FRESNO, Calif. (FOX26) \u2014 Fresno native Max Arfsten may not have played in the United States’ 4-1 World Cup victory over Paraguay on Friday night.<\/p>\n
But you couldn’t tell in his hometown, where his jersey was worn at watch parties and chants of “Let’s Go Max!” erupted.<\/p>\n
The World Cup opener for the Americans was a chance for Max’s close circle of friends – Milton Blanco, Mason Gonzalez and Jonny Navarro – to celebrate one of their own.<\/p>\n
“If you are from Fresno, you’re not supposed to make it out of here. You’re not expected to,” said Navarro.<\/p>\n
“But he leans on his people, his faith, and he just puts the work in. I’m literally not surprised. It’s crazy to see it happen, but I’m not surprised.”<\/p>\n
They’ll watch the next U.S. match to see if Arfsten makes his World Cup debut then. The Americans face the Australians next Friday, June 19th, in Seattle at noon Pacific time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FRESNO, Calif. (FOX26) \u2014 Fresno native Max Arfsten may not have played in the United States’ 4-1 World…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":["post-359022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fresno","tag-fresno","tag-fresno-headlines","tag-fresno-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}