There's no question that despite having an actual set piece coach...............the USMNT at the world cup was awful on set pieces. That was something we saw all during qualifying too. Its something we'd like to see some improvement on. In the past, we did have some guys who were excellent. Carlos Bocanegra wasn't the biggest/tallest dude. But damn if he wasn't a beast on corners. Scored 14 goals for the USMNT. If you asked people who scored the most USMNT goals out of Clint Mathis, Eddie Lewis, Jordan Morris, Hugo Perez, Tab Ramos, Claudio Reyna, or Carlos Bocanegra...........how many people do we think would get it right? Michael Bradley was also a beast on corners and such. We don't have the bulk on the roster that we used to. Michael Bradley is 6'1". Tyler Adams is 5'9". Michael Bradley had 17 USMNT goals. Adams has 1. Set pieces, set pieces, set pieces. To this day I think there's a group of fans who only saw the declining 2018 cycle version of Michael Bradley.................and don't realize just how good he was in his prime.
They already had 2 chances to do it in Jan. They didn't have a 6. Why didn't they play a cb instead? Now, it's true they didn't have any Euros available in the window. If you never do it because there's always an excuse to not do it, we'll never do it and be just as naive in 2026 as we were in 2022. There are ways we can arrange the roster so we can move quickly between a 352 and 433. We can use Sands, Dest, Arriola, e.g. as pieces that can be moved around. To me it seems like Berhalter and a lot of the players were too rigid because they're not all that smart in football. If the players were unable to follow Berhalter's instructions as he claimed just 3 months before Qatar, maybe he should have found other players. We are playing Grenada away in March which would be a good opportunity to start training something new. Or we could just sit back afterwards and go "good thing we have Adams and we should be fine as long as he stays healthy." Actually, that isn't even true because Adams tended to play with 3 cb's when he was at Leipzig or as a fb/cm hybrid a la Lewis at Man City. Adams was our best progressive passer of the 3 midfielders but because we played with 2 cb's (against Holland who played with 3!) Adams was stuck in a double team in the middle because he had to protect the center where we could have played a 3rd cb. This meant we were trying to get the ball to our worst passers. Yet people seem happy just sitting back and watching futility rather than doing something about it.
I've read on social media (because of course you should always believe everything on social media) that Zendejas has chosen to commit himself to the USMNT and will accept a cap-tying call up for Nations League this month. This is the most substantiation that I could find online: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/f...Zendejas-25-commits-national-team-Mexico.html