Gonzaga Bulldogs's Casey Calvary unexpectedly finds himself on a soccer website (TomHauck/Allsport)

Another plain fact emerging is that there is no real space for football in the American sporting calendar. This is not to say that the men's national team might one day perform well in international competition, nor that the women's team won't continue to do well.

However, soccer will never be more than a sideshow, trailing some way behind ice hockey and stock car racing in the list of national sporting priorities.

How can I be so sure? America is currently gripped by...college basketball.

The NCAA tournament, (The Big Dance) receives network TV coverage, daily namechecks on nationally syndicated talk shows, and exhaustively detailed analysis in newspapers, even when the regional interest has gone.

Furthermore, it's a public participation event. Everyone is involved in a pool, either at the workplace or amongst friends.

Complete strangers will ask you 'how's your bracket?' while making you a pastrami on rye with tomato, mustard, a little mayo, hold the lettuce, pickle on the side and a large decaf with half and half no sugar to go. (Another American thing: too many options at lunch.)

The guy will get your order bang on while cackling at your belief that Gonzaga is either the name of a big lizard or a fourteenth century Spanish Infanta.

In fact they are an NCAA team which keeps winning against the odds. My bracket (a chart on which you write in the winner of every game from round of 64, through 32,16, 8, semis and final) is a shambles, but so's everybody else's. That's the fun.

It's pure knockout, the games are frantic and have a refreshing savour of amateurism. It's vastly entertaining watching Yanks pretending to know who Reuben Boumtje-Boumtje is, or whether Carlos Boozer is out with a foot injury or cirrhosis of the liver.

(Incidentally, something else I've learned about America: most people here sound as if they got their names either by dipping in a Scrabble bag or by opening a dictionary and choosing the first word they saw. I myself tried both techniques. I am known to some here as Heliport Djyxnik.)

College basketball also presents the rare opportunity to watch a basketball game, in which there are several white guys playing. They mostly have 'I've reached my level' written all over them. Sometimes they're tall, but have the turning circle of a giraffe and are rarely able to vertical jump more than ankle sock height off the ground.

The small white guys are fantastic athletes destined for careers as actuaries or regional sales managers. They will develop a tendency later in life to bore their colleagues with how they once scored eight off the bench in the first round of the Tourney in a blow out loss against Duke.

But for the moment it's a joy. I am in an office pool, and, even though I still find it difficult to differentiate a lay up from a point guard, I'm totally into it, baby. I'm experiencing what a Brit might call 'the magic of the Cup.'

The Big Dance has a vocabulary all of its own: the third round is called (by everyone) the Sweet Sixteen. The semi final stage is called (by everyone) the Final Four. The 'Cinderella' analogy pervades: announcers drop references to glass slippers with gay abandon.

Senators in Gormless George's new cabinet make liberal reference to the event during discussions on campaign finance reform. It is all totally American, totally overhyped, draped in history, mythology and statistics, tremendous fun and faintly crap.

A little clarification on this last point. The fact that all American sports are faintly crap does not in any way impair one's enjoyment of them, nor diminish the performances of the people who play them.

In fact, all sports are faintly crap. This is something that many women have worked out and their perception is normally expressed in this manner, whilst not lifting their heads from the magazine they are reading: 'How can you spend so much time watching men in nylon chasing a pig's bladder round a field?'

Moving to a new country gives you a brief ability to see things as if for the first time i.e. that sports look faintly crap.

To an American, baseball uniforms look natural and unremarkable. To someone not brought up on the sport they look like nineteenth century underwear or spacemen's pyjamas.

Basketball to a Yank looks like the height of athleticism and competitiveness. To the uninitiated it looks like netball for tattooed pituitary cases.

Then there's the media bilge. All that sententious garbage sportsmen spout: when they win, 'I thank the Lord, my momma, and my agent' or more rarely, when they lose, 'I blame the Lord, my momma and my agent'.

The fundamental meaninglessness: try watching a Boston Bruins v Toronto Maple Leafs mid-season game from start to finish if you really want to get an insight into cosmic futility. In all sports, all that language that seems as if it's originated in a playground: blitz, power play, bomb, slamdunk.

	Shane Warne is about to flip. Note the crisp white shirt (HamishBlair/Allsport)

Then it strikes you: what does an American think the first time he sees a cricket match? Or hears the commentator say 'it looks as if Warne tried the flipper but overpitched and Dravid clipped it to deep backward square for a couple'? Long white trousers in Lahore in the middle of summer? Five day matches between Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka that end in draws? I'll bet ESPN can't wait to get their mitts on Test Cricket.

And now of course I am adjusted for the relentless rhythm of the American sporting year. In fact it's fair to say that I am gradually overcoming all the faint crapness. I follow the reports from Spring Training with eagerness. I already intend to root for the Sacramento Kings once the Knicks are out of the playoffs. My god, I'm even slightly pissed off that the NY Rangers look dodgy for the post season.

Which brings us back to soccer and the impossibility of it ever becoming established as a major sport over here.

After the NCAA tournament ends in a couple of weeks, the baseball season is instantly upon us: that's 162 games of regular season play, over a month of play offs which will take us to November and the middle of the NFL season.

Come June, the NBA playoffs; sometime in the next four months the Stanley Cup (Ice Hockey); not to mention the height of the golf season - The Masters, in April, US Open in June, British Open in July, PGA in August, every tournament that Tiger plays in now a reason not to go lamp shopping with your wife on the weekend.

	Is this XFL fan really ready for The Beautiful Game? (AllsportUSA/Allsport)

The only window for soccer, (itself faintly crap of course, with its addiction to cliche, face-painted dork fans and tendency to cast itself as more important than life and death) is to replace perhaps the only sport on the planet that is without doubt truly crap: the XFL.

This third rate American football league was launched by NBC and the people who brought you WWF wrestling. They took pains to infuse the spectacle with similar qualities of crassness, incompetence, vulgarity, rebarbative boredom and dimwittedness. You get the feeling George W. might like it.

Just desserts are currently being served all over: the XFL on NBC on Saturday night delivers the lowest EVER rating for a sporting event on network television. It was 107th on the week's rating list. This puts it just ahead of the guy on community access who shouts at the camera about how Falun Gong will save us all.

In the light of this debacle, I ask NBC to consider giving the time to soccer next year. There's a recession on, an energy crisis looming, a cold warrior in the White House and a nuclear power station being built in Iran - by Russia.

In times like these we need all the faintly crap stuff we can get.