My response sounds a little like this.

Granted, the US is playing on a lousy pitch, away from home. A win is a win and all that. But for me the much larger issue is the fact that the entire Cuban squad played in the Cuban league, a point that John Harkes made in order to stress that the US would push their fitness.

Let me get this straight. The United States of America’s national squad, who has made it to five consecutive World Cups, who have players based in England, Germany, France, and elsewhere, need conditioning to be a factor in order to beat a team hailing from one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean. Something is desperately wrong here folks.

Two players that usually don’t impress me, namely Brian Ching and Freddy Hejduk, were the only ones to really stand out. Dempsey has an alarming tendency to drift out of games for long periods of time, and I don’t know what the hell is wrong with DaMarcus Beasley. What I do know is that most national teams don’t give you a run of games to find your form and, even though Beas has been one of my favorites in recent years, on this performance he shouldn’t be invited back to national team duty. Shockingly bad.

Maurice Edu is young and is probably learning a lot from these games, so he can be forgiven his string of two-dozen passes to Cubans in the second half, and Heath Pearce played okay. But wouldn’t you play okay against semi-professionals too? Gooch and Bocengra and Howard all looked fine too, but again you can’t say the competition was tops. Landon Donovan was invisible for much of the game.

Plonking the ball up field at Brian Ching is not a sophisticated game plan and I’m wondering what else Bradley has up his sleeve. It seems like the philosophy is play boring and lose against good teams (England, Spain), or play boring and squeeze a draw (Argentina), or play boring and win narrowly against inferior competition. Will he ever give Sacha Klejstan a full run out? What about Freddy Adu? What about Kenny Cooper (although I am suspicious of men named Kenny)? What about Edson Buddle? What about Josie Altidore?

Simply put, these are attacking options that, for whatever reason, Bradley doesn’t want to try. I know that these guys don’t have much (if any, in some cases) experience at the national team level, and there’s something to be said for getting points in the bag before you start experimenting. Yet again, there’s something to be said about worrying that the US won’t finish at least second in a four-team group alongside Guatemala, Cuba, and Trinidad. If US Soccer is at such a state that this round gives the higher-ups true pause, then there’s something horribly wrong.

Here’s the point: the US should be expected to win these games at this point. Sure, in 1988 this win would have been a major accomplishment, and it is good to see the US win on the road in CONCACAF. But in winning in highly defensive, uninspiring ways, this squad is just meeting expectations. My contention is that the team learns nothing valuable from these games. Squeaking out 1-0 wins on the road in CONCACAF has nothing in common with winning 1-0 against, say, Poland or the Czech Republic in South Africa in 2010. They may be learning to win away in CONCACAF, but that’s not saying much in the big picture.

Current Mood: Not Impressed |
Currently Listening To - Elliott Smith - “Roman Candle”