***Official USMNT Thread***
- Thread starter ianoconnor
- Start date
This is basically a B team, as most of our best U23s are with the full national team (Pulisic, Dest, Reyna, Robinson, Sargent, etc).
Mihailovic is one to watch here. I frankly don't know much about a lot of them.
I really like David Ochoa, our keeper today. He made several saves in the first match against Costa Rica to nail down our 1-0 win. He’s very vocal and has a bit of an attitude (in a good way).
Sam Vines, our left back, is the other player who has been consistently good when he’s played this tournament.
Of course there a couple of guys you could consider fringe senior team players in Jackson Yueill and Jesus Ferreira.
He just turned 20 in January and I think he’ll be RSL’s starting keeper now that Rimando has retired. He Cruyffed an attacker who was pressing him in the Mexico match and he had a classic moment of gamesmanship against Costa Rica. When we were protecting our 1-0 lead, Costa Rica had us under constant pressure and won a corner. They threw the ball to the corner to take it quickly, but Ochoa went behind the net and got a second ball and put it on the six like he thought it was going to be a goal kick. Just an awesome bit of dickishness to slow the game down and let his defense get set up.
I’m going to push back on this comment. How do you prioritize the Olympics more than we did? If you want to be Alexi Lalas and pretend like we didn’t qualify because we didn’t prioritize Olympic qualifying, go ahead. I think you are both fools though.
Explain to me how you go to Chelsea, Barcelona, Dortmund, Juventus, Valencia, RB Leipzig, and Werder Bremen and get them to release Pulisic, Dest, Reyna, McKennie, Musah, Adams, and Sargent for a 3 week tournament in the middle of the European club season.
Lalas laid it on thick after the match about how if the Olympics are important you make sure you have your best team there for qualifying. European clubs don’t release first team players for Olympic qualifying....period. You get the best team together you can, but you’re not going to have your pick of the litter when you have several young players playing first team minutes in Europe. Acting like this is somehow a failure of Berhalter or Kreis or US Soccer is disingenuous at best or maybe it’s just pure trolling or ****-stirring.
I wanted these guys to go to Japan as much as anybody because tournament experience is good development for our younger guys and maybe more importantly, it’s a huge chance for our MLS talent to get in the shop window and get noticed by scouts from European clubs. However, I think we should lay off the “we didn’t qualify because we didn’t prioritize it” crap. Crazy **** can happen when your qualification basically comes down to a one-off match. It sucks that this is the third consecutive time we didn’t make it to the Olympics, but let’s try to have a little perspective.
Still on the coach and the USSF to put a winning team in the field. Our best players are in Europe and should be but this team was talented enough to qualify for the Olympics. Whatever the hell Kreis’s game plan was, was terrible and he was throwing his players under the bus after the game
