Giants Stadium, like Foxboro Stadium in Massachusetts, the home of New England Revolution, is an out-of-town venue, surrounded by motorway intersections and by huge car parks. Soccer, cheap and simple to play, is hugely popular in US schools, and now, at last, the kids have some local idols they can watch in their home towns.Quite what US soccer crowds would make of inner-city stadia like Anfield and Highbury is hard to imagine. Only the Pope, who pulled in 82,498 last year, has drawn a bigger crowd there.Even more encouraging for the long-term health of the game is the popularity of regular league games. Although the figure has dropped since the start of the Olympics, at the time of the all-star games in mid-July the average MLS crowd was 20,420 - with the biggest crowd an astonishing 92,216 for Los Angeles Galaxy's home game against Tampa Bay Mutiny last month.The average age of a US soccer crowd appears to be much younger than in the UK, with family groups turning up in force. The all-star games were no exception: 78,416 packed New Jersey's Giants Stadium, a record crowd for a sporting event at a venue that has hosted countless big American football games. A two-week trip this month took in four matches: a double-header featuring the league's first all-star game plus a warm-up for Brazil's Olympic XI against a Fifa all-star team, and two MLS fixtures: New York/New Jersey MetroStars against Dallas Burn and New England Revolution against Washington DC United. The crowds that flocked to watch the last World Cup and Olympic soccer, both in California in 1984 and at the present Games, prove that the US sporting public loves the big occasion. It is football, but not as we know it.

"Soccer", as they call the sport in the United States, is proving surprisingly popular with the spectating public across the Atlantic. What follows is an attempt to describe life as a soccer fan in the last great nation on earth to embrace the global game. Major League Soccer, which started in April, is the latest attempt to establish a national professional league in the States. "I think they thought they were going to be staying at the Ritz," he said.Besse agreed that the first few days had been chaotic, but "cops are used to going to a situation that's in chaos and controlling it".. And I'm a vegetarian," she said.The man with the problem of arresting the walk-outs is A D Frazier, the chief operating officer of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, who has lost 306 of the 2,248 security volunteers he started with."As in any undertaking, expectations in some cases are met - in some cases met handsomely - and some others were not met," Frazier said.Donald Besse, a deputy sheriff from Larkspur, California, had little time for the moaners in blue. "It took four days to get a housekeeping crew here to clean the toilets," Shirley Resnick, a Miami policewoman staying in one Atlanta dormitory, said. If Resnick had her way the people who prepare the food for the lawmen taking a busman's holiday would be locked up "Over here it's garbage - turnip greens, collard greens. As Lenzi could tell him, the challenge for him could lie in the future..

Cockroaches in the rooms, poor food and chaos at the Games venues have led to more than 300 police officers packing their batons and quitting their posts as volunteer Olympic security guards. Whereas others were lapping into the 7.0s with their marks, he left a permanent water mark in the 8.0s and Lenzi, nor anyone else, could not catch him. I'm retired for good now."Xiong, meanwhile, was crying, cradling his gold. With barely a splash he hit the water and left it to a flash of 8.5s and nines on the scoreboard The bronze was his."I'm happy with a medal," he said "It doesn't matter what colour it is With everything I've been through this is special. Instead the American was in fourth place going into the same, final dive that had earned him a place at the Olympics.A deep breath, a deceptively confident stride to the end of the board and Lenzi contorted his frame through its most difficult manoeuvre, a reverse three and a half somersault.