Saturday, February 9, 2013

U.S. Men’s National Team v. Honduras, San Pedro Sula, 2.6.13



Not so long ago, the U.S. men’s national team was known for having players who would make up for a lack of world-class quality by playing hard. We had guys like Brian McBride and Alexi Lalas, who would not only play fearlessly, but bring it for the full ninety minutes. So I find it strange, borderline bizarre actually, that head coach Jurgen Klinnsman has repeatedly singled out physical fitness as a problem for U.S. soccer players. As a recent article in The Wall Street Journal noted, Klinsmann believes that previous U.S. teams “weren't physically or mentally conditioned to press opponents with the relentlessness of the best teams in the world. Long a believer in the constant monitoring of players, Klinsmann has instilled a system of regularly testing the team's strength and fitness and proscribing specific training regimens so each player can mitigate his deficiencies.”
If Saturday’s 2-1 World Cup qualifying loss to Honduras is any indication, the U.S. players are not responding well to Klinsmann’s program. Almost to a man, they looked gassed. There are good reasons for this. For one, many U.S. players performed in games over the weekend, and then had to travel great distances to get to Honduras. (Most games were on Saturday, but critical U.S. forward/midfielder Clint Dempsey played on Sunday.) And not only do many of our national team players work for clubs in northern Europe, many of them also grew up there. Four U.S. starters on Wednesday grew up in Klinsmann’s native Germany and play their club ball in the Bundesliga. In any case, it should go without saying that traveling in February from England or Germany to play a game in the hot and humid weather of Honduras is bound to take a physical toll.
Still, I find it ironic and a little irritating that Klinsmann has singled out a U.S. strength—or a widely perceived U.S. strength—as a deficiency, and then, it seems, actually turned that strength into a deficiency. I’ve seen dozens of U.S. national team games, and I can’t recall a match that was as bad, in terms of overall physical effort, as Wednesday’s performance against Honduras. In my mind, the worst offender was Timmy Chandler, who is one of those German-bred players I mentioned and a soccer product of all that Klinsmann extols. Well, Chandler may come from a country and a league that has conditioned him to “press opponents with the relentlessness of the best teams in the world,” but that conditioning was nowhere on display against Honduras. Chandler was so exhausted he might have gotten laughed out of an old-timers’ game. When he was picked apart and nutmegged by a Honduras attacker in the second half, he look like a member of an improv comedy troupe who’d been told to “freeze.” That’s not an image you want to associate with your national team’s right back in a World Cup qualifier.
One final word on the subject of fitness and U.S. players. If Klinsmann really puts a premium on fitness, and given this particular game played in Honduras, why oh why didn’t he play Herculez Gomez? There is no U.S. national team player over the past year, up to and including Michael Bradley, who has run as consistently hard and played as tenaciously as Gomez. To add to that, Gomez plays in Mexico—not far-off, chilly Europe—and knows all about playing in front of hostile crowds, as this Grant Wahl piece makes clear. I can understand not playing Edgar Castillo and Jose Torres, both of whom also play in Mexico but who can be shaky defenders, but the U.S. clearly would have benefitted from Gomez’s constant application of pressure high up the field and from his willingness to track back into the defensive third.
There were a few other noteworthy facts about this game. Chandler and fellow defender Omar Gonzales are now “cap-tied” to the U.S., which (despite Chandler’s performance on this occasion) is reason to celebrate. (Chandler, readers will recall, had held out hope of playing for Germany, and Gonzalez was, until Wednesday, eligible to play for Mexico.) Gonzalez had an unfortunate hand in Honduras’s game-winning goal, failing to mark New England Revolution striker Jerry Bengtson on the play, but other than that he had a decent game, pace many of the media player ratings I’ve seen. Also, the U.S.’s lone goal was a beauty, a one-time, over-the-shoulder volley by Clint Dempsey, courtesy of a beautifully weighted chip by Jermaine Jones (there’s a clause you don’t read every day). Almost unbelievably, Honduras responded with an even more breathtaking goal, a laser bicycle kick in a crowded U.S. box by fullback Juan Carlos Garcia. All U.S. keeper Tim Howard could do after the shot rocketed past his head was clap both his hands over his face in stunned disbelief.

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