Match 50 (R16) - United States v Ghana - Post-Match Thread [R]

I like what Klinsmann said yesterday (linked to in my sig) that essentially the US team didn't come down from the victory over Algeria and were simply not mentally or physically prepared for the Ghana game.

Sad but true.

Man, I wish we could get him as the US coach.

 

Why in the world would we do that?! Even Brazil, the mother of beautiful attacking football, has had to come to grips with the fact that in order to win in this day and age, you must play defense first, counterattacking football?

 

EVERYONE has been saying Ghana's theatric's were over the top. Germany was carded for much less than that in their first game.

Ghana won but the theatrics were a complete and utter joke by far the worst I have ever seen. When you have a guy laying on the crowd after no one has touched him it is a joke and it is time FIFA clamp down on that crud, from all teams.

 

You didn't answer the question.

 

The reality is the USA had several breakaways with chances to score. However, each ended up with a lame shot straight at the goalie. OTOH, Ghana's striker Gyan made the most of his opportunities and made sparkling shot's even while being physically muscled by US backs. In short, we had a weak defense and strikers (our strikers haven't scored in how many matches it is some outrageous number) and they had just as bad a defense but one heck of a striker. The end result was we lost.....

 

I don't understand why it's so hard for people to see that A) Ghana was the better team and deserved to win in a tightly contested match and, simultaneously B) Samuel Inkoom is #$%@ing POS douchebag who needs a good strong kick in the nads...

 

This is often said but I don't see where it is all that turue, mostly just a wive's tale that has taken to be true because it has been around so long. true. Sure, the "elite" academy and ODP teams are heavily populated by kids who have some money but that is a relatively new phenomena and even those teams reach out to poor kids with talent. Go to any tournament and there will be teams of middle and lower class kids playing soccer. Some so poor they have uniforms bought off e-bay. There are a whole lot of hispanic teams virtually dirt poor, but those kids don't look to play for the USA, they want to play for Mexico. Mexican immigrants just don't have the ties to the USA that previous immigrants did. They are poorly assimilated.

Travel costs are the nature of the beast in the USA, you will not avoid them. I lived in Europe for 12 years and never lived anywhere that wasn't virtually an urban area. There are virtually no remote urban areas in Europe. That can't be said of the USA so you won't get away from travel costs until soccer permeates to every remote burg of the United States. That won't happen for a very long time. You don't see many rural kids playing for the national teams in Central and South America either.

Sports participation as as a whole is declining in the USA. I served 6 years on a park board and every sport we had was losing participants. Travel leagues were reaching down to elementary age because our participant level could not support local leagues. Kids want to play video games these days. If the "rich" weren't forcing their kids to get off their butts and play soccer it would hardly exist at all as even poor kids can afford an x-box these days.

Kids don't play to learn technical skills. All kids need to have some competition to stay interested even if it is pick-me-up games in the streets. It is complete and utter myth to say kids in other country's receive only technical training and no other. I watched quite a few kids soccer games in germany. Sure looked like competition to me.

Anyone who thinks soccer is going to give out some wonderous college scholarship for their son is naive. Boy's scholarships go to the a-sports like basketball and football. At best a soccer scholarship will cut down the cost of a private school to an amount that is still higher than a public school. No one is making out like a bandit from soccer scholarships for boys. Girls are a different story, the schools give out soccer scholarships to girls to balance those given to football players. There are also a LOT more girls programs than boys programs in American schools, again, to balance out football.

The term "game" by definition means some sort of competition, even chess is a competition of wits. A "game" without competition isn't worth playing. Yeah, some people practice their butts off at some sport in hopes of breaking away from grinding poverty. That is one of the reasons the NBA and football have so many poor kids in their ranks. But American kids have a lot of other opportunities, they don't need soccer to make money. Worse, MLS salaries are abysmal. We start IT staff at rates higher than most MLS players and they can expect better longevity and a pension. The average MLS guy will play for a few years and then try to grind it out in the club or coaching circuit at virtually menial wages.

In short, much of the ideas concerning youth soccer in the USA are based on generalizations that are either not true or inapplicable to the USA.

 

Yes I did, when you say someone is "over the top" it means they did it more than others. By definition I am saying that while other people do it Ghana did it to ridiculous lengths. You must not be from the USA.

 

Isn't that what I said? Last I heard, saying someone had better strikers is saying they had a better team.

 

I made the mistake of watching the game with a friend from Ghana, which made it even more of a downer than it would otherwise have been! The U.S. was thoroughly thrashed in every aspect of the game. The U.S. has a lot of athletes but very few players. From ODP on up, coaches value athleticism over skill, thinking, incorrectly, that they can coach skill. However, for the game to be instinctive to the point of having the finishing touch without any need for thought, you need the kid who spends all of his spare time with the ball, using both feet, from the time he can walk. You need kids that play enough without adult interference that they also know how to play without the ball instead of standing around waiting like most of the U.S. side. The game has to be a passion in order for a player to become great. The U.S. team showed it was capable of passion, but only when on the ropes.

 

Listen to Klinsmann:

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-.../us/us-scatters-pondering-been?cc=5901&ver=us

 

In this part of the world the biggest part of the population is urban and not rural as you may think, but if you really knew it, proportionally, most of the greatest and talented players come precisely from the rural places or small urbanized cities and some from the poorest parts of the big cities, but what do you expect ?, some kids don`t even have anything to eat, so to have an unexpensive fun, all you need is a ball to play with, besides if you end up being good at it, well,.......... ask Maradona or Pelé, where they came from.

True. In the case of my country, mostly done in streets and in unprepared fields (dirt). Sometimes the goal zone is demarked only with a couple of stones in the ground or a couple of guys take off their jackets and puts them on the floor, it works and by no way expensive.

If you ask about it to the Brazilian fans back at Brazil, they hate to their gutts as how Brazil is playing nowdays, and the only reason why Mr. Dunga is still on charge of the team is because he is still obtaining good results, but almost everybody back in Brazil, only want him to fail in order to expell him from the management of the National Team. They have difficulty trying to understand how is it possible that with all the talent that exists in their country, Mr. Dunga, keeps on trusting in such a defensive style of playing the game. Of course their patriotism makes them cellebrate Brazils victories, but that doesn`t mean that they like how their NT is performing. For most of their fans, they think that with this style of playing they are loosing their advantage in relation to the rest of the world and going back in their advancement and development, so if Mr. Dunga doesn`t end up being World champion in this WC, it is highly probable that he will no longer be in charge of the NT, and if he does, every future peformance will also put his continuity in stake for the same reasons. Brazilians love beautiful playing (jogo bonito) and attacking in Football, thats the reason they love to play with us (Chile), because our style allows them to play with some restrictions in the same style, and therefore they beat the "s***" out of us, as what happened today. The team that mosts wants to play with us all the time is Brazil. We are tired of loosing with them, but we also love to play openly (we sure are fools, don`t you think?, but whatever, style imposes it.........
But we die with style....).

 

Your summary here is a bit off. There are 1000's and 1000's of scholarships in men soccers. The best players always get full rides, and the lesser (but still good enough) players split the full rides to become partials. Full rides are pretty common.

 

Thanks for #1, we were deffo the better team?

What did Inkoom do? Pull a muscle, lie on the field, get stretchered off and replaced by Muntari? That's a crime?

 

Thank you

Reading some comments here, I felt like some have just started watching football and are not used to the concept of time-wasting. Every team with the lead wastes time.

 

It's not the concept, most who have watched/played understand it. It's a question of degree. In this particular case, I thought Ghana was pushing the envelope somewhat.

To his credit, the referee added 3 minutes at the end of the second overtime, which I thought was fair as to the amount of time wasted in the second overtime. He would have been justified in adding 3 to the end of the first overtime as well.

Now, would it have made a difference? Nobody knows, but the fightbacks from all four matches had clearly taken their toll by the end of the first overtime. The Americans gave all they had, but their play in the second overtime was that of a team so fatigued that they couldn't put any passes together, and many of the players on both sides looked ready to cramp up or fall over (to that extent, the extra time-wasting by Ghana, while frustrating to watch, is understandable).

Add the burden of having to claw back from the second goal early in overtime, and my gut says that 3 extra minutes would have made no difference.

Ghana were the better side on Saturday. Their control of the midfield was expected. Their much improved finishing vis a vis recent matches, and a very strong goalkeeping performance were the (only slightly unexpected) difference. The USA had chances, but our finishing was dismal, and no team can continue to give away early goals, be forced to repeatedly overcome those deficits, and not eventually find that the tank has been drained.

That Ghana have gotten this far without Essian is remarkable, and the young talent coming up is impressive. Good luck to the Black Stars, hoping to see them reach the semis as Africa's first representative there.

 

Soccerdaddy pretty much nails it.
In Europe and Latin America, virtually every boy grows up with a soccer ball permanently attached to his foot.
Every school, office, shop,etc. has some sort of team that is part of some sort of amateur league.
This is not the case in the U.S., far from it.
For the vast majority of Americans, soccer is a game for little girls (and a social opportunity for their moms) in which we 'don't keep score because everyone is a winner'.
In Europe and Latin America, it's the modern equivalent of religious warfare.

Also, in America, we are kind of conditioned to think in terms of 'bigger is better' when it comes to athletes. (And not just athletes....)
Many sports popular in the U.S. emphasize height, body builder physique or just plain mass.
In soccer, you don't have to be 6'8, you don't need to look like the Hulk and weighing 350 lbs. will definitely not help your cause.
Soccer, on the other hand, is a sport in which average size guys (or people) can excel. American popular culture, however, tends to portray such guys as wimpy losers.
Versus the 6'8 body builder who can throw a car through a window with one hand while bench pressing a train with the other.
The soccer moms LOVE his movies........

 

This is a big point to be made. It's one of the reasons I'm becoming a major fan of soccer. Some sports like the NFL you could understand the emphasis on player size. American football is probably the most physically-draining sport in the world...it's a contact sport so obviously the bigger you are, the less chance there is of you suffering some major injury (even though guys still get hurt all the time). Even though I'd say soccer players have the most endurance of any athlete in the world. It's a major gripe of mine, but it's not the reason I think soccer is being held back here. We just don't have the proper homegrown culture for it. There aren't enough amateur leagues where talented guys can go and learn to play and hone their craft. There's very little emphasis put on the sport and the only time people want to watch it is during the World Cup. Until there is a system set up to find young talent (15-22) and bring them into the fold, I don't see US soccer going anywhere anytime soon. We can't treat soccer like football or basketball and hope to excel on the World stage.

 

I am surprised everybody is blaming coach Bradly who imo is one of the best coaches in the world. Same thing happened 4 yrs ago when Ghana beat US in Germany. Bruce was fired immediately after the loss because to many, there is no way Ghana, a poor country should defeat the US. I must admit that the US has a very good team that is capable of beating any team in the world but what many don't realize is that Ghana isn't a push over either.
Just take a look at the success they have achieved in youth soccer. Only Brazil, Argentina and a few European countries have achieved that. In Africa, they are second to Egypt so why underrate such a team?
In 2006, while the Italian coach Lippi traveled to Egypt to monitor the Ghanaian players in the African nations cup, the US media made it seem like it wasn't worth Bruce' time to do that because to them, there is no way a country like Ghana can beat the US. WRONG.
My friends, I am sorry to say this but not until many of you realize and admit that Ghana is a good SOCCER nation...
Hopefully, I didn't offend anyone with this post.

 

Naa...I agree with him. I wish there were a way for me to watch African soccer on TV in America, because I would probably pay just to see Ghana play year in and year out. I really like this team and think if there's any African nation that will win a World Cup...it's Ghana. But let's be real, people will always underrate African teams no matter how good the players are. And don't tell me it's because an African team has never won a WC. There are plenty of European countries that haven't won a WC either, but they're given the benefit of the doubt. Then when a WC comes around and an "elite" team loses to an African team, people are shocked. There were plenty of people who posted in the pre-game thread that acted as if a USA win was a lock. So Potash is not exxagerating.

 

That was gut wrenching stuff.

Especially seeing how we missed two extremely easy chances. But I guess with all the pressure and the magnitude of the WC added I can understand that it makes it a bit tougher.

Still wondering about Bradley's decision-making throughout the cup though. The players saved him in the group stage. But maybe it's time to move our national team in another direction.