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Five years ago, Gregg Berhalter was hired to reboot the U.S. men’s national team after their biggest failure in decades. An older generation of talent was politely handed their pink slips after failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, which was an easy thing to do considering their eventual replacements made up perhaps the team’s most exciting player pool ever.
Berhalter and his players accomplished the first task with aplomb, becoming the gold standard of Concacaf and reaching the round of 16 at the 2022 World Cup. Though they did not charter new territory, the youngest team in Qatar offered up optimism even in their 3-1 defeat to the Netherlands.
A year-and-a-half later, though, that positivity has diminished.
The task of starting afresh is quite different than that of raising the level, but the USMNT have shown few signs of growth since Qatar. A handful of individual players like Christian Pulisic and Antonee Robinson have improved on the pitch, but this team feels stagnant. We have learned nothing new about the USMNT since the World Cup — they still make up the greatest generation of players in a long time, but they have not generally broken out into the top tiers of this sport. Individually, their limitations are still obvious as they compete in Europe’s top leagues — few of them are regular starters — and collectively, they have barely graduated past being the best team in Concacaf.
The longstanding problems with the program were on display in the USMNT’s 2-1 loss to Panama on Thursday, when they crumbled as one issue after another popped up. The inciting action was Timothy Weah’s 18th minute red card, the result of him succumbing to the physicality of the match far too early in a scoreless game that showed few signs of slipping away from the USMNT. Though Folarin Balogun’s 22nd minute goal offered signs of life, Cesar Blackman’s 26th minute strike was enough for the U.S. to concede the game state to the opposition.
Berhalter’s team relinquished possession, ultimately holding just 26% of the ball and being outshot six to 12. Part of that is natural for a team that’s down a player, but Berhalter’s conservative game plan did not actually help the team much. He made a defensive substitution at halftime, bringing on Cameron Carter-Vickers, and still lost. The team did a shoddy job of absorbing Panama’s attacking pressure with Carter-Vickers in particular looking shaky on multiple occasions, nearly conceding a penalty along the way. Berhalter and company also seemed to forget they could muster up attacking plays until the 72nd minute, when Ricardo Pepi came on for Balogun. By then, though, the U.S. had missed several valuable minutes where they could have tried to change the game state.
This game was a particularly stark example of adversity, but surprisingly not the first this year alone. They have emerged from these moments with checkered results, too. Many will feel they got away with one in the Nations League semifinal against Jamaica, when they conceded a goal in the opening minute and only made it to extra time because of a very late own goal, which then allowed Haji Wright to score a brace to win the game. Against Colombia in a pre-Copa America friendly, they collapsed as a 2-0 deficit at the 20th minute returned into a 5-1 loss at the final whistle.
Their shaky recent record when their backs are against the wall is not just a sign that they have not lived up to external expectations. This version of the USMNT is also a very ambitious group — Berhalter himself has said this group wants “to do something that no U.S. team has done before” at the World Cup on home soil in two years’ time, a tone the players frequently take. There’s little to suggest that they have lived up to their own expectations in the last year and a half, though.
Despite his lofty aspirations, Berhalter deflected responsibility after the loss to Panama. He said they were prepared for Panama’s physical game plan, which did not appear to be the case as soon as Weah was shown a red card, and singled out the referee for his performance during the game. He also argued that they were good enough to win a point, which feels like a stretch on a day where they were dramatically disadvantaged from a statistical standpoint, and still calls his own tactical choice to go defensive into question.
The situation leaves the USMNT in need of their biggest performance in the Berhalter era against Uruguay on Monday in their Group C finale. The easiest way for them to advance to the Copa America knockouts will be with a win against Uruguay, which will be no small feat considering they are the only team to cruise to victory twice in this competition so far. The head coach’s record against top 20 teams will also loom large over this game — he has just five wins, four of them against Mexico and one against Iran — as will the fact that the U.S. have not posted a real statement win in that span.
That’s not to suggest that the big performance everyone has been waiting for will not come in Kansas City on Monday, but it’s hard to envision it when it has never happened before. It gives the game a make-or-break feel for Berhalter, who has yet to inspire a lot of optimism since returning to the job in September. His tactical decisions disadvantaged the USMNT on Thursday and he likely needs to put out a perfect game plan to keep his job, a monumental task against the well-respected Marcelo Bielsa, who’s in the midst of leading Uruguay’s resurgence.
The weight of expectations will fall on Berhalter’s shoulders primarily, but make no mistake — the fault is not his alone. Should the USMNT fail again on Monday, he might rightfully be out of a job but the players who stumbled will be left to pick up the pieces. They will be tasked with reversing course on a painful moment in their national team careers and with no track record of doing so, especially before a World Cup many hope will be a seminal moment in this team’s history.
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