Okay, okay, I get it.  The relationship between David Beckham and the MLS is strained.  His ability to truly be an ambassador and a force behind growing momentum for soccer in this country is quite possibly irrevocably tainted.  It’s sad to see it end up this way for him, but it is what it is.

Beckham’s talents in the MLS are underused and under appreciated because he’s the kind of player who works to make those around him better.  The Galaxy splashed cash on one or two positions, and then stranded those players.  The only thing you need to know to see how David’s abilities work with those around him is to see how effective he and Landon were despite the meager supporting staff.  I don’t blame him for expressing a desire to stay at Milan.  David’s a competitor and hates losing.  I’m sure it grates at him, but I don’t necessarily believe that he wants out of the MLS just because the level is so bad.  I think it comes down to the same thing it’s always come down to for him…England.  He’s enjoying his time in the third major world league he’s been a part of, but more importantly it’s helping his England chances…it’s keeping him in the picture for playing in Africa next year.  If you ask me, club soccer has been what Beckham does between international fixtures pretty much since he left United.  He bled United the way he bleeds England.  Since that divorce, he’s been all about country.  AC Milan has given him new life in England.

I hope the MLS stays strong and doesn’t back down now that they’ve trapped themselves in this corner.  I didn’t agree with the setting of the deadline so soon; I think it was a bit of a ploy that backfired on them and it shows that they don’t know a whole lot about dealing in the international market, but now that they’re here I hope they stand strong.  Will they lose money when David opts out of his contract at the end of the season (which, make no mistake, he will)?  Yes.  Will this probably make international players who are still young enough to truly be impact players shy away from the league for a number of years to come?  Yes.  But hopefully time will bring with it a little more savy-ness in dealing in international waters and sooth some of those wounds, and to back down now will only bring disrespect in the future.  Already AC Milan has basically demonstrated that they have complete disdain for for the MLS and the Galaxy by saying that they think the deadline was just a tactic.  They’re basically ignoring what’s been coming from the MLS because they seem to believe that they’ll get what they want by virtue of being the bigger club.  Don’t back down.

And don’t think for an instant that David Beckham will come back here and give anything less than 100% in a Galaxy uniform. Beckham may have expressed his desire to leave and tarnished his image here a bit, but he’s a competitor and a professional…one of the few truly professional players who have sustained that level under the spotlight.  Don’t forget, he was a want-away midfielder at Madrid who had already signed a contract with the MLS when Capello dumped him not only from the bench, but from the squad for a while.  All he had to do was sit in the stands and collect until his MLS payday.  But he busted his ass to get back into the lineup for the end of the season.  He worked that hard for a team he was leaving and to prove to himself and his critics that he wasn’t done.  He’ll do the same here, and then he’ll opt out at the end of the season, and Milan will reimburse him for his fees to do so.  Bet on it.

Beckham is going to leave the MLS, I really don’t think there’s any way to avoid that, but he’s coming back here first (if the MLS sticks to his guns), and he’ll probably have the best year of his MLS career just to show everyone that his time here wasn’t a waste.

So, in my post yesterday on the newly released US roster for the Cup qualifier on Wednesday against Mexico I stated that none of the inclusions or omissions surprised me because all of them related to problems I’ve had with the Nats since Bob Bradley took over. I wasn’t planning on writing this post so soon after saying that (I was planning on waiting until after the game to see if my complaints are even warranted), but I’ve been thinking about it since I said that and I’ve decided (or rather my impatience has decided) I just can’t wait.

My main problem around the Bob Bradley era version of the USMNT is actually a spill over from the Bruce Arena era, but it has been exacerbated by Bob. During the majority of Bruce Arena’s tenure he had Eddie Pope to call upon to play central defense. Pope proved on most occasions to be a smart, strong, speedy player who could hold our back line together as much with his brain as his brawn. He was a break from the long-standing mold of defenders produced in the United States that included Alexi Lalas, Marcelo Balboa, and Jeff Agoos, to name a few.  I hold Thomas Dooley to be an exception to this rule, but his memory went down in flames after he was asked to carry the world on his aged shoulders in the ‘98 debacle.  In 2006 Arena paired Pope with Oguchi Onyewu to create an interesting juxtaposition of playing styles in the middle of the field. It was an experiment that was never given time to adequately blossom. Teams took advantage of our weakness at outside back rather than play us down the middle, and Pope ended up red-carded for what ended up being out final game anyway. Pope’s retirement left us with some questions in the middle of the field…questions that fell to Bob Bradley to answer. Bob’s solution from the very beginning has been to use both Carlos Bocanegra and Oguchi Onyewu as the first choice pairing in all games of any consequence. Now, to be completely up front, I have no particular problem with either Boca or Gooch. They are both solid, gritty defenders who seem to lay it all out every time the step on the field. What I have a problem with is that they seem to be the exact same type of player. Both play in such a way that is more about strength and grit than reading the game, intelligence, or positioning. When I watch them play I see little finesse about our defense. Thank God for Tim Howard’s positioning genius and ability to play with intelligent reckless abandon. Just watch the Argentina friendly from a few months back to see how often he is forced to cover for them when their attempts to out-muscle leave them vulnerable to be split by a far more skilled player or players. These two are also largely responsible for the long-ball and counter-attack style that the US team plays. Instead of collecting the ball and being cool enough under pressure to give the midfielders a chance to check back, they tend to rid themselves of the ball with considerable gusto. This is a major reason why Brian McBride’s retirement was such a blow to the Nats, and why we continue to gripe about finding a player in his mold rather than developing a new system around the more ground-attacking minded squad we have. Our central defender’s tenancy to send the ball for a ride requires a forward who can collect long passes and hold the ball up long enough for the bypassed midfield to catch up.  Brian Ching, for all the flack he has caught for not being a major scoring threat since Bradley’s take over, is preferred by Bob for specifically these reasons, and is usually all alone when recieveing the ball.  This effectively takes him out of the attack on most plays because the defense has had time to organize and are usually keying on him because he’s the one holding the ball up to start the attack.

This is also part of our inability to use the wings to spread out another team.  Argentina spread us all over the field, as did England and Spain, as well as a host of other games I can think of in recent memory.  We have a few players who have come up through the system over the years who have been talented wingers, but wilted in long-run.  One of the reasons teams like England, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Mexico create such a broad pool of talented wide players is because they focus on that just as heavily as the center of the field.  The area you emphasize is the area that most readily develops.  What do we emphasize?  Defensive Midfielders.  What do we have a dearth of?  Exactly.  What does Brazil emphasize?  Attacking players.  Where have they always been vulnerable?  Defense and goalkeeping…it’s blindingly obvious.  Really, only DeMarcus Beasley has been a mainstay of the flank attack of the States with any kind of regularity, and even he has been in and out of form in long crests and troughs.  We simply don’t use the width of the field, and we rarely ever have.  Now we are resorting to using players who are not natural wide players to cover those positions, and get those players on the field (Donovan and Dempsey, anyone?).  But by puting these players who are vital cogs in our pool out there when we don’t use the wings, we are stranding skilled players away from the action and essentially taking them out of the game.  This all, of course, starts at the back.

(Wasted wide talent…)

The solution I’ve long been proposing has been bringing in and developing another group of central defenders that are cut from a different cloth.  Both Jay DeMerit and Michael Parkhurst are the type of players we should be looking at.  Michael, although often considered a bit undersized (despite his abundant success in face of the very physical play of the MLS), is a brilliant defender who makes his own success out of his ability to read the game, involve the midfield in the game, and his ability to position himself to break up the play before it happens.  DeMerit has had an up and down time with the Nats and with his current squad in the English Championship, but has been impressive in the few game situations he’s been asked to perform in.

And this leads into my third major gripe with the Bob Bradley version of the men’s national system.  Players who are seen as having “potential” are given very few chances to actually grow inside the system.  Most players called up on any regular basis have established themselves in one way or another.  Onyewu, Bocanegra, Cherundolo, Ching, Dempsey, Donovan, Howard, Beasley, and a small handful of others that have been given repeated call-ups paid their dues under Arena’s system.  The rest of the supporting cast has been called up on a somewhat rotational basis that makes only passing sense to anyone outside looking in.  If you believe the BB method, there is a huge talent pool in the United States, the second tier of which is either completely interchangable talent-wise or is so bad that we can’t seem to find adequate parts.  And whatever explanation you chose the general belief seems to be that they need to spend no time developing players at the national level.  Now, I don’t know about you, but the amount of actual playing time I see most of the fringe players (and some of our other regulars as well) in leagues outside of the MLS would suggest that their clubs aren’t spending too much time actually “developing” them.  I think that for the United States Soccer Federation to ignore internal development (which, let’s be honest, has kind of always been the policy…”Oh, let’s just let someone else worry about creating our players”) seems kind of blind and negligent. Freddy Adu and Jozy Altidore, along with Kenny Cooper, DeMerit, and Parkhurst have been the most glaringly obvious victims of this policy.

And this has been where the recent regeime has fallen down on us.  No one is going to develop our players for us.  Donald Rumsfeld once said you don’t go to war with the army you want, you go with the one you have.  Well, Donald and Bob are both thinking this way, and they are both wrong.  You go to war with the army you build.  Bob is playing, not with the team he inherited or the pool he’s got available to him, but with the one he’s building.  But he’s not conciously building one…and I believe it shows in the results.

When I was in high school, we used to play a team that was so far away from us that our players brought pillows on the bus. We usually got out of class sometime just after lunch to make it to the opposing school in time for the game. Now, anyone who knows anything about trying to play a sport immediately after a long trip (especially in a school bus, which seem designed specifically for the purpose of torturing school children awake on the way to school) knows that you end up moving in a kind of haze for most of the game…especially soccer. Despite this however, we never got scored against when playing this team and we re-set records for goals scored in a game every single time we played them during my three years as a varsity player.

You know what though? We usually got barnstormed by whoever played us next. It was like playing this little cow-town team made us forget how to be organized, how to work together, that we were in fact a soccer unit and not some pick-up team where we could all press forward and try to get our names on the score sheet with impunity.

Barbados is a nation tied for 121st in the world according to the (admittedly dubious) FIFA rankings. I know this is World Cup qualifying and that we don’t want to end up in a situation we might regret later, but I seriously doubt that 1) beating them 8-0 has any long-term benefits for our national side, or that 2) we would have been in peril of losing this game if we had played a small percentage of lesser used (notice I didn’t say less skilled?) players. Why can’t Kenny Cooper and Sasha Kljestan and Jay Demerit beat Barbados?

What do we gain by seeing an already exhausted Clint Dempsey turn out against this side? AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY IS EDDIE JOHNSON STILL IN A USA UNIFORM? I’m almost happy that Tim Howard strained his back in training (relax, he’ll be fine I’m sure) so that Brad Guzan can get a full game in. I admit, I’ve already made critical comments about Bradley’s seeming unwillingness to field the same side twice in a row. I believe in continuity and I believe that’s why some national sides loaded with talent fail, because they just don’t play together enough (did someone just say “Spain”?). And Landon had been out for a while with a strained groin, so he deserved 45 or so minutes to get to run around, as did Beasley who’s coming off that injury. But what did we gain? Seriously? So I guess we’re safe just in case Barbados beats us 7-0 in the return leg…home field advantage is big after all, but for someone who spent the last 2 years digging into the depths of the player pool and who couldn’t field a non-transitional side against freakin’ England and Spain just within the last two weeks, I think this was a bit much.

I’m scared, is all.

I’m scared that Bradley is either going to turn into another Steve Sampson, who thought he had become a tactical genius when he began playing a ludicrous formation within months of the ‘98 World Cup, and was touting it as a success because we were beating CONCACAF minnows (and we all remember how that worked out for us, don’t we?), or that he’s going to continue making questionable decisions and will end up being replaced right before the cup in So. Africa, which would almost be worse. Am I missing something? Is there a method to Bradley’s madness? He acts like he knows what he’s doing. Maybe if he would just let the rest of us into his world…

What do you suppose he’s thinking about?

Since the Euro is beginning today I know it’s odd to begin the day with a look at, well, anything else, but I’m unable to watch today’s slate of games so I’ll leave that to Frank.

What I do want to look at is the US Men’s national team’s gauntlet of friendlies that they are in the middle of. Having already completed the games against England and Spain, the third game left is against Argentina, a game which the Americans will be returning home for. A quick recap of the games:

England: The US side was expected to come out and challenge the English, possibly even squeaking out a result. That expected display never materialized. The English side looked faster and much more organized, more like the world-class side they are, than they’ve looked in a long time, beating us 2-0 on goals by Steven Gerrard and John Terry.

Spain: After the drubbing by England, the collective hearts of American soccer fans were suddenly filled with fear (after having been so high before that result) over the Spain friendly. The US gave an improved performance, only dropping the game 1-0, but still did not play up to what I feel is the US’s capabilities. We lost momentum in the second half and allowed Spain to take the game to us. Spain is a fantastic team, and has my vote to take the Euro, but we just didn’t show the tenacity that would be required to pull anything out against them.

What have we learned?

What we have seen has been two extremely timid and flat displays by a team that is obviously still in transition. US coach Bob Bradley has been at the helm for two years now, but doesn’t seem to have his team figured out yet. Now, I don’t want to join the ranks of Bradley bashers yet, I still think he can do the job, but I’m getting concerned with both his reluctance to field the same squad twice in a row, if only for continuities sake, and his over reliance on using two holding midfielders. The US players, even if they’re not the most gifted attackers in the world, have an attacking mentality. By relying on defensive formations such as the 4-5-1 or the increasingly popular 4-2-3-1 we are not taking advantage of that mentality. We do have attacking options, despite the resounding sounds of woe coming from the soccer community after these games, but we’re not using them effectively. Josh Wolfe has had his time and is no longer a viable threat for us, and I could write an entire post on the futility of continuing to call up Eddie Johnson, at least until he shows some improvement with Fulham. I realize that a large number of our better forward prospects were tied with MLS commitments and that it would have been difficult for them to make the trip, but Bradley has to stop worrying about stepping on MLS’s toes so much and leaving our MLS players out of the mix when these scenarios come up. These friendlies were scheduled to test us, and they have. But they’re not helping if we’re not actually fielding our best effort. Hopefully the Argentina game will see a squad that has some of our better attacking options suited up, including rewarding Freddy Adu’s effort against Spain with another start.

The thing I’m the most disappointed with in the two friendlies is that we managed zero goals. I know we were playing against top competition, I know we were using two sub-par forwards, but I think it had more to do with the mentality than the players themselves. There just wasn’t the push. We were timid and bunkered in. On the blog Stateside Footy, in their review of the game, blogger Brian Lomax said, “I’d rather us lose 5-0 attacking the other team than lose 1-0 trying to play for a tie…” Somewhere deep down I think every American player has that same mentality. They want to attack, they want to go for it. Bob Bradley needs to do a better job harnessing that and go after Argentina if we’re even going to stand a chance.