Team Canada forward Tajon Buchanan, right, chases the ball against Team USA defender Cameron Carter-Vickers during the first half of the Concacaf Nations League third place match at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on Mar 23.Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Reuters
In terms of big world events, one gets the strong sense there isn’t much to look forward to in the very immediate future. The goings-on they’re likely to remember a generation from now may not be great for us Canadians.
But here’s one little thing – the U.S.A. is going to be terrible at its own World Cup. There is now the very real possibility of an honest-to-God faceplant on the global stage.
That’s the big take-away from the CONCACAF Nations League that just finished in Inglewood, Calif. The U.S. didn’t just lose two in a row to teams it would have seen as inferior competition in Panama and Canada. It got worked by those two teams. Panama rope-a-doped it. Canada outhustled it.
In both instances, its shiny new head coach, Mauricio Pochettino, came out afterward looking like he was beginning to seriously regret he’d taken the job.
After the first loss, Pochettino ripped his team. The done thing after losing again would be to praise it faintly, in the hopes that carrots work better than sticks. But he couldn’t get himself there.
“Now is the time to be calm,” he said.
Soccer coach translator: Now is the time to be worried.
“Here is not to blame,” he said.
Translator: I’ll be doing my blaming in a few minutes on the bus.
“It is not to find who is guilty.”
Translator: Someone is guilty.
Pochettino – who has the wonderful habit of seeming to skip every sixth or seventh word in a sentence, turning all answers into Zen koans – was asked if his team was at “a crossroads.”
“Who knows?” he said, which is the most un-American answer one might imagine. What is this? Philosophy class? Isn’t Pochettino worried about his federal funding being pulled?
His repeated long answers boiled down to, ‘Things are terrible; the World Cup is a year away; maybe they won’t be terrible then.’
“If we will be today, in this situation, in one year time, I will tell you, for sure, Houston, we have a problem,” he said, to general mirth.
I’m not sure Pochettino can find Texas on a map, but this is a man who’s coached a lot of big teams that should have been better. He knows when he has a problem.
On audio, the U.S. is a great team. Just listen to the players. They’ve spent the past 30 years telling the accomplished soccer world they are a hidden juggernaut. Just you wait.
They made the knockout rounds of the last World Cup – where they were thumped by the Netherlands – and that seemed to be good enough for them.
The real story out of Qatar was chaos in the American camp. The parents of Gio Reyna, one of the team’s most promising players, tried to get the head coach fired. It didn’t work, but only temporarily.
The U.S. federation dithered with the decision for months and months, finally deciding to go with Pochettino. Once he’d taken the job, more months were lost as they waited for him to show up. He finally did last October.
Talk about the importance of tactical systems is overblown in every sport. You ever notice how football quarterbacks – guys who have to memorize a phone book at every new job – never complain about it? It’s because they have a real problem. It doesn’t require public relations. In every other sport, it does.
Still, learning a new type of play, under a new coach, with a very different approach (see above) is an uphill climb at the international level. Pochettino and his team will only have all the players together another half-dozen times before the World Cup starts.
If they were winning, then great. Those windows could be devoted to teaching and team building. But they’re not, which means they must be devoted to winning. It’s not hard to imagine how a team like that could enter a degrading orbit. One can’t say if the Americans like each other, but based on their play, they don’t seem to talk to each other much. Even the amateur eye can see how disjointed they are. Lots of long runs into traffic, and a defence that comes apart like a matchstick castle as soon as a ball is passed vertically. They are fast, but Canada’s faster. They’re tough, but Panama was tougher. They have no cunning, and Mexico is nothing but.
That’s just CONCACAF. As promising as this part of the world permanently is, it’s nothing compared to the established bullies of Europe and South America. If the U.S. gets dropped in a group with the likes of Uruguay or Portugal, it’s going to lose all its lunch money. Whatever tiny bit of hope it shows up with will be snatched away and stomped on.
If the problem was finding people to play this or that position, then that’s fixable. But the American issue is general. They’re bad for the same reason as all highly skilled, failing teams – they just don’t have mojo. No self-confidence. No team feeling. No evident pride.
Just because a guy’s good at something doesn’t mean he cares. The U.S. plays like it doesn’t care.
If you’d drawn a dotted line from the last U.S.-based World Cup in 1994 to next year, you’d have guessed this would be the American soccer century. They have the talent pool, the money and, after ‘94, the inclination.
Instead, they will come into next year’s big event a disaster waiting to happen while the whole world roots against them. Should their president show up at any game, their own crowd might boo them. How delicious.
There’s nothing noble about enjoying the prospect of someone else’s failure. Just because they are small, that doesn’t make you any bigger. Remembering that is a good rule for life.
But sometimes it feels good to break a rule.