Another great game for the US that I believes locks up advancement to the next stage of qualifying for us.  I’m really glad that I had the chance to get my national team fix in person.  The atmosphere for the game was great and the team put on a pretty good display for us, overall.  A couple of specific thoughts.

I thought the first half of the game was a bit frustrating and that we didn’t play as well as we could have.  We definitely could have been better and we gave up kind of a crappy goal.  The shot was as actually a really quality shot, but our defeding leading up to the shot was suspect.

From my perspective from this game, one of our biggest short comings in our offense is that we’re overly patient.  I know that sounds really strange, but there were so many times that one of our midfielders got the ball and played it straight back to who played it to them when they had time and space to turn with the ball push the attack forward.  I’m not one to promote a lot of dribble on the ball, but without a balance of both passing and dribbling the offense gets predictable making it easier to defend.  We need for some of our players to be willing and able to push the ball forward on the dribble instead of passing 100% of the time.

Our defense was completely solid except for the series where they scored.  We had a pretty decent shutout streak going and I’m sure Tim Howard was probably pretty pissed about giving up a goal.  The thing we have to remember is that we can’t afford to have mental breakdowns like that against better teams.  A Spain or Argentina will make us pay for mistakes like that and we won’t always have the ability to score six goals and get the win anyway.

I was glad to see some of the younger guys get in and see some time.  Hopefully, having advancement locked we’ll see even more play from them.  I’m glad that Kjlestan started to add a more attacking element to the midfield, and Adu and Altidore obviously got in with Altidore putting a goal away for us.  I was also glad to see Torres get some time and I thought he handled himself well.  He did appear to have a little big of first game jitters, but I also thought he showed some pretty nice promise.

I really hope that Bradely takes the chance to play a lot of the younger guys on Wednesday to see what they can do.  One that I hope to see the most is Torres, just to get more of an idea of what he’s capable of.  I’d also like to see Adu and Altidore in the game from the start.  It would also probably be smart to give more playing time to guys who don’t play as much to further their experience in case they’re need due to injury of a normal starter.He’s one I’m probably most interested in seeing against Trinidad and Tobago on Wednesday.