The team in Couva came out flat and tired. I saw it live. Arena rotated lineups for the previous three two match windows that he coached, but decided to start the same lineup in T&T as in Orlando. Arrogance? Stupidity? Overconfidence? Some of each. The most important quality missing from all the USSF election/reform talk is humility. It is kind of rough that the attitude from the top of the US coaching echelon is "I know best. I have been successful. What have you done? Your opinion does not matter." Looking at you, Bruce Arena and Bob Bradley.
It's ironic considering that Tim Howard should have stopped the second T&T goal. Howler. He should not have been in goal.
Furthermore, it's one thing to think this privately but it's arrogance to state it publicly even if, or especially because, it's true. I feel the exact same way about JK's public statements towards MLS when he was coach. Needlessly antagonistic and better expressed privately to players.
There's no doubt that part of the USMNT problem this cycle was both Klinsmann and Arena being unable to fix on a starting CB tandem and goalkeeper. It was chop and change, chop and change. When folks say Howard shouldn't have been starting, my response is................then who would you start? Brad Guzan wasn't in form. 2018 was supposed to be HIS cycle. Ethan Horvath has recently shown us that he's not ready. Can you imagine the freakout session on these boards if Arena had started Nick Rimando in goal for that do-or-die qualifier? Every time either Klinsmann or Arena were ready to give Hamid a chance, he would pull out with an injury. It was insane. I don't know if people realize this, but we scored the most goals of any team in the Hex. People can bash Altidore and whomever all they want. Goal-scoring wasn't the issue overall. We conceded 6 fewer goals than Honduras. [We had a +4 GD, Honduras had a -6. That's quite a difference.] The players Arena selected (including Howard) should have blown that T&T team off of the field. Its kinda almost inexplicable. Watching that game it almost looked like there was no sense of urgency. They showed up expecting to blow that T&T team off of the field......................and they forget to actually accomplish it. That's a void of leadership both in terms of coaching and on the field from the team leaders.
So Horvath starting on Belgium's top team was showing us he wasn't ready? Sure, maybe he's hit some bad form since, but he was starting weekly back then. The purpose of selecting your nat team is picking the best, most in form players (not, as so many preferred then, and apparently now, your MOST EXPERIENCED). By any stats I've seen (and the previous Rapids supporter on this thread), Howard was average/below average in MLS. You could have picked one of many MLS guys who were performing better. Once again, another "there was nothing that could have been done" US Soccer fan. While anyone could easily go back and see numerous posters here suggesting Howard be gone and a variety of other options used.
Howard was one of the guys who pushed Klinsmann out. Not trying to rehash the argument but it's true. And in a way Klinsmann did that himself with the results... Wonder who he was talking about? Chandler or Fabian Johnson? Maybe others? Howard maybe wants a job within US soccer when he retires? That's all I can think of after his comments. I would at least expect a vanilla and vague "we need to do better at youth development." Oh well.
Horvath was exposed in a way against Portugal, which is exactly why Arena couldn't trust him against T&T. That's fine. He's still an intruiging young player with a future. I can understand why he wouldn't have been selected for that do-or-die game. Howard was moooooooooooooooooore than good enough to get the job done against T&T. It just didn't happen. And Tim Howard is one of the few players that's truly taken responsibility for those failures. I respect that. Frankly, we could have chosen any MLS starter and he'd have been good enough to be part of a winner against that T&T team. Hell....................a backup like Chris Seitz would have worked.
Agreed. There were probably 10 guys that were better than Howard. And we wasn't good enough, as he gave up a 40 yarder that the other 10 guys saved. If Howard and the other old lazy guys were more than good enough, they would be in the WC.
This is exactly right. I personally believe there are things that have been improving in US soccer and need to continue improving or changing but losing and not qualifying is not the indicator of general or systemic problems but an indicator of more specific problems and issues relating to the team itself (coaching and players). The indicator of the faults of US soccer is primarily, but not solely, in the talent gap that we have in our pool. The fact that we have a significant number of quality young players coming up is probably an indicator that some of those issues have improved but there are most definitely areas that we need to change or continue to improve in. the failure to qualify, however, is more due to other reasons. The team (no matter which one you choose....those left out, Klinsmann's team(s) or Arena's team(s)) was good enough to qualify. They didn't so the issue is with the players and the coach. Were there non-soccer issues that contributed? Maybe, I am not qualified to know.
We got 10 goals in 2 games, game 3 hosting Honduras, and game 9 hosting Panama, and 7 in the other 8. That's a scoring problem, not an asset. We couldn't generate effective attacks on the road at any level at all and against Costa Rica in particular.I understand that we lead Concacaf in goal scoring but the distribution was the problem, as watching any of the road performances plust the Costa Rica match at home will show. We simply could not translate our home game, on the road, AT ALL, against anyone, save Mexico (where we actually seemed to inexplicably play better at Azteca than at home). To me that underlines your point about the T&T match. The team seemed to think they could walk onto the field in Honduras and Panama and T&T and beat them w/o much trouble and/or were just completely and totally intimidated by the heat, and difficult road conditions in terms of fan support and field conditions. i don't know what it was, but from what little I could see on streams of the games, they just looked like dog manure in terms of stringing together consecutive passes, let alone intelligent, incisive passes, and stringing together attacks? Forget about it, that wasn't happening, no matter who the opponent, long ball horror shows actually came back to the fore at times. It was the road performances in conjuniction with the you know what in the pants opening to the campaign against Mexico and at home late against Costa Rica that really were decisive and again it underlines just how bad we were. We played two great games all cycle. Two, and nobody, not one team all cycle, was great. Nobody was. Yet we could only put together two quality performances. Mexico: Better than '14, but that's easy. It's a good Mexico, getting even better, but not a great one, not yet anyway. Costa Rica: Not as good as '14 version, yet this one killed us, and that one only played to the typical standard. Honduras: Inferior to '14 version. Panama: A bit better than '14. T&T: Just bad. There really was no excuse to turn in a grand total of two great games, and a road draw against Mexico in a ful Hex. That was putrid.
To be fair, Klinsi probably saw that, acknowledged it and ran off to Germany and Mexico to recruit dual nationals. He didn't focus on recruiting dual nationals because he favored German-Americans, but because he realized that his domestic talent pool was horribly lacking and not enough to compete on the world stage. You know how bad our talent pool is if Wondo had to start for us in a WC game.
The home Panama game was not a great game. The score was great but it hid some of the weaknesses in midfield that we showed many times in the hex. We didn't control the area in front of the defenders. Whether that is Bradley's fault or Arena's fault for not playing someone that could fill that role is up to the individual fan I guess. I believe there were several choices that could have been made with the roster chosen without having to add Williams or FJ or whoever. (Williams, by the way is one of the types of player that was missing from the field but it could have been McCarty or even Acosta).
Right...................we blew our direct competition for spots 3/4 off the field at home. We also drew with them both (and Mexico) on the road. Road WCQers are tough. Take a 1-1 or 0-0 draw on the road every time. When you look at that, and you try to figure out how we didn't qualify.......................your eyes cross. It took terrible performances in games we should have won handily, and a bizarre set of circumstances in the last two weeks in terms of upsets.
Pulisic had greatly help masked our deficiencies in both CM and back line. Those games were 1 man show, and Pulisic was the man. Through out this whole entire cycle, our mid field was ran through like a train, our CB were being abused repeatedly, and our lack of speed on the full back was exploited. If you had watched the games, you probably saw that about 80% of the goals scored on us were right through the middle, and down our throat. Which meant, Bradley just got destroyed in midfield during this cycle. And no, I don't blame it on his other midfield partners, or the CBs. I expected much much more from our captain and automatic 90 min starter. Bradley was an utter failure for us this cycle.
The crazy thing is, 13 points gets us into a playoff. Over 10 games, all we needed to qualify for a playoff was 13 f'ing points. 10 games, 30 points, and we get f/ing 12. Sure, nothing systemically wrong here. Nothing to look at here.
Brad Guzan. Brad had a better year in MLS than Tim Howard in 2017. Brad is 5 years younger, and Tim had just played against Panama. Easy.
One thing somebody may have mentioned, but if nobody has, as a bellmark of how bad we were this cycle? Home and Home aggregate against the two sides with international pedigree (nobody else has any beyond us): We lost 8-2 on Aggregate to Mexico and Costa Rica In 2014: We won 4-3 on Aggregate In 2010: We lost 6-7 on aggregate (w/the finale being a home game against Costa Rica we didn't need) In 2006: We won on aggregate 6-5. In 2002: We tied on aggregate 3-3. In 1998: We tied on aggregate 5-5. That's an interesting angle to look at. You can see just looking through the previous five cycles we were essentially +1, +0 or -1 on aggregate every single time no matter what was happening in cycle, and then '18 happens and we finish -6 and give up 8 goals, while scoring our lowest total overall as well (and that includes the '98 old man US team, and the '02 team that was missing nearly all of its starting forwards and midfielders for the summer road matches in Mexico and Costa Rica, and still had a better aggregate than the '18 version). Some markers beyond quality of play, and all the rest of the numbers is the scary reality that all in all, our failure really can be connected to just three games overall and just a couple of moments: Hosting Mexico and giving up the last minute in regulation winner to Marquez, Giving up a shocking 0-2 home loss against Costa Rica (the red card not pulled looms large there) Losing 1-2 against that T&T youth/B squad (and the own goal moment/howitzer). The only positive in this horror show is that it forced some, though clearly not all, to look under the hood, instead of just at the above three moments, and consider how flawed things are, because obviously there is a lazy man's argument that we were just unlucky when clearly the rot runs far deeper.
That's the kind of thoughtful, measured, reasoned analysis that makes this forum so great! Who the ******** is saying that? The problem is that everybody and his uncle is bringing up their pet theory as to what went wrong. (Which in and of itself is stupid...it wasn't one thing, it was many.) It's like when a political party loses an election their side thinks it should have won. People whose hobby horse is foreign policy say it's because we were wrong (i.e., I disagree) on foreign policy. People obsessed with immigration say, our immigration policy was wrong. Etc. etc.
Wait, you mean if you cherry pick the results, you come up with your preferred answer? You just blew my mind! PS...how many POINTS did we get in those 4 matches, vs. our usual? Basically, there were 3 results that most hurt us. LOSING, not even drawing, but LOSING at home to Mexico, losing at home to CR, and the road loss to T&T. Change any one of those, and we're in. But really, that just shows my point...we had 3 shitty results. We underachieved by more than "one goal."
vs. "Bruce did the best he could, picked the only players he could, came up JUST short. All is well!!!!!" got it!
Do you really consider it cherry picking to take a look at our home and home's against the only two squads in Concacaf that have actually accomplished anything worth a damn at the World Cup? Do we measure ourselves against Mexico? Yes. Do we measure ourselves against the worlds elite to follow our progress? Yes. So why shouldn't we take a look at what we did in games against Mexico and Costa Rica to see if it illustrates anything interesting about the cycle historically, and it actually does. Going back twenty years, we've qualified for every single World Cup except 2018, and in every single World Cup except 2018, the Goal difference between us and those two teams, on aggregate has never swerved any higher or lower than -1 to +1. That's remarkable consistency for 20 games across 5 sets of qualification campaigns. Is there any difference in 2018? The sixth campaign since we hosted in 1994? Why yes, there is, and it's enormous. We were -6 in GD, lost at home for the first time in those six campaigns to both of those squads and got pounded more thoroughly than ever before at Costa Rica. Is that cherry picking? Really? For me it's illuminating, and if you prefer looking at the entire campaign as a whole. Like many others, I've done that as well. All of it is interesting and illuminating in a manifold of ways. I mention Costa Rica and Mexico, because beyond whining and a great deal of anger over the results in three of the games, I haven't really looked at those matches in comparison to other campaigns. Hence the post.