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.