It's June now, which means the World Cup is only ten days away! While some of you may have already flipped to espn.com to avoid reading the rest of this soccer article, hopefully the rest of you will read a few of my thoughts leading up to the World Cup.

I'm not psyched about this US team

Landon Donovan said this is the best US team he's been a part of. Guess what, Landon. You're a filthy liar.

This isn't the best team Landon's been a part of. This isn't the second best either. If this isn't the worst team, it's certainly the one with the most inexperience and injuries he's ever been on. Aside from Donovan himself, Tim Howard and maybe Clint Dempsey (and that's a big maybe), nobody on this team has either the experience or the tools to keep up with the world's elite.

Soccer 101: The most important parts of the game are scoring and preventing goals. The man expected to head the US scoring, Jozy Altidore, is 20 years old and coming off of a highly disappointing season at Hull City in the English Premier League. At age 20, he also has more than double the amount of US caps than any other forward on the roster. For goals, the US is banking on players with lots of youth and no experience- and aside from Altidore, the three other forwards (Buddle, Gomez and Findley) all play in the lower-level MLS or Mexican leagues and have no experience playing at soccer's highest levels.

As for preventing goals, the defense is old and banged up. The likely center-halves are riddled with injuries, and Oguchi Onyewu (knee) and Jay DeMerit (abdominal strain/bad vision) looked pretty crappy in friendlies against the Czech Republic and Turkey. And they're the strength of the defense. Your likely wing defenders are the injured and even older Carlos Bocanegra (hernia) and the younger but defensively poor Jonathan Spector.

Even the eternal optimist would concede the US has major question marks at basically every position, save for goalie and attacking midfield. The biggest positive is that the US got a pretty nice draw, since they'll playing against a team that has a history of choking (England, though usually after the group stage), Slovakia (a solid team but also an older side with several key injuries) and Algeria (who are simply happy to be at the World Cup).

But let's also just say for the record, don't hold your breath with this US team.

As for the rest of the field...

When I first saw the draw and quickly determined my winner, I picked England. I'm sticking with them.

I love this England team. With a great mix of younger players in prime form (Rooney, Lennon, Milner) and older players with several World Cups under their belts (Terry, Ferdinand, Gerrard, Lampard) and far less pressure than '06 with who appears to be a better coach, I think England has what it takes to win it all. Italy, Brazil and France, your last three World Cups winners, all had sizeable backbones of veteran players, and England has that.

I'll admit picking England has a big hunch element to it, but there's also nobody else that's really doing much to make a case that they're any better than England. The other favorites, Brazil (I'll talk about that in more detail below), Argentina (disastrous squad selection with a coach who may be legally retarded), Spain (a slew of key injuries), France and Italy (both teams are still dependent on old players) and Germany (key injuries/not that good anyways) simply don't wow me. So why can't England win their first World Cup since 1966?

One quick note: My team is Chile thanks to my family background, and I'm excited to see them. They're the most entertaining, attack-minded team in this tournament, and their final group game against Spain should be a real classic. They are the youngest yet one of the most talented teams in the tournament, so be sure to give them a look if you're one of those "I don't like soccer because there's not enough scoring" people.

Finally, Brazil

I'm not sold on Brazil. Of course Brazil is always a contender, but I haven't seen that superstar up-and-coming player that the Brazilians usually throw at opponents like they've had in the past few World Cups (Kaka '06, Ronaldinho '02, Ronaldo '98). I don't understand the exclusion of young AC Milan forward Alexandre Pato or Ronaldinho. Brazil had a comfortable qualifying campaign and came in first in South America, but I just don't see this Brazil team winning.