PBP: 2022 CONCACAF U-20 Championships, Semifinals: USA vs. Honduras, 7/1 @ 9 PM EDT

While last night was the more important game, playing for a cup is never meaningless.

 

That's my point! But in a single elimination tournament, you have to win every game.

So you can't treat it like a league table and the play the long game. If there's a really important game, you have to put your best foot forward. And even if you have a strong talent advantage, you just might lose.

I agree we've been dominant. I don't think that dominance = the level of certainty of winning a single game that seems to be implied.

That's all.

 

I want the silverware, but the big focus for me was the Olympics.

It's been so long, I think we've forgotten how much fun they could be. So if we do lose tomorrow (and we've got to be big favorites), I'll still be pretty happy.

 

I'm using the league table to show the level we are playing at, and how it predicts for the future. If we had lost yesterday because we hit the post 5 times after dominating, and the referee gives a phantom PK in the 90th minute for Honduras, the result stings, but fans should be able to see the bigger picture that we've vastly outplayed all of these teams, and what we've seen in this tournament projects well in the future for our senior team's success.

Many years ago we weren't capable of playing at this level. We weren't that much better than these teams. Now, we are that much better than a team like Honduras where we should be imposing ourselves on them on the road.

 

Why do you feel sorry for the fans? They saw a great performance, just not from their team. Ten years from now they could say they saw the greatness in Paxton Aaronson (or fill in blank) when he was a teenager before he was a Champions League winner.

 

Right?

I'm just saying that it doesn't translate to guaranteed wins at the individual game level.

 

I sure don't. Nothing is more awesome than crushing their fans' souls.

The one sport that Central Americans countries are supposedly better than the US at is the one that the US has taken away from them.

 

i guess I need to go back and look, but my memory is that the US has been on again off again dominant at youth levels in concacaf for 20+ years. This is an on again moment, but means nothing by itself about the next cycle or the senior team. Top senior teams need 30 top youth teams worth of players to make a roster. Too many things happen between 19 and 25 from injury to medical school to be too sure of anything.

 

4. Winning this tournament for the third time in a row / getting another trophy
3. Qualifying for the U-20 World Cup
2. Qualifying for the Olympics
1. Beating our #1 rivals Mexico

By some measures already a failure

 

Inexperienced teams? This is a tournament, experienced players put games away early and play the 2nd half like you know you have a game in the next round.

 

The flow of talent has accelerated pretty consistently since the 2015 cycle. The players are just flat out better in terms of ceiling, floor than previous decades, and there are far more of them at this level than there ever have been before. That's the difference. The elite talent is heavier in supply than ever before and the supply itself of talent is order of magnitude better, hell one of the easiest ways of showing it is that in previous decades our U17 and U20 and U23 teams were made up of our very best players, starting in 2017 that started changing (no McKennie, no Perez, no Taitague, no Haji Wright (though that seemed a choice)), and since then more and more of our first choice options haven't been released because "they're too good". I feel like this started with Novokovich and Reading in 2015 and has just accelerated rapidly since then.

More talent, more elite talent, more high floor talent. Probably the best way to illustrate it is how many minutes our U23, U20, U19 or whatever players are getting in big 5 leagues. We have suddenly arrived in a situation where depending upon which cohort, we're consistently top 5-8 in the world across the board in all the metrics.

That simply wasn't true AT ALL, in previous decades, and it's built with players that are '97's, '98's, '99's-'04's etc. So it's not just a good year or two or three, at this point it spans 7 years worth of age cohorts and it continues apace (and technically i think you could see elements of this in 1995 and 1996). Hell our U19's beat the UEFA U19 champion England 2-1 just a couple of weeks ago and it made no news whatsoever that this happened, I can't find coverage anywhere for the performance (I still don't know if they beat Norway in the following game), nor footage anywhere. Apparently it was a mini-tune up tournament before the final games of the UEFA championships (England beat Italy 2-1 in the semi's, Israel beat France 2-0 in a shocker, and then England beat Israel 3-1 AET to win the championship).

So yep, this thing we got going, it's just happening, period. I still haven't found convincing explanations for the disaster that was 1990-1995, but we can trace nearly all of this to the growth of the game the past decade and the development of MLS and USL academy development. It should get better in time, not worse, but actually better.

 

Somewhere in all that a Conan the Barbarian quote is lurking...