My disappointment, more than the result, was not seeing it live and watching exactly how the disaster took place in real time. The match took place at work and I could only check a score tracker.
Yeah, I have to amend my prior list. The loss at T&T is now my most disappointing match, topping the US-Iran game from the 1998 WC. Getting knocked out of the World Cup by a weak opponent in a largely empty stadium is worse. Bruce Arena not having the team prepared was worse. The players showing little heart or effort was worse. This is the worst match in modern US soccer history.
What's forgotten about that match is that Germany's goal came as a result of Frings running up Eddie Lewis' back, and Dallas, somehow, whistling Lewis for the foul. Lewis had the ball deep in our 3rd, turned from pressure, Frings ran up his back and somehow Lewis was whistled.
Dallas wanted us to know that just because he loved Texas didn't mean he was a straight shooter..... Either that or his favorite Okie song was " A Sorry with a Fring on Top"....
I'm not american but I'm really disappointed that the USA haven't evolved into a superpower challenging Germany, Spain etc. I thought it wouldn't take that long with such a vast population and historical athletic prowess. But they've showed little sign of real progress. I mean Iceland are a better team than the USA at the moment.
Germany, Spain, England, etc. what do they have in common that's not at all like the US? They are all soccer nations. America has 3 sports that want to claim that title but soccer isn't one of them. It's an uphill slog when the USSF clearly doesn't get it, nor do they have a plan to get us there. When it's isn't just well to do families putting their kids in soccer, we'll have a shot.
I wish I wasn't so prescient... I don't know why that 2002 Poland game wouldn't make Arena double down on such games, like last Tuesday, for the rest of his life. Maybe the fact they lucked out, he internalized as his getting it done and no change needed. Why, through many coaches, the USMNT has rarely played well as the favorites is strange. It is the flip side to the mythology (for the most part) that we fight hard and get results against better technical teams.
They were pretty much in the exact same situation against Poland as they were against Trinidad and Tobago. Going into the game only needing a point, end up losing and hoping another team bails them out. Only back in 2002 we got lucky.
So true. It bothered me the whole past 10 months. Everyone talking about "Bruce" and getting to the Quarterfinals. That 2002 Poland game has been mentioned maybe once or twice this past week, but never in the last 10 months or the past 16 years. It was like we hired Bob Bradley back and everyone just talked about 2009 Spain win and then we get to a big game and he plays Ricardo Clark instead of Edu and puts Bornstein at LB. Everyone afterwards is like, what happened?
Even before this fiasco, there was the poor 2006 showing where Bruce Arena was coach. I actually forgot that Arena was the coach in 2006 until recently.
Yes, and look at 2006. We know nobody in the media wrote about it the past 10 months. 2006 was getting the first hard result, then totally blowing it when a favorite. Sounds a lot like Tuesday. 2006 was also bringing "experienced players Bruce trusts" over more talented players. That really worked well Tuesday. Everyone expected Bruce to be super pragmatic and that the job was actually not that difficult. It wasn't really. But in the end, he wasn't super pragmatic and made all the
Top Ten Disappointing Moments: #10 - Freddy Adu return from Benfica. You had to be there. Younger generations will never understand what Freddy Adu was to us back in the day, emerging right after the 2006 world cup fiasco. It was like Pulisic now, but without the dose of cautious cynicism we've developed since then. Here was our promised savior, the guy to lead us to greener pastures, the complement to Donovan when he lacked the guts. But in 2011, when Benfica sent him back to MLS, that hope was extinguished for most of us. The true believers, though, persevered in their faith for five more years. #9 - The 2009 Gold Cup final. Something seldom talked about is that of the Gold Cups played with A-teams, the USA has only won one: in 2007, with the team that would eventually beat Spain in the Confeds semifinal. The next GC was to test new players, and we used an experimental team, like the other big teams attending. What no one expected was the chasm between our second-stringers and Mexico's. That game showed that something was seriously wrong with our league, when players who were doing so well in MLS, got played out of the field by a bunch of Liga MX guys. Several NT careers ended that day, before they had actually started. #8 - Charlie Davies accident. Charlie was a very good forward with a great understanding with the rest of the team. He gave us speed, a good reading of the game, and decent off-the-ball movement. He was the ground level version of McHead, which was better because we had more guys playing good ground-level passes. He was never the same after the crash. #7 - Stu Holden injury. Everything good you've heard about Stu is true. He was precise and incisive with his passes, and kept his eyes open to exploit a hole and score himself. He was what the most optimistic among us expect Hyndman to become. Bolton never recovered after losing him, and for us his injury meant losing midfield creativity and getting stuck with Bradley and Jones. #6 - Giuseppe Rossi choosing Italy. Family pressure played a big part, with his dad taking him to Italy when he turned 12. Still, having been born in the USA and grown in New Jersey until that age, there was hope he'd eventually say "no" to his dad. Anybody could have told him choosing Italy was a boneheaded move, they had enough talent to settle for someone many fans didn't consider "un italiano vero." But he chose his path and not all the whining by his nonno can change the past. #5 - Losing to Iran in 1998. That year we stunk up the joint. After a somewhat decent show at home, with MLS starting, and surviving the whole cycle, people were pumped to see us on the big stage. In qualifiers we had matched Costa Rica and defeated Guatemala & El Salvador, teams with a much longer soccer tradition. Once our group was known, everybody expected us to lose to Germany, most expected a defeat versus Yugoslavia, but even the most pessimistic expected a victory against Iran. Losing to them not only made us the laughing stock internationally, due to the political rivalry, but soured quite a few at home & turned them into ardent critics of all things MLS. #4 - The 2011 Gold Cup Final. For the first time Bob Bradley was comfortable enough to switch from our usual defend-and-counter plan with his pulley system (misnamed "empty bucket") to a more creative, more fluid style of play. We were becoming what Klinsmann promised a few months after but never delivered: a team that controlled the ball and played "proactive" soccer. With the likes of Bedoya, Agudelo, Adu, Sacha & Jones playing important roles, we were for the first time out-possessing rivals in an A-team GC. We were finally on track, and that despite our two best players missing part of the tourney. It all came crashing down on that second half of the final (the first had ended 2-2), when Gio and Barrera put the kibosh on our incipient metamorphosis. #3 - Donovan missing the 2014 WC. I've always been a Donovan fan. IMO, he's one of the most intelligent men to ever play the game, compensating his limited technical skills with speed of running and speed of thought. Other players have also been crucial to give us wins (like Dempsey or McBride), and we've had men (like Cherundolo or Hugo Perez) capable of uplifting the level of play of those around them. But Donovan did more than just those two things: he made us fun to watch. You never knew when LD was going to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Even though I was not surprised by his omission (I predicted it here, in fact), we played boring, defensive soccer in a World Cup in the Americas without him. That was a missed opportunity. #2 - The 2006 campaign. And just when the world were about to take us seriously, we dropped a deuce and looked like planks. That we could play much better was shown in the Italy game, but that also put in evidence a weakness in our mentality: our team needed the amazing atmosphere in Kaiserslautern that day to perform. Because it was magical, with the largest military base, at the time, there. The anthem was enough to fire up a cadaver, and our players showed it on the field. But that was their only good day in a European WC, so far. #1 - Missing the 2018 World Cup. No, it's not because it just happened. This is without a doubt the most disheartening moment in US soccer history, because one thing is to perform poorly when the program was just starting, another is to completely fail after almost 30 years of near continuous improvement. The consequences of this failure will be felt for many years to come, and we've been shown that our aspirations were a mirage. Anyone thinking we'll shake it off and be back to where we were supposed to be by 2022 is deluding himself. This is not a turbine sputtering, this is a mid-flight crash.
#1 has to be the T&T result, no other choices. Hopefully that will remain at the top for the rest of my life. Putting that aside #2 for me has to be the defense checking out in extra time against Ghana in 2010. During the match I firmly believed we would win in Penalties, and after seeing Ghana against Uruguay in the next round I am now 100% convinced we would have gone through.
Obviously we now have a permanent #1. Nothing in sports has been as devastating as this has been for me, and I'm a Nats/Caps/Indians/Redskins/Wizards fan so that's saying something however I wanted to add two that haven't been mentioned: #1: Argentina 2 USA 1 AET 2003 World Youth Championships (U-20 World Cup w/a different name) I can't remember if I cried after that, but I knew I wanted to puke, and to this day, it's agony to think about oh and it took place the day before my birthday in December 2003. We scored early to take a 1-0 lead, and I was getting up to celebrate, the ref was looking at his watch, and then Argentina sent the equivalent of that Rapinoe to Wambach cross in, except there was even less time left and a ton of guys in the box to defend, and there was Mascherano, in the 94th <expletive> minute, somehow sending it into the back of the net as the ref was putting the whistle in his mouth to blow the whistle ending the game. We were literally that close to making the U-20 World Cup semifinals four years after we'd done the same at the '99's. In 2014 we'd come close to replicating the agony against Portugal, but if nothing else, at least that goal against Portugal didn't screw us. The team, not surprisingly, was gut punched after that, and I would have bet everything I owned they'd lose, and of course they did, on a penalty in the 105th minute of extra time. It really feels like this is what unleashed the jinx that killed us in 2007, 2010, 2014, 2015, and 2017 in all those knockout games at the senior and U-20 level that kept us out of the semi's of youth cups and the quarters of senior cups. I could only find a clip of our goal that gave us a lead that we were basically about 1-2 seconds away of winning with. #2 Austria 2 USA 1 AET U-20 World Cup Quarterfinals (July 2007) People forget how shocking this result was. We'd come out of a difficult group, surviving a difficult encounter with S. Korea 1-1, obliterated Poland 6-1, and had beaten a powerful Brazil side convincingly 2-1 (not a lucky win), in the knockouts we won a slugfest, with a powerhouse Uruguay side that featured Cavani, Suarez and others in extra time 2-1, then we played a middling at best Austria side and completely ---- the bed, losing 2-1 after extra time. Part of it was on the weather (it was wet and on field turf, and that played a factor) but just as big was the fact that our goalie who'd been fantastic, was clearly injured, and not himself, and gave up one goal that he almost certainly would not have given up at any other point in the tourney when he was healthy. Kind of crazy to think we've been to the quarters in 2003, 2007, 2015, and 2017 in the Under 20's, and every single one of them went to extra time and we lost all freaking four. Pretty brutal. As if Hugh Dallas and Frings weren't bad enough in 2002. 3. That Poland game On page one some people mentioned it, and argued a point that at least on BS is not at all valid. All of us around to watch remember that, and quite a few of us also remember that isn't luck that got us into the Round of 16, and that we absolutely did deserve it. In that tournament we had about 10 tanker trucks worth of bad luck, and still came within a competent ref of making it into the semifinals. *Against Portugal multiple goal scoring opportunities were blown in the first half that could have made the game much rougher in GD for Portugal and Portugal's goals in the 2nd half were flukes, with Agoos scoring the most ridiculous howitzer own goal ever, and the opener being the byproduct of a corner that was won by our defense, but then directed out and directly into the foot of Beto, essentially the only place the defender could have sent the ball that was dangerous on the corner that gave Portugal it's first goal. *Against S. Korea *Bad Luck Side: S. Korea got their goal on a soft borderline non-existent foul, and their PK on an absolutely non-existent foul. *Good Luck Side: S. Korea blew a very easy chance late on to score a winner (this would come back in play later). Against Poland: Those of us who watched the game remember a couple of things that are at least as relevant as the scoreline. #1 The US actually equalized shortly after Poland's shocking early goal, only for the ref to rule that 5 foot 8 and 120 pound soaking wet Donovan somehow manhandled a 6 foot 185+ pound center back for Poland on the goal. Dive much?!?!? #2 The US lost it's mine after the goal was disallowed and was actually trailing on the quick restart still yelling at the ref when Poland scored its second. So the ref's screw up actually had a net -2 goal impact on us. #3 Mathis hit the post on top of everything else. Epic Bad Luck Now add this: Portugal basically had a complete mental breakdown while this was going down for a second consecutive tournament (they also went nuts after a penalty was awarded late on in the Euro Championship semi's in 2000, not exactly a mentally stable group, this, foreshadowing the choke in the '04 Euro's, and the violent thug fest against the Dutch in Germany 2 years after that) against S. Korea, getting foul happy, going down a man, and then getting to watch S. Korea blow chance after chance, including breakaways while up a man. I gotta thank S. Korea for playing to win, when they didn't have to (like we did against Panama in 2013, and unlike Mexico against Honduras last week, big surprise there, or Costa Rica against Panama), but it would have been one of the worst displays of finishing imaginable, if S. Korea didn't score considering the mountain of chances they generated while up a man against Portugal, of course, that's very much in keeping with a S. Korean weakness historically, and especially back then. Highly ironic that when they actually did finally score, it would be on one of the toughest and least likely of chances generated during the game. So in regards to 2002, yes, I remember the pratfall against Poland, but no, I don't agree with the reading some people have of it. Portugal was the side that was monumentally lucky in that scenario, and that team was just too mentally unfit to take advantage of the opportunity we and the ref in the Poland game, had gifted them, and considering the bad luck in the Portugal game, and the issues with misfortune in general, we were due some luck at that point regardless. Hopefully on Saturday we can finally put an end to the quarterfinal hex we seem to have been plagued with since Hugh Dallas in 2002.