The U.S. national soccer team has played in the past seven World Cups and qualified for six of them. The Yanks hosted the 1994 World Cup and did not have to qualify.

From the outside, it looks like light work. A massive country of 300 million people needs only to finish in the top three from a six-nation final round sure to include three dinky Central American countries to secure one of the three berths granted to Concacaf — the acronym usually connected to the Confederation of North, Central and Caribbean Football.

And, despite hiccups here or there, the Yanks usually have had qualification wrapped up before the final match day. In 2010, they had it wrapped up before the final two match days.

But Russia 2018 is different. The Yanks have not clinched, and as the second-to-last round is played tomorrow, they cannot clinch a berth.

The qualifying process will go down to the final day, which is a pressure situation the U.S. has not encountered since 1989, when the U.S. traveled to Trinidad & Tobago knowing it had to win to win to reach the World Cup for the first time in 40 years.

So, we shall soon find out what sort of character this current team has.

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By happenstance, we are in Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, a day or two ahead of what could be a momentous local decision — declaring independence from Spain.

We had planned months ago to meet up with a friend here, a leading tourist destination a few hours south of the Spain-France border.

We had no idea that the independence movement would choose the previous Sunday, October 1, to conduct a referendum. Nor that it would produce scenes of federal police roughing up Catalans attempting to vote.

The referendum violated Spanish law, the government said, and most outsiders seemed to agree on that point.

Yet, it went on, nonetheless, and 90-plus percent of those who voted endorsed a break from Spain — and an independent Catalonia.

It is easy to side with the considered constitutional opinions of Spanish jurists, as well as that of most European nations, which do not support Catalonia breaking away from Spain.

But at some point, those of us who come from a country that began with just such a declaration of independence … cannot help but see parallels to what is happening here.

And to sympathize with it as reflecting the will of a people to govern themselves.

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I already feel sorry for Lonzo Ball.

What we can reasonably expect from the Los Angeles Lakers’ 19-year-old NBA rookie bears no resemblance to what most fans and even many “experts” seem to expect from him.

One of those self-professed experts is his father, LaVar, who does Lonzo no favors when he suggests — well, actually, states as inevitable fact — that his son will be the league’s rookie of the year and already is a better basketball player than one Stephen Curry, of whom you may have heard.

Let’s look at three highly regarded players of the past generation and see what they did as rookies.

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You bet. Start worrying now, if you are not already doing so.

Only four days till the U.S. national team plays host to Panama, only eight days until an away game with Trinidad & Tobago, as Concacaf hexagonal qualifying for the 2018 World Cup concludes.

At stake, the U.S. streak of seven consecutive World Cup appearances that goes back to 1990.

At risk, vengeance aimed at the Yanks for crucial road victories that kept Panama (in 2014) and T&T (1990) from qualifying for the World Cup — which would have been a first for either country.

The pressure is on, and this group of U.S. players has not seemed adept at coping with it.

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Catalonia took another step on the road to sovereign status in a referendum today. And, as we typically do in reflecting the world of sports, we make it about us.

To wit:

“If  Catalonia leaves Spain … what does this mean for FC Barcelona and the Spanish league and the Spanish national team?”

The short answer?

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Raves. All-night dance parties that often just appear at some lonely place where young folks show up, thanks to a furtive, word-of-mouth campaign.

We didn’t know raves were still a “thing”. Maybe it’s just France.

It started Friday night. A rumbling thump-thump-thump coming from over one of the hills that surround the village, going on late into the night.

What really got our attention was the thump-thump-thump that greeted the dawn, and then carried right on into the afternoon. That wasn’t a party down around the corner.

Something bigger was going on, and by the afternoon we found an online site for a French-language newspaper … that let us know that a three-day rave, expected to attract 1,000 fans, was going on at the old “aerodrome” barely a mile away from our town.

A rave! Something I thought disappeared 20 or more years ago.

We couldn’t help ourselves. We walked over to investigate.

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Elite college football programs are allowed one pratfall in the national-championship chase.

USC’s Trojans just took theirs.

Heisman Trophy candidates can maybe — maybe –  get away with one stinker and still aspire to pick up that famous trophy in New York.

USC quarterback Sam Darnold just had his forgettable game.

It was already Saturday on this side of the Atlantic (5 a.m., actually) when I caught up to USC at Washington State, and after a few minutes of watching closely it wasn’t just the score (WSU 20-17) that looked dire for the Trojans … it was how unsteady Darnold looked at quarterback.

Darnold reminded me of Jim Everett, circa 1989, the nervous and fearful Rams quarterback who had the infamous phantom sack in the NFC title game. And that is never good.

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For all I know, journalists covering major sports events these days have an ID chip in their arms. Nobody gets into the media areas unless the sensor picks up your biometric data.

At minimum, credentials for an Olympics or World Cup  or French Open, over the past decade or two, have featured increasingly sophisticated and hard-to-alter media credentials, with photos and watermarks and holograms and bar codes. Security issues, of course.

It wasn’t that long ago that media credentials, even for big events, were fairly primitive. Or really primitive.

The other day, I came across a few of the oldies from back in the day, and they are pictured, above.

Really, that was all you needed to get the run of the place.

Let’s ID the four credentials pictured.

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About now, we can depend on baseball pundits to pose the Big Question pertaining to another disappointing season by the Los Angeles Angels:

Is Mike Trout wasting his career playing for this club?

It was a fair question, in recent years, as the Angels found themselves stuck on one playoffs appearance since Trout’s breakout 2012 season, The one postseason appearance, was in 2014, when they were swept out of the division round.

This year, a clearly underwhelming Angels team somehow managed to remain relevant in the wild-card chase until tonight, when their 4-2 loss in 10 innings in Chicago gave the second AL wild card to the Minnesota Twins.

The difference this season, in the Trout-and-Angels relationship, is that Trout has had a less-than-sterling season, by his twice-MVP standards, and it is fair to wonder if the Angels might have won a few more games — and still be battling for a wild card — had they gotten the Trout of the previous five seasons.

Consider:

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We cannot know what it is like, at the remove that is the TV in your living room.

Radio can convey some of the noise but little of the energy. Even inside the stadium, the nervous tension does not always register up into the seats.

To gauge the real impact of a big and painfully noisy crowd, a person needs to be on the field, at ground level.

Like, say, Timo Werner was tonight — when the 21-year-old RB Leipzig forward had a bit of a meltdown and asked to be taken out of a Champions League match, in the 30th minute, at the Turkish club Besiktas.

The symptoms he was said to have described — breathing and circulatory problems — sound a bit like a panic attack, which can be terrifying to someone who has never had one.

But it may be something as simple as mental overload from a lack of preparation for what the overwhelming noise and tension and pressure to perform, in an alien environment.

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