I have a love/hate relationship with the US Men’s National Team. As an American, I of course want them to be as successful as possible and to beat Mexico at every opportunity. As an observer and commentator on the game of soccer, I often find myself immeasurably frustrated with certain elements surrounding the team…I’m looking at you supporters.
There’s a great deal of grey area of course, all fans of soccer clubs are passionate (often to a fault) and I myself get all bent out of shape concerning happenings around Everton, so I’m doing my best to tread lightly here. What bugs me though, is the simple fact that USMNT fans often don’t do a great job of putting the situation in perspective.
Take this weekend’s match against Venezuela for example.
As the match is playing out and we were all being bored to death on an entertainment level, there were important observations to be made, directly connected to your perspective of the match. If you were able to take off your American Outlaw bandanna for a second and really look at what was happening, you probably noticed that under the guise of a less than enthralling game, there was a valuable data mining being done by Jurgen Klinsmann and his staff.
This is not the roster Klinsmann will march in to World Cup qualifying with this summer. There are certainly players on the roster that could be a part of that campaign, but this series of friendlies and the training camp that preceded them, was all about the evaluation of young and fringe players by the coaching staff. Sure everyone involved wants to win, but even if that had not happened, it still would have been a successful 90 minutes in my opinion.
If not for the late goal by Ricardo Clark, I think a great number of supporters would have walked away frustrated by a draw and the lack of a goal, instead of seeing the picture the match painted for Klinsmann.
He learned that he has two more capable central defensive options in Geoff Cameron and Michael Parkhurst. He learned that Graham Zusi is probably not an “A” roster guy, but Benny Feilhaber certainly needs to be in the mix for qualifiers. He learned that Jermaine Jones, when he keeps his head about him, can be a dominate force in the midfield. Getting the idea?
Wins and losses in friendlies are always important in terms of confidence and making the fans happy, but sometimes there are greater goals and more important things to be gleaned from these matches.
As I watched reactions during the match this weekend I saw various voices tearing in to the performance of Teal Bunbury, complaining about the formation, being typical sports fans focused on the top most layer of detail (i.e. things that really weren’t important). The complaints about Bunbury was abjectly absurd considering this was his third cap, he’s still young and he’s been in off-season mode since November.
I think people sometimes forgot that even the greatest players can have a bad match and playing on the international stage only exacerbates the issue because the sample size is so much smaller. Are people really ready to write off a player like Bunbury, “send him back to Canada” as some suggested, over one performance? I think we also forget that most of us have never coached soccer, let alone professional soccer, and a performance might be interpreted in a completely different way by our untrained eye versus a trained one.
We can bitch and moan all we want as fans, but we also have to accept that maybe there’s more than meets the eye.
Klinsmann is not an idiot, he has a plan and no he doesn’t have to share it with you. Everything he did against Venezuela likely had a purpose and was a means to an end for him and his staff. They are focused on one goal, qualifying for the 2014 World Cup. We as fans are often focused on the moment and forget that results aren’t always as important as the finer details that occurred along the way.
I therefore challenge you to watch tonight’s match against Panama with a different perspective. Be a fan, have fun, but look for the details within the match that help paint the bigger picture. More importantly, remember that this is about building to an ultimate goal and that it’s perfectly normal to stumble at times along the way.
