The US Men’s National Team suffered a sobering 4-2 defeat to Mexico in the Gold Cup Final on Saturday night. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA was host to over 90k soccer fans.
The Good
- the first 20 minutes
- freddy adu
- national awareness of soccer
The Bad
- clunky, predicatable playing style
- tim howard
- defensive line
Do we need better players or a new strategy?
Says ESPN’s James Martin:
But the ease at which El Tri was able to get behind the U.S. back line with simple diagonal balls, you’d have thought they’d devised some revolutionary way to play the game. Does the U.S.’s inability to handle these types of basic situations come down to skill, or coaching, or both? These discussions wouldn’t have been front and center if the Americans had won. But they should be now. via ESPN
Right on. There was a point in the first half where we were up by two and yet continued to play like we were down a goal in the 90th minute. On first viewing, it was difficult to associate fault with a particular area of the team. Everyone was making mistakes and no one grabbed the game by the scruff. Where was the maturity in the side? For all this talk about an aging back line (Bocanegra age 32, Cherundulo 32, Gooch 29, Goodson 29) there was little cohesiveness or maturity shown.
Tim Howard’s Gripe
“CONCACAF should be ashamed of itself,” Howard told Yahoo! Sports. “I think it was an [expletive] disgrace that the entire post-match ceremony was held in Spanish. You can bet your [expletive] if we were in Mexico City it wouldn’t all be in English.” – Tim Howard via goal.com
Nobody will disagree with you, Tim. Nor does anyone really care about that at the moment.
