by Daniel Dullum for Amaury Pi Gonzalez

PHOENIX–The U.S. Men’s team is still alive in this set of matches in Brazil. Who saw this coming with a 2-2 loss and a draw on Sunday night against Portugal. The U.S. is playing remarkably well and generally the U.S. doesn’t qualify for the World Cup to begin with and to see them enjoy this kind of success it’s a shame they lost.

Its a shame they lost the game in extra minutes but their not a favorite to begin with and to make it to that round 16 would be awesome. It’s very exciting especially for generations who have grown up playing soccer in the U.S. even causal fans are paying attention now and a lot more people are familiar with the game and as a result fans are pretty jazzed about what is going on.

Giants are back on track: After losing last Friday night for their sixth consecutive loss San Francisco Giants manager Bruce Bochy remarked saying “that’s baseball that happens all the time. It happens to every team good and bad, your going to go through a stretch where you lose five or six. Just like you can win five or six.”

For Bochy and the Giants clubhouse there was no sense of panic at at all and sure enough Saturday and Sunday the Giants were back on track. They got good starting pitching and it starts there. The key hitting fell into place accordingly.

The one Panic that the Giants don’t seem to mind on their team is rookie Joe Panik who made his big league debut on Sunday with some great defense and his first two hits in the show to take two souvenirs home. Panik has some flashy plays over at second base and if he was a nervous rookie he certainly didn’t act like one. Panik seemed very poised and it energizes a team a little bit when you call somebody up and they come up and get you going and it’s all positive.

Finally as far as pitcher Matt Cain in concerned he will get back on track eventually he had these stretches too where for some reason he can’t seem to get his pitches over the plate and that gets him in trouble and you’ll see him in the second half for the All-Star break straighten out.

NFL Cheerleaders starting to make some noise about getting paid: Cheerleaders in the NFL goes back to the 1970s when the Dallas Cowboys got it started off and for the most part over the years these ladies have taken these jobs knowing that they weren’t going to get paid very much.

These jobs were more for the status, more for getting their modeling or show business career going. Whatever that motivation is, should they be making a little more? Probably, the NFL is like a money printing machine and there is no reason why the cheerleaders can’t be compensated properly.

They make a lot of public appearances aside from games that people don’t know about. They definitely shoud be paid and there is no reason not to.

Daniel Dullum is filling in for Amaury Pi Gonzalez who is taking the day off, Daniel files A’s game reports for http://www.sportsradioservice.com every Thursday