U.S. 1, Trinidad and Tobago 0.
Three points in the bank, 'nuff said.
* * *
If I didn't feel like I owned all you guys some golden kernels of Internets goodness, those two sentences would have been the beginning, middle and end of my post-game post for an utterly forgettable 90 minutes.
Yes, I realize that Paul Caligiuri's wonderstrike in Port-of-Spain in 1989 ushered in the current era of the U.S. National Team, but did the current incarnation of the team decided it had to play like it was the 1980s? Simple things like stringing together one or two passes seemed to beyond the team's ability. All that was missing were some mullets. (Overboard?)
Of course, as is the case more often than not, one moment of inspiration is all it takes in international soccer. Ricardo Clark's 62nd boomeranging shot from just outside the box turned out to be the perfect cologne to mask a stinker by the U.S.
But hey, it's the team's first road win this qualifying stage, so everything is forgiven, right? It's not like this match will be remembered once South Africa rolls around. Thanks to this win, the U.S. will have the next eight months or so to tweak and fix.
One thing that always interests me is after U.S. matches is reading the varying "Player Ratings" from a couple different sites. It never ceases to amaze me what kind of varying numbers these writers can come up with from the same match. Wednesday's game ought to be fairly easy, nobody other than Landon Donovan and perhaps Tim Howard get high marks. Oguchi Onyewu and Jonathan Spector seemed to be in the right spot at the right time, too.
Everybody else?
As high as I was on the Charlie Davies/Jozy Altidore pairing after Saturday, they showed their youth and inexperience Wednesday. In his first real clunker this summer, Davies didn't do anything of note expect jump offside a few times. Meanwhile, Altidore was completely out of sorts and had next to zero impact on the match. His lack of match fitness clearly seemed an issue.
The entire U.S. midfield was listless and shapeless that its almost not even worth discussing.
Well ... let's do it anyway.
Clark scored, which does a lot to mask over any other inadequacies the Houston Dynamo player might have displayed. His tally tonight does a little bit to put all the Jermaine Jones talk on the back burner, no?
Let's instead turn our ire toward Clint Dempsey and Michael Bradley.
Dempsey, again, I just give up.
Did anyone else notice him trotting up the sideline with his socks halfway down his ankles midway through the first half? We've all seen him as an impact player with the New England Revolution and now Fulham, but lately in the U.S. shirt unless he's scoring goals he's ineffective on the right midfield. How many times will we have to continue reading and writing about what a mystery Dempsey is between now and next June?
Bob Bradley needs to start considering a Plan B -- namely Stuart Holden, who seems more suited to play the position in the 4-4-2.
Look at it this way, remember when Bob Bradley was trying to shoehorn Landon Donovan and Dempsey between the secondary striker spot and right midfield. Eventually Bradley moved Donovan to the left side of midfield, and the Los Angles Galaxy star took a page straight out of Wayne Rooney's book and thrived. Meanwhile with the emergence of Davies and Altidore, Dempsey is almost by default forced to the right, which isn't exactly working.
I hate to play armchair psychiatrist, but Dempsey pre-2006 seemed to play with a wild look in his eye. He was dangerous at every touch. Now we only see that look after he scores.
To say it again, the U.S. has to figure out the Dempsey question ahead of the World Cup.
Now for Bradley the Younger. Admittedly, it's a tricky spot since his father is the coach. Suffice to say, it's time to stop using the term "holding midfield" in regard to the Borussia Mönchengladbach man.
Maybe it's the last two matches clouding my judgment, but the U.S. midfield looks about as organized as a 10-year-old AYSO Sunday league match. Is this all Bradley the Younger's fault? No, but he's playing in a central role, which should facilitate the U.S. attack.
Not to repeat myself, but Bradley, too, is a guy who's at his best when he's rushing forward toward the goal. That's not to say he's not apt on defense, but his best asset would be throwing his big frame around and breaking stuff up. You can get away with this when you have a midfield partnership that plays off each other like say, vintage Andrea Pirlo and Gennaro Gattuso at Milan, but when you have an enigma in Dempsey and a limited hard-worker in Clark, it doesn't exactly bode that well.
To be a successful offensive team in soccer, a lot of times -- no surprise -- it comes down to chemistry or feeding off one another and finding little combinations that work. Right now not a lot is clicking for the U.S. The only successful clicking back-and-forth seems to between Donovan and to whomever he is passing the ball.
Unless there's a change in philosophy (or a bunch of other players are naturalized) the U.S. won't excel in a possession game. This isn't the worst thing in the world, since we've seen the U.S. at its most dangerous offensively on the counter-attack.
After writing all this, it's going to sound crazy, but maybe this uninspired 1-0 road win might not be the worst thing in the world for the U.S. Reading that Princeton Intro to Soccer 101 interview of Bradley the Elder, it made me think might actually see some of these things and change the tactics before the match at Honduras on Oct. 10, assuming he's not locked in to playing certain players regardless of current form.
Then again, Bradley the Elder stubbornly decided to play Jonathan Bornstein after his horror show against El Salvador almost as a personal eff-you to the Internet nerds like us.
So yeah, what I'm trying to say is, once again who the hell knows what we're going to get whenever the U.S. steps on the field against a team ranked in the FIFA top 100.
Perhaps we can pool our efforts to hire David Stern to pull the U.S. ball out of the pot in Geneva when the 2010 draw is held in December, because I'm finally convinced despite everything we've talked about it might come down to the random draw.
At least Bahrain and or New Zealand will be available.
Miscellany:
* The ink on the math isn't dry yet, but the U.S. needs a win in its final two matches to automatically qualify. Two draws might even work.
* Jonathan Bornstein's birth certificate must really read "Michael Bradley III", how else to explain his start Wednesday? Did Steve Cherundolo make fun of Princeton in practice?
In fairness, other than his 93rd minute deflection back to Tim Howard, Bornstein wasn't that terrible. Credit Trinidad coach Russell Latapy for watching some game tape and having his team constantly attack and probe that side of the U.S. defense.
* The ESPN cameras caught Bradley the Elder complimenting Latapy after the match. That's two straight matches that the U.S. walked away sending platitudes to the opponents. Not sure how this makes me feel.
* Normally I'm fine with JP Dellacamera, but was Sunil Gulati holding a knife at him to keep repeating, "How difficult it is to win in CONCACAF on the road."?
That argument loses a lot of its luster when you're playing at a half-abandoned stadium filled with fans playing steel drums. (I half expected Eugene Levy to wander onto the field at halftime with a garbage bag full of pot. "Club Paradise", anybody? Anybody?)
* Speaking of steel drums, maybe I'm in the minority but I liked using them for the "Star Spangled Banner." Nice touch.
* Why whenever I look at Pedro Gomez do I think he just showed up at the field after directing an television spot for Patio?
* Alexis Lalas' beard? The one positive of Wednesday's game being non-HD.
* Here's the book on Tim Howard -- try to catch him off his line. (Howard did make some nice saves, but the best came courtesy of the woodwork in the first half.)
* Spector definitely got away with a full-fledged armbar on a Trinidad player in the first half but didn't get the whistle for the penalty. Overall the officiating was much improved from the other night, with the only U.S. gripe a handball that wasn't called on a sliding Trinidad defender in the 10th minute.
* About that time machine, the U.S. wasn't the only one to hit 88 m.p.h. Wednesday night as Cuauhtémoc Blanco dialed it back to 1999, looking at his vintage best leading Mexico to a critical 1-0 over Honduras at Azteca.
* Wow...what happened to the Ticos? El Salvador pulled out an extra time winner vs. Costa Rica. Looks like the U.S. can coast to South Africa after all.
Final thought:
Actually, to go back to the top, if I was going to take the lazy, eff-you approach to this post it would have simply read -- "The U.S. won another game with Jonathan Bornstein at Left Back."
Then I thought better of it, because like saying the movie 'Gigli' is terrible, it's just too easy. It's too bad that Bornstein personifies the frustration U.S. fans sometimes have with the team, but that's the way it is.
Three points. Three more precious points.
(Maybe we're just all too negative by nature.)
Three points in the bank, 'nuff said.
If I didn't feel like I owned all you guys some golden kernels of Internets goodness, those two sentences would have been the beginning, middle and end of my post-game post for an utterly forgettable 90 minutes.
Yes, I realize that Paul Caligiuri's wonderstrike in Port-of-Spain in 1989 ushered in the current era of the U.S. National Team, but did the current incarnation of the team decided it had to play like it was the 1980s? Simple things like stringing together one or two passes seemed to beyond the team's ability. All that was missing were some mullets. (Overboard?)
Of course, as is the case more often than not, one moment of inspiration is all it takes in international soccer. Ricardo Clark's 62nd boomeranging shot from just outside the box turned out to be the perfect cologne to mask a stinker by the U.S.
But hey, it's the team's first road win this qualifying stage, so everything is forgiven, right? It's not like this match will be remembered once South Africa rolls around. Thanks to this win, the U.S. will have the next eight months or so to tweak and fix.
One thing that always interests me is after U.S. matches is reading the varying "Player Ratings" from a couple different sites. It never ceases to amaze me what kind of varying numbers these writers can come up with from the same match. Wednesday's game ought to be fairly easy, nobody other than Landon Donovan and perhaps Tim Howard get high marks. Oguchi Onyewu and Jonathan Spector seemed to be in the right spot at the right time, too.
Everybody else?
As high as I was on the Charlie Davies/Jozy Altidore pairing after Saturday, they showed their youth and inexperience Wednesday. In his first real clunker this summer, Davies didn't do anything of note expect jump offside a few times. Meanwhile, Altidore was completely out of sorts and had next to zero impact on the match. His lack of match fitness clearly seemed an issue.
The entire U.S. midfield was listless and shapeless that its almost not even worth discussing.
Well ... let's do it anyway.
Clark scored, which does a lot to mask over any other inadequacies the Houston Dynamo player might have displayed. His tally tonight does a little bit to put all the Jermaine Jones talk on the back burner, no?
Let's instead turn our ire toward Clint Dempsey and Michael Bradley.
Dempsey, again, I just give up.
Did anyone else notice him trotting up the sideline with his socks halfway down his ankles midway through the first half? We've all seen him as an impact player with the New England Revolution and now Fulham, but lately in the U.S. shirt unless he's scoring goals he's ineffective on the right midfield. How many times will we have to continue reading and writing about what a mystery Dempsey is between now and next June?
Bob Bradley needs to start considering a Plan B -- namely Stuart Holden, who seems more suited to play the position in the 4-4-2.
Look at it this way, remember when Bob Bradley was trying to shoehorn Landon Donovan and Dempsey between the secondary striker spot and right midfield. Eventually Bradley moved Donovan to the left side of midfield, and the Los Angles Galaxy star took a page straight out of Wayne Rooney's book and thrived. Meanwhile with the emergence of Davies and Altidore, Dempsey is almost by default forced to the right, which isn't exactly working.
I hate to play armchair psychiatrist, but Dempsey pre-2006 seemed to play with a wild look in his eye. He was dangerous at every touch. Now we only see that look after he scores.
To say it again, the U.S. has to figure out the Dempsey question ahead of the World Cup.
Now for Bradley the Younger. Admittedly, it's a tricky spot since his father is the coach. Suffice to say, it's time to stop using the term "holding midfield" in regard to the Borussia Mönchengladbach man.
Maybe it's the last two matches clouding my judgment, but the U.S. midfield looks about as organized as a 10-year-old AYSO Sunday league match. Is this all Bradley the Younger's fault? No, but he's playing in a central role, which should facilitate the U.S. attack.
Not to repeat myself, but Bradley, too, is a guy who's at his best when he's rushing forward toward the goal. That's not to say he's not apt on defense, but his best asset would be throwing his big frame around and breaking stuff up. You can get away with this when you have a midfield partnership that plays off each other like say, vintage Andrea Pirlo and Gennaro Gattuso at Milan, but when you have an enigma in Dempsey and a limited hard-worker in Clark, it doesn't exactly bode that well.
To be a successful offensive team in soccer, a lot of times -- no surprise -- it comes down to chemistry or feeding off one another and finding little combinations that work. Right now not a lot is clicking for the U.S. The only successful clicking back-and-forth seems to between Donovan and to whomever he is passing the ball.
Unless there's a change in philosophy (or a bunch of other players are naturalized) the U.S. won't excel in a possession game. This isn't the worst thing in the world, since we've seen the U.S. at its most dangerous offensively on the counter-attack.
After writing all this, it's going to sound crazy, but maybe this uninspired 1-0 road win might not be the worst thing in the world for the U.S. Reading that Princeton Intro to Soccer 101 interview of Bradley the Elder, it made me think might actually see some of these things and change the tactics before the match at Honduras on Oct. 10, assuming he's not locked in to playing certain players regardless of current form.
Then again, Bradley the Elder stubbornly decided to play Jonathan Bornstein after his horror show against El Salvador almost as a personal eff-you to the Internet nerds like us.
So yeah, what I'm trying to say is, once again who the hell knows what we're going to get whenever the U.S. steps on the field against a team ranked in the FIFA top 100.
Perhaps we can pool our efforts to hire David Stern to pull the U.S. ball out of the pot in Geneva when the 2010 draw is held in December, because I'm finally convinced despite everything we've talked about it might come down to the random draw.
At least Bahrain and or New Zealand will be available.
Miscellany:
* The ink on the math isn't dry yet, but the U.S. needs a win in its final two matches to automatically qualify. Two draws might even work.
* Jonathan Bornstein's birth certificate must really read "Michael Bradley III", how else to explain his start Wednesday? Did Steve Cherundolo make fun of Princeton in practice?
In fairness, other than his 93rd minute deflection back to Tim Howard, Bornstein wasn't that terrible. Credit Trinidad coach Russell Latapy for watching some game tape and having his team constantly attack and probe that side of the U.S. defense.
* The ESPN cameras caught Bradley the Elder complimenting Latapy after the match. That's two straight matches that the U.S. walked away sending platitudes to the opponents. Not sure how this makes me feel.
* Normally I'm fine with JP Dellacamera, but was Sunil Gulati holding a knife at him to keep repeating, "How difficult it is to win in CONCACAF on the road."?
That argument loses a lot of its luster when you're playing at a half-abandoned stadium filled with fans playing steel drums. (I half expected Eugene Levy to wander onto the field at halftime with a garbage bag full of pot. "Club Paradise", anybody? Anybody?)
* Speaking of steel drums, maybe I'm in the minority but I liked using them for the "Star Spangled Banner." Nice touch.
* Why whenever I look at Pedro Gomez do I think he just showed up at the field after directing an television spot for Patio?
* Alexis Lalas' beard? The one positive of Wednesday's game being non-HD.
* Here's the book on Tim Howard -- try to catch him off his line. (Howard did make some nice saves, but the best came courtesy of the woodwork in the first half.)
* Spector definitely got away with a full-fledged armbar on a Trinidad player in the first half but didn't get the whistle for the penalty. Overall the officiating was much improved from the other night, with the only U.S. gripe a handball that wasn't called on a sliding Trinidad defender in the 10th minute.
* About that time machine, the U.S. wasn't the only one to hit 88 m.p.h. Wednesday night as Cuauhtémoc Blanco dialed it back to 1999, looking at his vintage best leading Mexico to a critical 1-0 over Honduras at Azteca.
* Wow...what happened to the Ticos? El Salvador pulled out an extra time winner vs. Costa Rica. Looks like the U.S. can coast to South Africa after all.
Final thought:
Actually, to go back to the top, if I was going to take the lazy, eff-you approach to this post it would have simply read -- "The U.S. won another game with Jonathan Bornstein at Left Back."
Then I thought better of it, because like saying the movie 'Gigli' is terrible, it's just too easy. It's too bad that Bornstein personifies the frustration U.S. fans sometimes have with the team, but that's the way it is.
Three points. Three more precious points.
(Maybe we're just all too negative by nature.)
Labels: bob bradley, concacaf, ESPN, Landon Donovan, Soccer, USMNT, world cup qualifying
I have no idea of the technologies and interests at stake in HD broadcasting, but I watched this game at a bar and on another television, they broke into the ESPN2 pre-match tennis broadcast with an update from Port-of-Spain....in glittering perfect Hi Definition. What the fuck, ESPN? (not surprised, just pissed.) The Classic broadcast mustve been routed thru the coax my jamaican next door neighbor used to steal cable our sophomore year of college.
@Camoranesi's Mom
At least you got to see the game. I got home to find that my DVR recorded a black screen with the message "call to subscribe". It turns out that in August Comcast moved ESPN Classic out of the package I subscribe to.
Wow did John Harkes give it to Clint Dempsey! He called him disinterested, tired, and sick, called for him to be taken out 3 different times in the first 60 mins,....wow
What to do with Clint is a tough answer right now, at worst he makes the decision who to play at foward an interesting question, 2 spots for Jozy, Charlie, and Clint with one of the bench. If Bob decides to do that he has to give Torres and Holden a fair shot to prove who plays on the right.
When Ricardo Clark scored in the 60th min I was in the middle of a 45 sec rant that he hadnt touched the ball in the second half. Up until the goal he and Bradley were having horrid games. US needs to fix the center mid problem... is it possible Jermaine and Edu are the starting backs come WC?
For all the praise Donavon is getting lately ( hes playing really great field games) his set pieces were awful again. You can't waste 6 out of 7 first half corners on the road. Of course he gets another assist, but come WC time the US is gonna need to score on a set piece to steal a tie against a Russian like team.
Final thought, if national teams payed their players like a professional sports team my thought for this match would be, " Oh that's why they pay Timmy Howard so much"
I only saw the second half with a couple of recap highlights of the first half. Based on that, I'd say we were extremely lucky with the result. How we didn't concede in the first half seems amazing.
After we scored, I was yelling at the TV to have the US keep possession and was obviously not getting through. Bench Dempsey. Variability in the quality of our play will be improved measurably. I was glad to see Feilhaber and HOlden come on and I have to disagree a little with Cardillo. I think we can do a possession game with players like them and Torres in the mix. HOwever, up and down the team, asking them to play possession is like asking a pre-schooler to rub his head and pat his tummy at the same time. Neither looks natural.
Kenwyn Jones looked like a Dominican little league player compared to his peers out there. We got lucky he didn't seem interested, or the team couldn't get him the ball enough. I though Gooch did a great job standing up to him and essentially negate him in the air on most of their Route 1 efforts. Jones made Gooch look small.
Best result of the night was definitely the Costa Rica loss. It looks like the Argies may be in the Concacaf/Conmebol playoff and I'll wager a mortgage payment on Argentina getting through regardless of the opponent. Fifa is not going to let Argentina fail to qualify for a World Cup. Personally, I'd love to see Mexico and Argentina in a home and home. THAT would be a soccer game worthy of prime time and playing hooky from work. There will be blood on that one.
I vacillate between wanting, once the US qualify for the World Cup, someone from US Soccer shake Bob Bradley's hand, thank him for doing the best he could, and tell him they're replacing him with a more experienced manager or feeling some sympathy for Bradley, who must, at some level, recognize that he's in over his head.
I wonder if the absurdly long leash he's currently giving Bornstein, Dempsey, and his son has something to do with Bradley trying to fit into the clubby world of US Soccer where most failures don't have any real consequence once you're admitted.
It's not fair to Bornstein to run him out there repeatedly to look overmatched and out of position. It can't be good for development of Michael Bradley, who I believe to be the best American central midfield prospect ever, to have him play, in the midst of a poor run of form and thus out of match shape because players appear to have to play well to keep their place in the team at Gladbach, two matches in five days in the center of a sloppy and disjointed side.
If Bradley is OK with Dempsey only "trying" for 10 mins why doesn't he bring him off the bench and let Disco Stu play hard for the first 80? I was almost afraid that Dempsey would score knowing that it would only lead to more playing time. It's so strange that Bradley looks the other way with Dempsey when he seems like a guy that prefers gym rats who try hard over pure talent.
They should play a 3-5-2 and get Benny and Torres on the field at the same time. Score 2 or 3 goals then bring on the defensive subs to lock the game down.
Sigh, well three points = Yay! Everything else leaves me feeling confused and wondering where this is going.
Lando, in the run of action, is the best player in Concacaf right now. Who else might it be? Giovanni Dos White Hart? However, Wednesday night, Landon's corners and free-kicks were abyssmal, as HBO said. Two corners went straight into the side netting - squandering the kind of chances the US will need in WC Group play against someone like Ghana or Serbia. Needing to get more out of free kicks and corners alone makes playing The Tiny Ghanaian Who Shall Not Be Named (aka TGWSNBN) seem almost reasonable.
Gooch was matched up against the best possible forward for him - Kenwyne Stone. That guy is huge, but he actually makes Onyewu look mobile. Jones is a tough match up for many teams, especially the Latin countries with smaller defenders, but his presence plays right into the US's strengths. That tiny winger TNT played was much more troubling to our defense. (Side note: TNT needed a win last night to retain a chance to make the WC, so why did they play so conservatively?)
In central midfield, I have never seen the reasoning behind playing both The Younger and Rico Strong - at least if the team isn't staying back and playing to purely defend. Now, that both of those guys seem to have caught the inconsistency bug from Deuce - it makes even less sense.
Now onto the USMNT's most infuriating player - Clint Dempsey. The other commenters have summed it up well, but this guy is really pissing me off these days - and I am a Fulham fan. He turns the ball over so many times with (what seem to be) low-effort attempts to control a pass or some whirly-gig spin when there is no defender that needs 'juking.' Maybe Deuce will find his form again and all these pieces will fall into place (it has happened before, like the 2nd half of the Confed Cup). Dempsey certainly CAN 'hit homeruns' for the US, but right now, we only seem to be getting the strikeouts and foul pop-ups. Should The Elder bring Dempsey (or Younger or any US player who seems to have their name engraved on a starting spot) in off the bench in the last 2 WCQ games in order to 'light a fire' and let them know their place is not guaranteed?
This comment is already too long, so to contradict everything I just wrote here is a nice paragraph from GRANT WAHL - who brings the hope:
It's still 2009, not 2010. If there's any solace for most U.S. fans, it's that how you perform in 2010 may have nothing to do with how you qualify for the World Cup. Would anyone have predicted that the U.S. (which finished third in qualifying for '02) would be a World Cup quarterfinalist a year later? That Brazil (which barely qualified for '02) would raise the trophy a year later? England fans will no doubt be sky-high after their team's 5-1 blowout of Croatia on Wednesday, but what does that say about England's chances in 2010? Perhaps very little. In the end, qualifying is about qualifying -- and then wiping the slate clean.
Its a win. Gotta say though, I spent a good portion of the match flipping to the US Open to watch the women, this game was that boring.
It seemed in the first half they spend way to much time trying to spring Davies. Dumb long balls up the field that amounted to nothing. Even when they did string some passes together, again, it was to spring Davies. They need a plan B, especially if they plan on getting nothing off of free kicks.
Onyewu is a mess with the ball at his feet. He has the mentality of a 6 year old, see ball, kick ball hard. Take a second, look up, and find someone. How hard is this?
I was hoping beyond hope they were going to pull Clark and put Torres in there. Then let Bradley be your defensive midfielder, and let Torres attempt to run the offense. He might slow things down, but it just gives our guys more of a chance to get in position to do something. Heck, it might have given Dempsey a chance to catch up to the play.
Is it me, or does it seem like the amount of shirt pulling and elbows has really picked up these last two matches. USA could not go into a tackle without grabbing shirt and trying to swing their elbow over the guy first. I was surprised there were not more penalties called.
If USA does clinch with a win in their next game, who gets called for the last game against Costa Rica? I was thinking last night it would be interesting to see our A team play without Donovan. Because, you know, there is alot of time until next year, and it could happen.