Team USA is stretching in warmup for World Cup
Worldwide, sports paused for the pandemic. International soccer mostly postponed. It piled into 2021.
The U.S. Men’s National team had four games, all friendlies, last year. This year, they have a pileup. The U-23 team has already gone through Olympic
qualifying (and failed once again; more on that below). The final two rounds of the Nations League tournament, CONCACAF’S newly installed hemispheric ATM, is jammed into the first week of June. The Gold Cup, the more traditional continental championship, will run through July.
And on its heels, World Cup qualifying rounds will be played as international windows open in early September, October and November.
In the best of times, half of the country’s soccer wonks think that USMNT coach Gregg Berhalter should be fired, another 49% think Berhalter is sort of intriguing and then there’s Columbus, where the belief is that world peace is possible if Don Garber retires. Which is true.
Berhalter had nine dark months to figure out how to handle the upcoming schedule. What’s the plan? Is world peace possible?
“As we started to see COVID happening last year, we had to pivot and change our thinking about how we’re going to handle the Nations League, the Gold Cup, the Olympics and World Cup qualifying,” Berhalter said in a telephone interview Friday afternoon, after he spoke (virtually) at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
In November, Berhalter convened a band of young players, many of them future stars and/or stalwarts, in Europe. In December, he added a camp in Florida to assess U.s.-based talent in Florida. In January, he reconvened in Florida with a mixed group of U-23 and senior players. Last month, he headed back to Europe to train the foreign-based group.
“We wanted to look at as many players as possible,” Berhalter said. “For us, it was a process to identify a solid core we can count on for all these events because we know we’re not going to get the same players for everything, given what’s happening this season.”
In a five-month span, Berhalter widened and/or deepened the pool of players in his purview. He retooled his preferred 4-3-3 formation and added a high press. His Euro-based team had a scoreless tie with Wales and a 6-2 victory over Panama in November. His U.s.-based teams beat El Salvador 6-0 in December and Trinidad and Tobago 7-0 in January. Back in Europe, they beat Jamaica 4-1 and Northern Ireland 2-1 at the end of March.
For the match against Northern Ireland, Berhalter switched to a 3-4-3 formation. Half of the U.S. soccer intelligentsia (like, 100 million people) criticized him for poor use of superior talent (how could he move Christian Pulisic so deep into the central midfield?) Another 49% thought the formation change was intriguing (for specific matchup reasons, for the sake of future flexibility, and because Pulisic
and other Euro-based young studs play in formations with three center backs). The remaining 1% figured that, if Don Garber retired, there’d be no more famine.
Berhalter has been clear that he’s not going to run any one (or five) players into the ground in the coming months. In our conversation, he stepped just short of proclamation:
“We’re going to have, basically, two mutually exclusive teams,” he said.
One team for the Nations League semis versus Honduras and, Uncle Sam hopes, the final (against Mexico). That’s the first week of June.
Another team for the (potentially) monthlong slog of the Gold Cup in July.
“I can’t see many players overlapping, if any,” Berhalter said. “It’s going to be a challenge. We’ll have two completely separate teams and we’re still going to have the desire to win two trophies. It’s going to be a push. The benefit of it is 40 players that’ll be battle-tested with Nations League and Gold Cup, who will have recent experience of what we’re going to be focusing on (when World Cup qualifying kicks in at the beginning of September).”
Berhalter, the former Crew coach, was hired by U.S. Soccer on Dec. 2, 2018. His mandate is a trifle: Change the entire culture after the failure to qualify for the last World Cup, restore U.S. hegemony in the region and slay again Lazarus Mexico. Not a year passed before some called for his head after losses to Mexico (3-0) and Canada (2-0) in 2019.
The whole national program took a hit last month, when the U-23 team lost to Honduras, 2-1, in the semifinals of the regional Olympic qualifier. Team USA
hasn’t qualified for the Olympics since 2008, and it missed again this year. U.S. Soccer was again lambasted for its laxity in Olympic preparation. U-23 coach Jason Kreis was roasted over his roster choices.
Although European clubs did not make available some top-flight U.S. players — Tyler Adams, Weston Mckennie, Josh Sargent, Sergino Dest, Pulisic, et al — for Olympic qualifying, the team had enough to make it to Tokyo and fell short.
Berhalter thinks that the Olympics should be a U-21 event, to showcase younger players with professional aspirations. He makes a good case. He also makes no excuses.
“We should still qualify, and that’s on us,” he said. “We should have had more programming. Mexico played 13 games with their Olympic team in 2020. We played none. That’s relevant.”
Berhalter did a lot of thinking in 2020. His USMNT job will ride on his conclusions. He understands the heat as he is a gourmet and a gourmand. In fact, he has a fine Kamado grill, a ceramic beast that weighs about as much as Pulisic.
“The last thing I made on it was about a month ago,” he said. “I did the reversesear with the Tomahawk steak. It’s unbelievable. Four-ounce steak, 15 minutes a side, 300 degrees. You sear it afterwards. I served it with a Caesar salad and roasted asparagus.”
The Tomahawk steak is a ribeye with the bone still in it. Grilling season is here – and that’s not a metaphor, not as far as I can tell. Garber retire yet?
marace@dispatch.com