Welcome to the Gold Cup quarter final between the USA and Cuba — brought to you in association with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Politics.  And the sport/politics crossover starts straight away as we spend the minutes counting down towards kickoff calculating the over under on how many Cubans make it to the field and bench, after yet another defection on Friday night brought the running total of defections so far in this competition to four.  Cuba themselves may be slightly surprised to be in Baltimore facing the US, after a combination of other teams’ results and their own surprise victory over Guatemala in their final group game saw them overcome a less than encouraging start to the competition (Mexico and Trinidad put a combined eight goals past them, before combining for eight more goals when they played each other).  But Cuba are here, and joining the ranks of Caribbean success stories in this competition. It’s been a competition where central American sides have underperformed and the likes of Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and yes Cuba have made unlikely progressions, while World Cup participants such as Honduras have crashed out and Costa Rica and Mexico have had to settle for second place in their groups and an elimination clash with each other as a result.  Cuba’s tournament should end here though. As unconvincing as the USA have looked at times so far in this Gold Cup, they should have more than enough for Cuba, who will try to emulate the bunkering tactics used by Haiti, Honduras and Panama in the group stages, but will struggle to keep the USA off the score sheet.  It won’t be pretty, necessarily, so we may have to make our own entertainment while Clint Dempsey and Michael Bradley pick up Alan Gordon and charge at the Cubans battering ram style. On that note, send in your tweets or emails to @KidWeil or graham.parker@theguardian.com with the subject line “On Jozy Altidore and neoliberalism” and I’ll try to use the ones that best address the shifting global paradigms and whatnot. And I’ll be back in a bit with more build up and team news.
Jürgen Klinsmann’s team take on Cuba at the MT Bank Stadium in Baltimore. Can they secure their place in the semi-final? Find out live with Graham Parker