So as I sit enjoying my morning coffee I find myself thinking about this subject. A couple of thoughts:
With very few exceptions, USMNT lacks an identity. The years we have had an identity it was "gritty team". When you go play England, right wrong or indifferent, they play or always have played English style soccer( direct) ( probably not by best lead example) if you are going tonplay against Brazil it's going to be free flowing samba, the Germans will always be competitive with their system of players and understand if x gets to y be at 1 ready foe the ball.
We don't, and never have, had that. We have tried to play like the English, We have tried t oplay like more like mexico 1v1, right now we are trying to play the perfect Arsen Wenger (maybe) "football" ( **** you Gregg, this is america) where we try to make the perfect pass, and the run behind space, and if you just always use perfect angles you really don't have to shoot you can just play everybody out of the play and pass it in.
We need an identity and frankly that identity needs to be super simple to start eith, let's get back to "gritty" and being a super in shape team that no one really wants to play.
It's easy to spend others money but US soccer needs to buy a #1 head coach. Right now they have a little bit of a three headed monster, similar to Iowa football offense, where we can't really point at the players because we don't know if the coaches are good, we can't really fault the coaches because our youth system isn't great, you can't really fault the system because the best players often come from street corners playing with balls with no covers. So you really can't fix anything. It's nor qb the line sucks, it's not the line the play sucks, it's not the play the qb can't throw the ball. Oroboros.
Go buy a "Klopp" and take it from 3 variables to 2 and actually start making improvements.
At risk of turning this political, it is very obvious there is a inverse relationship between comfort and performance. Todays players are the most skilled players we have ever had and I'm not joking when I say those decent John Harks, Eddie stuart, Eddie pope, Landon teams, ON A SHITTY WEATHER DAY, would kick the shit out of today's team, and today's team has exponentially more talent. We are soft, and frankly I think that's permeated the woman's side as well.
To continue that a little, Carli Lyod said something last night that I bet would make today's youth players shit themselves. "We won championships and we HATED our coach". That doesn't exist in today's society. In 2004 Bill Keoppen had been coaching at drake for many years. We had put together a usysl team to go compete in nationals after winning regionals. I was 17 ish... I had a "soft" practice. In the middle of practice at a aliber fields he stopped practice and in front of everyone yells "you want a shot at the champ" asking me if I wanted to fight him, a grown man. When I told my mother what had happened, without pause she looked at me and said, "you have nationals next week, why are you practicing soft".
Somewhere in the mid teens the parents finally removed Bill Keoppen from Des Moines Soccer. ( I was in Nebraska)
We don't need abuse, but we are soft, and it shows up in pressure games.
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