THERE was a moment last night during the disaster and the debacle that was USA FC’s 2:1 loss at Trinidad & Tobago where I first uttered the phrase “motherfucking shit bitch,” and nearly threw my laptop. It wasn’t, however, after either of the Soca Warriors’ two goals. It took place moments before the second goal when the U.S. had a corner. The pitch was in atrocious shape after many days of rain, and the players all looked like they were tiptoeing through jello. Just trying to complete a pass in that sludge with any sort of usual weight and accuracy was difficult. The U.S. had bigger players in the box, matched up against a team which hadn’t defended set pieces, nor much of anything else, particularly well in CONCACAF qualifying, but America’s chosen set piece guru Michael Bradley instead tried to play a short corner, which rolled about three yards and promptly started to die in the slop. The chance was wasted, T&T cleared their lines and in the ensuing series of movements, Alvin Jones launched a missile from 30+ yards that somehow found the net to give T&T the 2-goal lead – news of which immediately filtered over to San Pedro de Sula and Panama City, of course, since all three CONCACAF games were taking place simultaneously, and after which both Honduras and Panama suddenly started playing better.
The reason this particular short corner rankled me so much is that it’s exactly the sort of low IQ play I’ve come to expect from Bradley, in particular, and USA FC, in general. It was a dumb idea executed in a dumb fashion. What’s driven me crazy, in the past three years, as U.S. soccer has devolved to the point where it can’t even get a draw against a Trinidad & Tobago team with nothing to play for, is just how dumb everyone involved seems to be. We quote Cruijff often here at In Play Lose: “football is played with the head.” During this up-and-down spell, which has gone on seemingly since the moment they lost to Belgium in Brazil in 2014, there always seems to be this lack of any sort of situational awareness – be it from the players, the coaches, or even the game’s administrators. The U.S. has good footballing talent at the moment – good, but not great. But you don’t need to be great to qualify for the World Cup. You do, however, need to be smart.
We’re going to hear a whole lot of, “if they can figure this out in Iceland, we can do it in the U.S.” here in the coming weeks and months, which is actually sort of dumb. (More on that in a bit.) Want to know the difference between the two? Compare and contrast. The U.S. has one truly great player: Christian Pulisic. Iceland has one truly great player: Gylfi Sigurðsson. Iceland also has 22 other guys on their squad who know where they are supposed to be and what they are doing at any given time. They’re incredibly well organized, well prepared, they figure out what their opponents are going to try to do and go about thwarting it, they have a whole bevy of great set pieces off corners and long throws. Quite simply, Iceland have thought their way into being successful at the game, mastering the parts of the game where superior talent can be neutralized. And when they do get the ball, they get it to Gylfi Sigurðsson and let him try to make stuff up, because he is good enough to do just that. Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, we’re two minutes into the second half last night in Couva, and Pulisic slips over to the left, gets the ball, dips around a couple of guys and blasts one into the goal to make it 2-1, and the BeIn Sport commentator noted how the U.S. was going to change it up in the second half, let Pulisic drift and move into spaces to try and get the ball. Hey, good thinking there guys, it only took you until you were two goals down in the most important game of the year to do what you should be doing every single fucking minute of every single fucking game.
U.S. Soccer is not smart. Time and again in the past three years, we’ve gotten mixed signals and, not surprisingly, we’ve also had mixed results. I said the other day in the mail bag that the USA FC had been making some progress under Bruce Arena. Sorry guys, I jinxed it. But I’m as guilty as everyone, in that it seemed absolutely unthinkable to me that the U.S. couldn’t get a result in Trinidad & Tobago. The difference being, of course, that it wasn’t up to me actually get a result. No one involved in U.S. Soccer seemed to treat this game last night in Couva as a game where, if all goes wrong, disaster could occur. Arena left some of his best players at home – their European homes, I should add, but we’ll kill them for that shortly – and the U.S. sleepwalked through the first half, clearly bothered by the awful pitch that they were playing on but not doing anything to adapt to it. Then they’re down two goals and, all of a sudden, everything starts getting weird in San Pedro de Sula and Panama City, and the U.S. found themselves in the weeds.
This is why you don’t leave it late. Weird stuff happens on the final day of qualifying. Weird stuff happened four years ago, if you recall. These games get nuts, and weird stuff starts to happen. Chile basically got eliminated from the World Cup last night because Peru and Colombia forgot the rules – the Peruvians fired an indirect free kick straight at the Colombian keeper, who touched it on its way in the goal, thus making it a direct free kick. That goal pushed Peru past Chile in the standings. But Chile have been garbage in the CONMEBOL qualifying – a result due in part, I suspect, to everyone on that rather short squad having played far too much football, as none of their top players have had any sort of a summer break since about 2012. But if you put yourself in a position where bad stuff can happen, bad stuff often happens, and now the two-time Copa América champs are getting a long summer vacation in 2018.
I was also watching the Dutch yesterday attempting to go about trying to win 7:0 against Sweden, which is what they needed to do in order to qualify. The Swedes seemed remarkably complicit in this, looking at times in the first half like they were, in fact, trying to lose 7:0. Sweden were terrible. Except the Oranje then missed about four gilt-edged chances in the first half where not scoring seemed inexplicable, and while it was 2:0 at the break, it could have been, and probably should have been, 4:0 or even 5:0 at the break – at which point 7:0 becomes doable. The Dutch wound up going out on goal difference, tied with Sweden on points – Sweden having picked up two bonus points in qualifying thanks to French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris losing his mind. But the Dutch played their way into that mess, just as Chile did in CONMEBOL. You don’t deserve any breaks. Chile, in fact, had already got themselves a break, picking up some extra points in the table because the Bolivians had fielded an ineligible player. Even then, they still couldn’t qualify. When you play like garbage, you deserve what you get.
And the U.S. has been garbage for a large part of World Cup qualifying. Hell, they’ve been garbage since 2015, when they lazed their way through the CONCACAF Gold Cup in a confused haze. They pop up with a good result here and there which teases you and makes you think they are on the right track, but then they go and lose to Guatemala or some such nonsense. There has been this perpetual sense of confusion surrounding the entire program, be it Klinsmann deciding to trot out a groovy new formation he read about the other day in a magazine, or him trotting out a lineup full of all the guys we’ve come to know and hate in some dimwitted attempt to hold Argentina scoreless for 120 minutes and win on penalties, or the perpetually strange notion held by Bruce Arena types that guys who play in the Premier League and the Bundesliga somehow aren’t good enough to win games in Honduras and Trinidad & Tobago. Not only is there a cluelessness about this entire operation, but there is also an arrogance, one bred from achieving modest success and thinking that success was stellar.
Having said all of that, it still took stuff like this happening to knock the U.S. out of the 2018 World Cup:
That’s not a goal. It might be a penalty, it certainly is a mess, but it’s not a goal. While that was happening in Panama, Honduras was going up 3:2 on El Tri on a shot which slammed off the crossbar, off the back of the Mexican keeper’s head and in. Of the two goals from the Soca Warriors, one was a once-in-a-lifetime strike from Alvin Jones, the other a harmless cross which deflected off Omar Gonzalez for a dreaded own goal. Both of those are pretty fluky, in the grand scheme of things. All of that weird stuff had to happen in order for the U.S. to wind up being eliminated.
Well, another thing had to happen as well, which was that the U.S. had to play like crap.
It never should have gotten to this point. This campaign should have been over weeks ago, but the U.S. kept dropping points it shouldn’t have been dropping. The U.S. response to the obvious ploy from Costa Rica and Honduras – surround Pulisic with five guys and kick him repeatedly – was basically to say, “hey guys, stop doing that.” Even what seemed like a good performance – 1:1 at Azteca against El Tri, a game in which Arena got it tactically right – looks, in hindsight, like a missed opportunity: Gee whiz, the U.S. might have some trouble down their left flank, with Carlos Vela running at 67-year-old DeMarcus Beasley and look, there goes Vela running at Beasley and cutting in on his left foot like everyone on the planet who watches this game knows he wants to do and he scores to the surprise of no one. It ends up 1:1 and it’s two points lost. That happened again and again and again. Drop two points here, two points there, and you’re in trouble.
This team should never be in trouble in this region. Yes, the away games are all trap games, played on bad pitches in terrible weather conditions. Yes, CONCACAF isn’t nearly as weak a region as soccer snobs like to think it is. (It’s actually the third-most successful confederation overall.) But don’t make any lame excuses here. Want difficult conditions? Go to South America and play in Ecuador at 9,500 feet or Bolivia at 12,000 feet of elevation, go play in a tropical downpour in Colombia, or on a frozen pitch with snow on the ground in Argentina. World Cup Qualifying can be hard, and honestly, it should be hard, but the U.S. has the run of this region, for godsakes. They play the only tournament that matters in this part of the world in this country every single time. There aren’t any excuses. The U.S. should do better than this. We have better players than Panama and Costa Rica and Honduras. We have the best goddamn player in the whole region, for christsakes. Just having him and 10 guys who know where they are supposed to be at all given times should be enough.
U.S. soccer has been caught daydreaming, conflating the really positive results in the World Cups of 2010 and 2014 with the notion that we, as a footballing nation, have been verging on an becoming part of the footballing élite when, in truth, we have stopped improving. The improvements basically stopped after Brazil, and ever since, we’ve been regressing while the others in the region have gotten better, and done so with a shallower talent pool. I want to throw my laptop when I see the sort of dimwitted short corner that Bradley played for no purpose because I’m sick of seing Bradley do that sort of thing – but he’s not alone in doing that sort of thing, he just gets more flak because he’s so important to this team and is the captain. But Bradley also embodies, in a lot of ways, the exact sort of player that USA FC is chock full of, a guy who went to Europe and cut his chops and earned respect playing in Serie A who then jumped to MLS and has pretty much stopped improving from the moment he returned to this continent. The core of this team is guys like that, or guys who never ventured abroad and raised their level of their games. It may seem, for a young American player, like a bit of a come down to do something like go and play in the Eredivisie or play in the English Championship or go and play in Belgium. Belgium? Really? Hey, guess what, there’s a whole team of guys out there who started out playing in Belgium: the Belgians, who scored 43 goals in qualifying and just might win a damn World Cup next summer, all of whom learned to play in Belgium and grew into the types of players big European clubs want to buy. For CONCACAF, MLS is a godsend – a chance for players in the region to play regular first-team minutes and know they’re actually going to get paid on time. For the U.S., it isn’t. It is an easy way out, an excuse not to strive to excel. You want to get good at this game? Get your ass to Europe or to Mexico. Don’t play it safe. Don’t be lazy.
But we’ve encouraged laziness. We have a talent development system in this country that doesn’t work. We’ve missed qualifying two Olympics in a row, which is valuable experience. (Jeez, all of those young Honduran kids who played in the Olympics instead of the U.S. kids seem to be developing in a hurry.) We’ve been shorting our talent pool in this country for years now. We’re still enamored with pay-to-play at the youth level, where suburban soccer moms plunk down $2500 a year so their kids can travel and play. That’s not how this should work. This is a game of the common people everywhere else in the world for a reason. We have this terrible collegiate structure, where they play too many games in too short a time frame and grind up too many players. That’s a waste. All of that is a waste and all of that needs to be addressed.
This is where the dual appointment of Jürgen Klinsmann as coach and also technical director was a big, big mistake. Technical director is all about developing talent, and about all Klinsmann accomplished, in terms of talent development, was finding a bunch of European kids eligible for American passports. Which was a good thing of him to be doing, mind you, and I’ve always found the contempt and disdain some American soccer snobs – including soon-to-be former head coach Bruce Arena – have for a bunch of German guys to be insulting and completely short-sighted. But it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the best player who has ever been produced by this country, Pulisic, felt like he needed to move to Germany as a high school kid in order to get good at this game. Our national team has been stuck in the mud, and the talent pool needed to feed this team has been neglected and is rotting to the core.
Big changes need to happen and big issues need to be addressed, and this is where we go back to the, “well, if Iceland can do it, than why can’t we?” line of thinking. It’s actually easier to make the sorts of changes that, I believe, are required in a small country than it is in a big one. You can institute a sweeping change of philosophy in a place like Iceland, or in a place like Belgium – which is what happened when they bombed out of World Cup Qualifying a few years ago – a whole lot easier than you can in a place which is a huge, fractionalized, splintered nation like the U.S. Having said that, the Germans did it after they stunk up the Euros in 2000, and look at where they are now. The French did it after imploding and missing qualifying in 1990 and 1994, and look at where they are now.
And, as you can see, U.S.S.F. President Sunil Gulati is getting right on that:
“So wholesale changes aren’t needed if the ball that hits off the post [from Clint Dempsey] goes in? You don’t make wholesale changes based on the ball being two inches wide or two inches in. We’ll look at everything, obviously, and all our programs, both the national team and all the development stuff. But we’ve got a lot of pieces in place that we think are very good and have been coming along. Tonight obviously wasn’t what we hoped for.”
Care to add to that, Bruce Arena?
“There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing. Certainly, I think if our league continues to grow it benefits the national team program. We have some good players coming up. Nothing has to change. To make any kind of crazy changes I think would be foolish.”
Oh, come on. The table doesn’t lie. The table says you finished 5th. The table says you won 3 games out of 10 in the Hex, and further says that you won one frickin’ away game, against St. Vincent & the Grenadines, in the entirety of the qualifying cycle. For years, we’ve trotted out the same group of players stuck in neutral, with no clear plan of how to play, and they promptly produce like a team stuck in neutral with no idea what they’re doing.
Arena then offered up this gem in the post-match presser:
“If we had qualified for the World Cup, there needed to be a number of changes for the World Cup roster.”
Aah, okay, so it wasn’t important enough to make those changes ahead to time and actually give yourself the best chance to win the game you needed to win. Yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense.
Fire these people. Seriously, fire them all. Arena will certainly be out. Gulati should be out. I’m leary of thinking any American presently involved with MLS is the answer, since I think the way MLS is constructed and plays out is part of the problem, and you can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them. I have no idea who you get to coach this team, but if we’re going outside the U.S., I’d prefer it be someone from the southern part of this continent, if not the southern part of this hemisphere. They play pretty good football in Mexico, in Argentina and Brazil. Maybe we should start learning from those people.
I don’t care how much money the federation has made and that it was broke when you took over. I don’t care. I want some goddamn results. But my expectations are still reasonable. See, here is the thing: we Americans, when it comes to soccer, have modest expectations. We would love to win a World Cup some day (who wouldn’t?), but more than anything, we want to see some progress. We want to get better. We actually enjoy, and revel, in the fact that we have to up our games and strive to be great, be creative and resourceful and tenacious, whereas we can just show up in some other sports and clobber everyone. That drive to improve, and that emphasis and pursuit of improvement, has been the basis of the support behind American soccer for years. Improving at the global game, over the past 30 years, has brought out the best in us as a sporting nation, at times. It’s what has always excited us as fans. It’s a challenge, and we enjoy the challenge. But now we’re not going to get that chance in 2018, and that’s a huge, huge loss. Through being arrogant, lazy, and soft, this team threw everything we have liked about it out the window. The momentum built over three decades has ground to a halt. It’s almost like we’re starting all over again.
The next tournament of note that the U.S. has to look forward to is the Copa América in Brazil in 2019, and I want to see the young players out there, I want to see the good players out there, the ones that actually play on a high level and learn how to compete. I’m tired of this lot. I’m tired of the Bradleys and the Altidores and the revolving door at center back and the toxic waste dump that has been the left back position for the past decade. U.S. Soccer needs to stop patting itself on the back and maybe start watching its back. Have some pride, have some humility, and for godsakes, use your heads! Some good could come out of this, in the end, but in the meantime, about all that USA FC has managed to accomplish is to further my blossoming drinking problem. And for that alone, I hold them all in contempt.
