Disjointed and disappointing; my view of the US’s performance in a nutshell.
At the most basic level, the result of this game didn’t really matter because the US had already qualified for the next round of qualifying. Despite this fact, you always hope to play your best, get a good result, and you want to come away encouraged by the performance no matter the final score. Unfortunately, I’m not all that encouraged by the display last night, though I’m not as discouraged as one might think.
The greatest impression I take from this game is that we fielded a team full of players that rarely play with each other, and have no history of playing with each other. Typically, the team we put together has a couple of days at a time with each other, but the big difference is that most of them have been playing with each other for at least a couple of years which has given them a fair level of familiarity. The team we put out there yesterday was very green individually in addition to not having hardly any time together as a squad.
Essentially what the coaches did last night was to throw a whole bunch of guys that probably aren’t completely comfortable out there to see what would happened, and they got a result that I think they should have expected. Realistically, if the young guys get introduced into the team, its going to be paired with a squad that is going to be more comfortable and confident with the pace and tone of an international match. Throwing all the young guys on the field together isn’t really going to do anyone any favors. You won’t be able to get an honest assessment of how they would fit in to your team and they really won’t have the opportunity to get a good feel for playing for the US national team. My fear is that a player who would play well and fit in with the full squad won’t get a fair shake because of how they perform in a game where they weren’t really set up to succeed, in my opinion.
All that being said, there were a couple of places that weren’t so dependent on team mechanics that I thought were lacking. For all of the talk about Altidore’s speed and size, I’d like to see him impose them a little more on defenders. I didn’t think he played that strongly with his back to goal and expect to see more out of him in that regard. Also, the PK he gave up is enough to make me pull my hair out.
Last night also showed how far ahead the pairing of Bocanegra and Onyewu are in relation to other central defenders. This is a perfect example where it would have been nice to play one of the two of them with a less experienced center back to help keep the new guy from feeling like he’s drowning. I also don’t think Heath Pearce did himself any favors last night. There were several clearance attempts that were a little scary and he just seemed a little frenetic and unsettled in general.
Brad Guzan didn’t display the kind of confidence and polish that we’ve come to expect from our goalkeepers over the years. There’s really nothing he could have done on the goals and he was very unlucky on the first one, but he didn’t do a very good job of collecting the shots he did stop and his clearance attempt in the first half that almost resulted in T&T’s first goal needs to get up and out.
Finally, as a team we should have numerous training sessions devoted only to crossing the ball into the box. We did a fairly good job of getting ourselves into position to send the ball in from the wings and came up sorely wanting numerous times. I am pleased that we made progress to getting in the crossing position, but it does no good if the final step in the process comes up short.
The US has several weeks off before their next match against Guatemala in Colorado on Nov. 19th. I expect we’ll see a lot of the less experienced players again, but I hope that Bradley decides to bring in a few more of the seasoned veterans to provide some balance to the sqaud.
