USA in Gold Cup

The USA won 4-0 with its B-team against Grenada yesterday. No, the game was not in the same hemisphere as USA vs. Brazil or USA vs. Spain, but it was a good chance to work out some new players.

With the lot, I was well impressed with Robbie Rogers, who created the first 2 goals and capped his fine performance by scoring the 3rd. With his good looks, he has the potential to be promoted as US soccer's poster boy if he can hold down a starting position in the MNT.

I also enjoyed watching Kyle Beckerman and his long passes. He still made too many mistakes to be worth considered a starter, but our team can greatly benefit with a player like him.

A lot of players showed promises but it's hard to tell against such weak opponent. Freddy Adu, though with the opening goal, was quite disappointing. Our team can use somebody like him to break down defenses when our opponent decides to close it down, but he did not have the fitness nor the confidence yesterday.

The pairing of Adu and golden boy Charlie Davies was also a mismatch. I personally like our team to have a hard-nosed center-forward. Let's hope we can find one for the World Cup from this tournament.

Bradley Gave It Away

It was a devastating loss. It took me 3 days to recover, and I'm still not sure that I have. If you told me before the game that we would lose 2-3 in a back-and-forth hard-fought battle against Brazil, I would have gladly taken it. But, up 2-0 at half-time and lost, that was too painful. When I saw Dempsey crying after the game, I simply couldn't control myself.

To me, it was all our coach's fault. I was screaming for substitutions at around the 60th minute. Our men were too tired to fight in the midfield. I could see some of our players not have legs anymore. Why didn't he? We were not as skilful or technical as the Spaniards and the Brazilians, so we had to compensate by playing a scrappy style and fought for every ball. It was understandable that our players were spent much sooner.

When an inferior team was up by 2 goals in soccer, they should defend, defend, defend - putting 10, or even 11, men behind the ball. That is so elementary and why didn't coach know?

And what's with putting in Sacha Kljestan and Conor Casey. If coach didn't know that they were not up to national team standard before the tournament, then he should have known from the games they played in.

Our players worked hard to get us to 2-0, and our coach gave it away.

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