Yahoo Sports Little buzz accompanies this USMNT Gold Cup campaign, and for good reasons
Chances are you missed it. And truthfully, no blame befalls you for this.
The United States men’s national team kicked off the second-biggest event in its four-year cycle on Tuesday night and very few took note, as the consequences of a missed World Cup continue to reverberate almost two years later – or 616 days later, to be exact.
That’s when the Americans somehow conspired to lose in Trinidad and Tobago while two other results broke just right – or wrong, more like – in a series of flukey events to rob them of a ticket to Russia last summer. A program that had lost its way was exposed for all its flaws. And it’ll probably be years more until they are addressed.
So in any case, the USA’s CONCACAF Gold Cup campaign began in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a 4-0 over a hapless Guyana team making its debut at this tournament, or any other major national team event. There isn’t much to tell from such a game, against a team with insufficient skill to consistently threaten your goal but enough physicality to gum up the works for its opponent.
This tournament is usually a big deal. The Gold Cup, which crowns a champion of North and Central America and the Caribbean, is held every two years. But every other edition coincides with World Cup qualification, meaning most of the big nations send a B-team. This, however, is one of the tournaments when all of the stars are available. And save for the World Cup, it’s the biggest event on the Americans’ calendar, now that the Confederations Cup, which they hadn’t qualified for since 2009 anyway, no longer exists.
But this time around, there was no buzz to speak of for this tournament in America, no excitement registered, no anticipation to be measured. A 10:05 p.m. ET kickoff time on a weeknight didn’t help any.
That’s partly down to CONCACAF’s catastrophic timing of this Gold Cup, coinciding exactly with the much more compelling Copa America and overshadowed entirely by the Women’s World Cup and the USA’s attempt to defend its crown there.
Even in the best of times for the men’s national team, it lags behind its female counterparts in mainstream popularity. And this is hardly the best of times. Before Tuesday’s national team debut in the local Major League Soccer facility, attendance had been poor for years with many fans checking out. (This wasn’t helped any by U.S. Soccer’s strategy of extracting premium ticket prices, rather than filling stadiums.) And the team has been rudderless since the 2014 World Cup, languishing under Jurgen Klinsmann’s aimless leadership and then careening from one low to the next.
The overdue rebuild has moved in fits and starts. The Americans played under an interim manager – Dave Sarachan, the long-time assistant of Bruce Arena who had resigned following the qualifying debacle, which he, in turn, tried to rescue after a winless start by Klinsmann – for more than a year as U.S. Soccer painstakingly set about electing a new president, hiring a general manager and finally installing a coach.
Presently, this U.S. roster is one consisting largely of unknown players. And while you might argue that Gregg Berhalter could have called in a somewhat stronger team, making this bunch something less than the A-squad, he had all his healthy players available to him and this is what he chose. This, therefore, is the national team right now, whatever letter you assign it. It features young stars Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie, veterans Michael Bradley and Jozy Altidore and, well, some other guys.
But none of it is terribly thrilling. Just as the newish head coach Berhalter – managing his first competitive games in charge at the Gold Cup, after a series of friendlies that were promising early on and then dispiriting in the run-up to this tournament – seems a perfectly competent and indeed encouraging coach, but not one to get casual fans excited.
Then there’s the trouble with this tournament itself, which has become sort of orphaned as its biggest nations, the U.S. and Mexico, have spent the last years trying desperately to try to play anyone from outside the CONCACAF region. They plainly no longer have a whole lot of use for this event, of which they have cumulatively won all 14 editions but one, and compete in it because, well, this is the region they happen to be in and they weren’t able to play in Copa America instead.
But here they are, in the Gold Cup, the tournament that will face a huge fight just to get some attention this summer.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Yahoo Sports soccer columnist and a sports communication lecturer at Marist College. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
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