USMNT Winners and Losers

By John Pini | 25th February 2010

USMNT Winners and Losers | read this item

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While players across Major League Soccer sweat out the final hours leading up to the collecting bargaining agreement deadline, some of the top American players in the league have been preoccupied with something else: the World Cup. The United States Mens’ National Team played a friendly last night against El Salvador in Tampa, Florida and narrowly edged out a 2-1 win.

As most European leagues are in session, it was a chance for seventeen MLS players (plus one American who plays in Norway) to impress coach Bob Bradley as he looks to round out the squad ahead of the World Cup. Throughout the broadcast fans were constantly reminded that this would be the last chance for many MLS-ers, since the pool of European-based players will be available for the remaining games on the United States docket leading up to June.

Overall I don’t think anybody especially stood out — in a good way at least. A few did stand out in a bad way. Here are some of the winners and losers from last night’s friendly.

Winners

Heath Pearce. After a four year spell in Europe that can accurately be summed up as abysmal, Pearce signed with FC Dallas this past September. He has been back in the USMNT picture since then, but he hadn’t really shone in a game.

…Until tonight. He looked totally confident at left back, and made some valuable contributions in the attack. In fact, he looked better going forward than most midfielders and strikers did. If he continues to play like that for FC Dallas this season (provided that we have a season), he will be right back in the mix heading into the May friendlies.

Brian Ching. For most of the World Cup Qualifying campaign, Ching was a regular inclusion in the team. However, he has been out of the USMNT picture since a hamstring injury kept him out of the Confederations Cup.

He came on last night as a halftime substitute for Conor Casey, and scored the first US goal in the 74^th minute with a firm header off a perfect Heath Pearce cross. The goal came at a time when the game had been largely defined by extreme American sloppiness in front of goal (taking nothing away from a great performance by El Salvador keeper Miguel Montes). Ching just looked like he belonged there, and he probably will be in June.

Sacha Kljestan. I don’t think Kljestan was particularly great tonight, as many commentators and journalists would have you know, but he did seem to help his cause to make the World Cup squad. He had some very good moments, including the headline-grabbing, game-winning stoppage time goal, which he took extremely well, by the way.

However, he missed two great goal-scoring chances earlier, and was sloppy at other times too. Some of this could be down to a lack of match fitness, which applies to the entire team, since they are all out of season. He did show flashes, though, of the Sacha Kljestan that excited us so much in the 2008 Olympics. He’ll be back on Bob Bradley’s watch list in the next couple months.

Clarence Goodson. Goodson started and played the whole game over fellow on-the-bubble central defender Chad Marshall. Goodson played very well, and gave Bradley no reason to take him out. He also came in at halftime and scored the US’s only goal in the otherwise-disastrous game against Honduras in January.

As Carlos Bocanegra will probably play outside full back if Oguchi Onyewu and Jay DeMerit are healthy, a la the Confederations Cup, there is room for one other central defender in the squad. Goodson took a big step toward becoming that player.

Losers

Robbie Rogers. For some reason, popular American soccer journalists tend to like Robbie Rogers. He was pretty bad for most of the game tonight. For the first ten to fifteen minutes of the game, he was competing with Sacha Kljestan in a game of who-can-play-himself-out-of-the-midfield-picture-the-soonest.

But then Kljestan started to look comfortable, and became a positive force in the game. This didn’t quite happen with Rogers (he may have had a handful of decent passes, including one that sticks out during a counterattack when he weighted a perfect pass to the left). He capped it off with a terrible miss in the final minutes of normal time — not only was it horribly aimed, but it was an unthinkably bad decision.

Robbie Findley. It’s not that Findley played poorly, per se. He just never asserted himself on the game. He had a few decent scoring chances, but never really looked like scoring. He wasn’t the Robbie Findley we saw in the MLS Cup Final. The commentators reported that he had some sort of nagging knee injury, and he re-aggravated it about fifteen minutes into the second half.

By the time he came off in the 68^th minute, he was walking away from what was a gilded-edge opportunity 68 minutes earlier. He was basically a peripheral figure for most of the game. He’ll hope he can benefit from the shortage of competent US strikers in the future. Which segways nicely into…

Jeff Cunningham. If Bob Bradley was seriously considering Cunningham for the World Cup before this game, he surely can’t be now. Cunningham came on for Findley in the 68^th minute, and looked totally uninterested in playing soccer. The least you would expect from an on-the-bubble player is hard work. Not here.

Granted, he only played for twenty some-odd minutes. But I’d like to think this performance directly reduced the possible-World-Cup-US-striker pool by one.