With the announcements this week of the Olympic qualifying roster for the U23 team and the World Youth Championship roster for the U20 team, we're about to have several new players cap-tied to the US, presuming they play in any of the games. From the 23s, the following players are currently not cap-tied to the US. Nat Borchers David Stokes David Testo Chris Wingert And from the 20s, the following players are not cap-tied. Arturo Alvarez Clint Dempsey Drew Moor Zak Whitbread Ford Williams Now, obviously the big one here is Whitbread and, to a lesser degree, Alvarez, who could play for El Salvador. I don't even know if any of the other 7 players even have ties to another country that would allow them to play for them but you never know - better safe than sorry.
I thought that under the new rules, though, even if these guys play with the U23s or U20s, they're still free to play for some other country's senior national team?
Under new fifa rules, a player can choose "one-time" to play for a national team other than the one he played youth games for if he meets the citizenship requirements.
How does the U23 process work? Will they be holding a series of camps and games to form the team? I guess this will be JK first job. SM, how soon will they announce anything? It has to be after they announce the USMNT coach.
There's no realy rush as the first stage of qualifying isn't until late 2007. It's glossed over a lot here, but it's worth noting that what did us in last time was the absolute asinine format of the last qualifying round where the reward for winning our group undefeated was a winner take all knockout match against Mexico in Mexico. That better have changed.
I suppose this is why the Dutch U-17 GK is going to a U.S. U-20 camp too... Wants to see if he sees a better future (or, at least, a better chance of making a WYC roster) with one team or the other. Once you get past that level at GK more than any other position, it's a crapshoot.
Borchers, Stokes, Testo and Wingert? Boy, that's a good reminder to those who project the current U-17s as future Nats starters.
Well, seeing as how the last two US U23/Olympic coaches are dead, it could be no one is in a hurry to fill the job. OK, that was a morbid attempt at humor, but still, sadly, true. As for how it is going to work, it's hard to say because the precedent isn't being followed. In the past, the USSF had the Olympic coach named very early and as soon as the first half of the four year cycle (in this case that would be the 85/86s from the last U20 team) finished their U20 play, the U23 coach started calling them in with camps and games, etc... Clive Charles had U23 games and camps late in 97 and early in 98, closer to the previous (96) Olympics than the next (00) one. Mooch Myernick had his first U23 camp very early in 02. Both times, who the U23 coach was known well in advance of those camps. In the case of this cycle, we'll be more than 2 1/2 years removed from the last Olympics before we start gathering and the players from the last cycle will be a year and a half removed from having any YNT time together. In theory, a new coach will have a camp, presumably with the top U20 players from the last cycle and perhaps several of the stalwarts on the current U20 side, and will play a game or two. But, as things stand now, we don't know. Presumably, we'll have qualifying for the Olympics early in 08, so the clock is ticking and it's looking more and more like our players won't be getting a lot of time together.
This is a perfect reminder of why we lost that olympic cycle. We had no talent in the back. Testo also was considered a stupid pick at the time, he barely was even good enough to parly U-23 experience to an MLS job. The 3 backs really were about our only pro available choices, thankfully more and more defenders are getting earlier pro experience. Man were we thin back then. I'd take our current U-20's against that side and we probably would have more combined pro experience in the 20's.
Well Stokes and Testo were both eyebrow raisers at the time anyway, and Borchers isn't really a bad defender at the moment and may have more USMNT caps in his future. Wingert? Well we've always had problems at fullback, and he's not an awful player.
Yeah those were problems, but the ridiculous qualifying system was the main culprit. We qualify under virtually any reasonable scenario. Even with the silly format, we likely qualify if Mexico wins their group instead of finishing second. I hope they fix it this time around.
Here's the final U-23 roster. Onyewu, Casey, Martino, Buddle and Rico Clark were unavailable (their teams wouldn't release the first two, Martino, Buddle and Clark were injured): Code: Beasley, DaMarcus Beckerman, Kyle Borchers, Nat Burciaga, Jose Luis Carroll, Brian Convey, Bobby Countess, D.J. Davis, Brad Donovan, Landon Eskandarian, Alecko Gaven, Eddie Johnson, Ed Lewis, Ricky Marshall, Chad Pause, Logan Stokes, David Testo, David Warren, Doug Whitbread, Zak Wingert, Chris Notable omissions (1981-1984 birthyears) using hindsight: Troy Perkins, Nate Jaqua, Matt Pickens, Josh Gros, Chris Rolfe, Clint Dempsey, Bobby Boswell, Drew Moor, Michael Parkhurst, Heath Pearce, Brad Guzan, Santino Quaranta, Justin Mapp, Kenny Cooper, Jonathan Bornstein. Plus there was Freddy. At the time the only real questionable omission was Mapp who had just played well for the best team in MLS and had a good U20s. Jaqua also might have been, but we had a pretty good forward corps. Had we qualified, Dempsey would have had an excellent chance at making a late run. Quaranta missed out because he had just played dire for the U20s and got benched in favor of Freddy and wasn't doing much in MLS either. The rest would have been hard to come up with.
That's a decent enough amount of talent not to lose 4:0, even if it was at Mexico. BTW, I actually liked Testo last year (2005) with Columbus. He was a decent enough left wing by MLS standards. Sigi waived him but then had to trade for Burch, who's not as good. Testo meanwhile went up to Vancouver and scored 7 goals with 6 assists (regular + play-offs) in about 1,600 minutes (~ 18 matches worth) for the USL Champs. That's a pretty decent year.