technical, very tactical and deeply underappreciated. He makes everybody around him play better, and he cares about everybody else on the field. His whole goal is to make the attackers attack better, the defenders defend better and it’s that sense of sacrifice and love and joy from the game that you get from Kyle.”
“But spending time with that bloke, you only get to love him even more…. Here’s the joy of Kyle, I’d say he’s one of the emotional heartbeats of this team, he’s in his 30’s, he’s never made a U.S. [World Cup] squad, he’s been a seven-time MLS All-Star, he dropped off the squad really under Bob Bradley and Klinsmann’s pulled him back. Since he was eight he’s always signed his name “Kyle Beckerman: No. 15 USA,” even in notes to his mother. It’d be, “Mum, I’ve gone to the supermarket, I’ll be back in 20 minutes, Kyle Beckerman USA No. 15.” And he’s on the brink of making that childhood dream come true.”
