On haters and goal posts

Ahhhh, fickle American media, how I love thee.  To them, the only thing that's better than a big national success is a big national failure in an unappreciated sport.  After months of unjustified hype, we go out and lay an egg in our opening World Cup game against the Czech Republic.  And now, all of a sudden, we're declared the biggest disappointment since Ryan Leif's rookie season (BURN!) or Charlize Theron's choice of Oscar dress (DOUBLE BURN!).  I'd like to say that I expected a little more class, but I honestly didn't.  So instead I'm hearing uninformed analysts going on about how our inevitable early exit is going to be such a huge disappointment and I'm hearing depressingly little about what we need to do to beat Italy on Saturday.  How about a little national pride?  A little optimism?  Hellz no, bitches, we like rubbing people's faces in their failures WAAAY more.  America == KICKASS.

But now for the game itself.  Pretty much any soccer analyst who had any idea what they were talking about knew that our chances of a win were pretty slim.  We don't match up against the Czech Republic well at all:  they have a big, athletic team and we don't.  Size, height, and strength are far from everything in soccer, but they make your job a hell of a lot easier.  You can loft the ball into the box and generate a lot of threats through the air, you can muscle the opposing strikers and midfielders off the ball, the list goes on.  Granted, we've added a lot of size since 2002 in the form of guys like Oguchi Onyewu, Eddie Johnson, and Brian Ching, but the Czech team still outweighs us by a large margin.  I mean, how do you defend a guy like Jan Koeller?  He's like 20 feet tall, eats a dozen steaks in a single sitting, bench-presses Volkswagens, and can fire lightning bolts from his ass.  I exagerate, of course, but not by much.  It would be nice if our best athletes played soccer (as Mike from That's On Point remarked a while ago, "wouldn't it be great to see LeBron run over a skinny little Spanish defender?") but, alas, it's not to be.  Couple all of this with a ton of international experience on the Czech team, some very gifted shooters, and one of the best keepers in the Cup and our prognosis was . . . negative. We needed to come out and play smart defense from the start and not give them space to serve the ball into the box.  That means limiting corner kicks and set pieces near our own goal.  It's a difficult task, but not impossible:  we have a smart, stingy, experienced defense that might have pulled this off.  On the offensive end, we needed to play possession football.  We weren't going to win the size battle in the box, so we needed crisp passing and some decent runs to make things happen.  Donovan and Beasley had proven that they could do this in 2002 so while we had a very difficult task ahead of us, we had a chance.  Koeller got the early goal off of a header (big surprise), but I feel we played decently for most of the first half:  our possession was good in the midfield even though we couldn't finish in the Czech third of the field and Reyna had that fantastic shot off of the left post, but Rossicky's first goal (off of a FANTASTIC shot) killed us.  We had a chance to go into the locker room only down 1-0, but Onyewu made a poor clearance (one of his few mistakes to that point) and they made us pay for it.

How would the game have changed if Reyna's shot had been a few inches to the right?  Dramatically, in my opinion.  Bruce Arena would have dropped pretty much everybody back at that point and played for the tie and our team as a whole would have gotten a huge infusion of energy.  But down 2-0 at halftime, we had to try to play aggressively during the second half for a chance to tie.  That was something, however, that we did not do:  we panicked, our passing was terrible, and we couldn't threaten at all.  Reyna's miss proved to be the only legitimate chance at a goal that we would have.  Final thoughts?  Yes, we played crappy, but we were overmatched by the Czechs.  My hat goes off to them:  they simply have a much better team and they showed it.  The best that we could have hoped for realistically was a draw, but we were about three inches away from having a legitimate shot at that. As for Italy next week, we will also have a difficult task before us, but a much better chance at pulling it off.  Italy doesn't have the size advantage that the Czech Republic does and so I think our defense will prove to be a lot more effective.  Up front, Italy has a well-coached defense but we'll have more success running at them than we did against the Czechs.  I think we need to get Eddie Johnson on the field early and give Brian McBride a chance at some headers in the box.  But we also need guys like Donovan and Beasley to snap out of their slumps and actually start playing some fucking football.  Like it or not, they're the future of this team:  they showed the ability to give us some fantastic play in 2002 but they both looked flat during the latter half of qualifying and through the first game.  Having any sort of realistic chance at continuing on rests on us winning out through the rest of group play so Team USA basically needs to just cowboy up and play some ball.

So fire up your televizzle at 2:55 PM EST on Saturday, tune to ABC, and show the Red, White, and Blue some love.