The USMNT just finished the group stages of the Gold Cup last night with a draw against Haiti. Just coming off a busy schedule with the Confederations Cup, we brought in a batch of players that hadn’t been playing with the full senior team lately. Given the number of players with little to no experience at the senior level, I decided I wasn’t going to do a review after each game. I wanted to see how things panned out a little before I formed any real opinions.
Now that the first three games are over, I feel like I’ve seen enough play to form some opinions on how we looked and performances from individual players. This is what I saw from the first three games.
Freddy Adu has a fair distance to go before I’m convinced he belongs on the field. He’s obviously rusty from not playing, but this was supposed to be his chance to show that he deserved to be considered for regular time with the full team anyway. Its understandable that his touch is going to be rusty and hit fitness wouldn’t be great, but he just lost possession of the ball way too easily way too many times. I’m starting to get the feeling that he was overhyped, or he’s just not reaching his full potential. Bottom line, right now we have too many other options that are much better than him in the midfield.
On the flip side, Charlie Davies and Benny Feilhaber proved they were the class of the group in the first three matches. The impact their introduction to the game against Honduras was obvious, and they did a lot to further the belief they belong on the field for the full squad. On a side note, Davies’s work in the Confed Cup and Gold Cup helped him to secure a move to French Ligue 1 side Souchax this past week.
We’ve seen some compelling wing play from Robbie Rogers this past week. I’m not sure that anyone is going to argue that he should supplant Donovan or Dempsey on the wings, but he’s making a very strong argument that he should be included on the bench next summer.
Stuart Holden is also stating his case in this tournament. I’ve been a fan of Holden’s since watching him in the last U-20 World Cup and I’ve been hoping that he would develop and move forward towards a place in the full team. His natural position is in center midfield, which I’ve already noted is crowded, but it appears like he has the ability to work on the wing as well.
From the team, in general, I’d say that we’ve acquitted ourselves well. Grenada was supposed to be an easy game, and I feel we handled that game as we should with a very solid result. A stronger test against Honduras was met and we had another solid result there. Finally, we faced a bit of adversity against Haiti, but we didn’t give up and we fought to come away with a draw. Now if I’m honest, I’ll admit that a couple of pretty poor defensive lapses lead to the Haiti goals to put us in that tight spite, but I’m pleased we didn’t panic and we came away with a point to secure first place in our group going into the semi-finals.
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