When the Star-Spangled Banner rings out at Wembley this week, we should all feel proud. After years of hard work, the motherland of soccer has finally eaten humble (apple) pie and treats the US as serious opposition.

It was not always the case. The Americans visited Wembley 14 years ago, following the hiatus of World Cup '94, but a comfortable 2-0 home win saw the London press have a field day dismissing the Yanks as minor-league opposition for the mighty England, despite the fact the Three Lions had not qualified for the Finals that summer and had lost to Bora Milutinovic's men by the same score in Boston a year earlier.

Yet with a dozen Americans on show in the Premier League this season, the US National Team in action at the past five World Cups (unlike England) and the nation's icon (David Beckham) opting to play in MLS, respect has been fairly, if not ubiquitously, accorded at last.

Until the 1990 World Cup, we in England did not really know soccer existed across the pond, and the subsequent years have been a learning process for us Brits, via John Harkes' days at Sheffield Wednesday, the 'Yanks 2, Planks 0' defeat in 1993, Premier League stalwarts like Brad Friedel and Brian McBride, the US wowing the soccer world in Korea in 2002 and the American legion now ensconced at Fulham.

Over the last decade-and-a-half, our soccer histories have intertwined like never before. The US and England have been like chalk and cheese as we say, poles apart, for almost 400 years.

The English brought soccer to Jamestown in 1607, Boston's Oneida club of 1861 was the first organized outside of England, and the first US college football game, the Princeton-Rutgers clash of 1869, was played with largely soccer rules and a spherical ball.

But up the road from Boston Common in Cambridge, Harvard had already been experimenting with the rules, and when they played the Canadians of McGill in a series of games in 1874, they fell in love with the Canucks' rugby code and oval balls - or maybe it was their ladies' dress code and formal balls.

Harvard's influence as the alma mater of US universities slowly persuaded the other Ivy League institutions to carry the ball instead of kick it, and the rest is history.

How ironic it was a British country (Canada) which turned America away from soccer, but the people's game was disdained by the UK's ruling classes, who taught their colonies to play cricket, rugby, polo and field hockey instead.

Throughout the barren years of Anglo-American soccer relations, one game of course stands out.

Geoffrey Douglas immortalized the US' shock 1-0 win over England in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in his moving book 'The Game of Their Lives', filmed in 2005 by that title, then reissued as 'The Miracle Match'.

I can recall my bemusement as a young kid when I first read the score of England's first game in a World Cup Finals. The Three Lions were packed with legends I had heard so much about - Tom Finney, Stan Mortensen, Wilf Mannion, etc, while I didn't even know the US played football.

When I was lucky enough to interview two of the game's survivors, Sir Tom Finney and Harry Keough, what struck me was how small fry the World Cup was in those days. 

Only one American journalist bothered to cover the game, and only through personal interest having paid his own passage there, while England's best player, 'the Wizard of Dribble' Stanley Matthews was resting because he had just taken part in an FA tour of Canada!

There was no TV transmissions of the game in either nation back then, and even scant press coverage in England, but the game's legend has grown since, and rightly so, as it was a bona fide David v Goliath slaying.

Alas it was no herald of a golden age for American soccer, more the beginning of a long and sad decline, while England, once Hungary had punctured their myth of invincibility three years later with a storming 6-3 thrashing in London, embarked on a period of introspection and rebuilding that would lead at last to a World Cup win in 1966.

In 1953, the year the Mighty Magyars wooed Wembley, England crossed swords with the Americans for the first time since Belo Horizonte, at Yankee Stadium.

"We had lived with the stigma of the 1950 World Cup for three years and there was a genuine feeling of revenge in the air," Finney recalled. After an edgy 90 minutes, England emerged 6-3 winners and could forget about those damn Yankees.

Six years later, the US National Team, two years since their previous outing, took the lead against England in Los Angeles and went in to the dressing rooms at 1-1, but collapsed in the second half and finished 8-1 losers to the fitter, full-time professionals.

England were two years away from hosting and winning the World Cup when in 1964 they returned to America to face a soccer nation in the doldrums, without a pro league and a National Team playing about once a year.

The Three Lions hit double figures at Randall's Island, New York, their 10-0 victory painfully emphasizing the gap in quality between the English-speaking nations on either side of the Atlantic.

England again blanked the States in 1989 in California, their 5-0 win perhaps being notable for the presence in the US lineup of Paul Caligiuri and a young John Kerr, who would go on join Millwall as the first American pro player in the home of football.

John Harkes arrived at Sheffield Wednesday soon after Italia '90 and did more than anyone to improve the image of American soccer in England, particularly after playing in a League Cup Final and FA Cup Final, and bagging the nation's Goal of the Season award with a 35-yard missile past legendary goalkeeper Peter Shilton.

Harkes dispelled many long-held doubts about Americans and soccer in England, although it would be another decade or so until English clubs started seriously to scout MLS and US National Team Players. 

In the meantime, US goalkeepers like Friedel and Kasey Keller and were establishing themselves in England, although to some extent they started a myth that the best Americans on a soccer field are always found between the sticks.

'Captain for Life' was Captain America when a beleaguered England, facing World Cup elimination, surrendered 2-0 at Foxboro in 1993, to goals from Tom Dooley and Alexi Lalas, who became a bit of celebrity in England and almost joined Cobi Jones at Coventry City a year later.

The 1994 game at Wembley had one US player then on the books of an English club (Jones), plus three others who would later sign for one - Friedel, Joe-Max Moore and Claudio Reyna.

Bob Bradley's 2008 roster is one-third English-based, while I never thought I would live to see the day when an England international (Beckham) plies his trade in Major League Soccer.

Over the past decade, the proliferation of American players in England and the concomitant growth in MLS has led English clubs to tour America in their offseasons, scout for players and establish academies and coaching links across the Atlantic.

England's players, fans and journalists will make their way to the great arch of Wembley this Wednesday expecting a tough contest, not a turkey shoot.

Even though a weakened England eleven won 2-1 in Chicago three years ago through two first half strikes by Kieron Richardson, they did not forget the way the US fought back in the second half and pulled a goal back via Clint Dempsey.

While the soccer history between our two nations has largely been a threadbare one, punctuated by the miracle on grass in Belo Horizonte, the future looks very bright now that the US is catching up on the field.

Off the pitch too, things are on the up: 7,271 paid to watch the US play England in New York in 1953, but 45,000 were there in Chicago 52 years later.

Soccer has grown in England as well. 38,629 were at the old Wembley to see the States in 1994, while Wednesday's crowd in London is expected to be at least twice as large.

Times have indeed changed, and in the case of the England v USA rivalry, decidedly for the better. More than anything else, US soccer now earns a level of respect in England, which it never had before.