USA: If we don't win we're Ghana Czech out

[StPetersburgHoya (Inactive)]

Match is in 90 minutes. We need a win and a Czech loss or a 3 goal differential win and a Czech tie to advance to play Brazil. Bottomline is we need goals - so Dempsey and Johnson need to see the field together for an extended period.

[kghoya]

i could see arena putting dmb back on the right to start the match...that would be a big mistake imo, but i think he will...

please, please, please start johnson!

[FLHoya]

kghoya said:

please, please, please start johnson!

D'OH!!

It's Keller, Onyewu, Cherundolo, Conrad, Bocanegra Lewis, Beasley, Reyna, Donovan, Dempsey, and McBride.

(EDIT: And if I'm not mistaken, the center ref looks an awful lot like Markus Merk the German official, who for my money is the best one in the tournament.)

[SEAHoya]

Yikes, Reyna gives the ball away for a score and gets hurt at the same time. Luckily, looks like he's well enough to come back on.

[FLHoya]

Materazzi scores on a corner kick header for Italy, so it's 1-0 there in the 28th minute. If anyone can go into a fortress defense and kill soccer for 62 minutes to help us out, it's the Azzurri.

[SEAHoya]

What a goal... Damn. Game on!

[Boz]

Woo-hoo!

Decidedly NO woo-hoo.

[FLHoya]

The Czech Republic just had a man sent off (Polak) in injury time.

And Markus Merk just blew a penalty kick call. Two to one.

[georgetowngrad05]

PK was total crap. This whole "I'm going to act as if I was shot in order to get a phantom fould called" is one of the reasons soccer hasn't caught on here. It's almost comical the way some of these teams react to a minor amount of contact. I thought FIFA was cracking down on this, not encouraging it. What crap.

[FLHoya]

You've gotta think that Italy has a better than average chance of holding their 1-0 lead. Czech Republic is a man down, and if Italy is known for anything, it's diving, flopping, simulating contact, and other displays of girliness it's playing defense and taking the air out of the ball...the closest thing soccer has to a Four Corners strategy.

So the US is getting the help they need so far from the other game. Now the challenge is to somehow score twice (I'm decidedly not optimistic about this given what I've seen so far today). For the love of Zeus, Bruce, put in Eddie Johnson and get 2002 Landon Donovan with Jose's time machine and sub him in for his 2006 self.

(EDIT: Dave O'Brien is now teasing us through Shelley Smith--is she still hanging out down by the river?--that Eddie is coming on at some point in the half.)

[miamihoya]

Once again the man in yellow (or last time it was the man in red) has decided to put his stamp on the outcome of the game. The ghanans put Italy to shame with their constant diving and flopping. Terrible call on the PK, and that just had to take the wind out of the US team. Really a dissapointing tourney. Not only because the USA didnt live up to the hype, and quite frankly didnt play very well at all (outside of the valiant effort versus Italy), but the game of soccer has to of taken about ten steps back stateswide. I love the game and have played since i was 5, but I can see why the sport just cant stick here. People hate flopping in basketball, and soccer plays that to a maximum. I lost all respect for Ghana (who otherwise i would have rooted for in the next round), with the contact shows they put on at the end. The refs have to cut down on that and pull yellow cards on guys who pretend to be hurt and get stretchered out. Really dissapointing.

[FLHoya]

Wow. Given that the USA knew exactly what they had to do in the second half to advance, that was an absolutely shameful performance. Unless McBride's header off the post counts, I don't believe the USA recorded a shot on goal the entire half...this when they knew they had 45 minutes to score two goals with their World Cup on the line.

And at 12:00pm EST, Eric Wynalda just broached the "Bruce Arena screwed up this World Cup" topic. This will be very interesting in the near term. His performance was Steve Sampson-esque (minus the dreadful 3-6-1 but still). To be honest, I wonder if he's coaching come 2010 qualifiers, much less the next USA friendly. But my goodness, did he get absolutely no help from anybody on the field. Almost comical if it wasn't so depressing.

[AustinHoya03]

Really disappointing Cup for the USA. I think Arena will probably get saddled with the blame for this performance -- the team never truly played together and his subs made little sense at times. And you know what? That's okay with me. This World Cup was so awful for us that IMO changes will need to be made to get the bitter taste of defeat out of our mouths. Might as well be the goofy-looking dude on the sidelines who called players out in the media and played for a tie against Italy.

Speaking of changes, who is donzo before 2010 besides Reyna?

[AustinHoya03]

The PK was a terrible call, but you know what? It didn't decide the game. We could have scored two in the second half. The USA's play decided the outcome of this game more than one terrible call.

[StPetersburgHoya (Inactive)]

PK was a terrible call but only losing teams complain about the refs.

Fact is the squad was mismanaged by Arena and Landon Donovan was a dissapointment.

Landon being a disappointment is no surprise to me - he looked a step slow against EUROPEAN competition. Hmmmm ... Baiern in the Bundisliga or LA Galaxy ... which do you think would have been better for his development as a player.

Arena was held onto for too long by US Soccer - his tactics looked old and tired - he made no significant tacitcal changes at the half of any of the games we were losing - he failed to get McBride involved and he did not use Dempsey and EJ togehter until the last 20 minutes of the Ghana game. He needs to get canned immediately and then the US needs to find a specialist who can take this team to the next level.

[GIGAFAN99]

Oh come on!

People love to talk a big game about how it "didn't decide the game" but it GAVE GHANA A GOAL! That would be the DEFINITION of deciding a game. It awarded Ghana a PK that was the winning goal. The US didn't play a great second half but I might be deflated after getting the equalizer and then having the officials take all that work away in one whistle.

This isn't even the Italian controversy which just made it difficult for the US to go ahead. This was an call that was AT BEST marginal and you cannot tell me that any official shouldn't be absolutely certain to award a PK like that.

And it was the best official in the tournament which made it worse. I 'm sorry, but no matter what you think of the way the US played, two red cards in 3 minutes and a penalty kick in stoppage time of the first half (no card, not even a chance on goal, just run of the mill contact in the box) after tying the match is a royal screwing.

[CAHoya07]

Disappointing. I think that sums it up. The US would have been in a position to win this game, were it not for a stupid giveaway by Reyna and a suspicious call in the box leading to a PK goal. But I'm tired of blaming the refs, because we have no one else to blame but ourselves. It's become evident that we simply do not have the offensive firepower to compete with some of these teams. We can do enough to hang with them, except for the Czech Republic debacle that stings even more now after they put up duds against Ghana and Italy.

The penalty kick was obviously the huge blow, because it came right after our goal (our first real one of the tournament!), when we were riding high. The crowd seemed predominantly pro-USA, and were very loud at this juncture. But you know what? If Keller would have not gotten faked out on it and somehow stopped it, I think it would have given us even more momentum going into the half. But it didn't happen, it was a nicely placed kick, and it's just hard to expect your keeper to stop one of those.

The second half gave us some opportunities, but we just didn't have the execution or the firepower. Eddie Johnson seemed to give us a momentary lift of energy, but he didn't do much.

I'm not sure whether we should point at Arena, I think the players lost this moreso than the coach (Donovan's air-mailed free kick in the 80th minute or so comes to mind). In the end, a tough way to go out, but they gave us something to root for and even in losing, they have triggered (or retriggered?) my interest in U.S. soccer, and soccer in general.

Now, vaya Argentina!

[jerseyhoya34]

The call decided the game, but a tie here was as good as a loss. In that sense, the call was not decisive. Nonetheless, the call is one of the worst I've seen at ANY level of soccer, and I've seen a lot of recreational league soccer.

I think the problem with the team had a lot to do with how things seemed to revolve around "set pieces," and there was just no sense of timing on many of the plays. I don't know much about World Cup "strategy," but it seems to me that you need to have some playmakers instead of guys who rely on timed runs etc.

I haven't watched but two games in this World Cup. Could anyone suggest a team that plays some hardnosed defense? I'd rather see a spectacular save and good defense than a spectacular goal when I watch soccer.

[GIGAFAN99]

Can we have two thoughts in our head at once here?

1. The refs really screwed the US

2. The US played poorly and Arena will probably be canned for the unimaginative performance.

They are not mutually exclusive. We could have played poorly AND gotten screwed. Italy played terribly against the US and Ghana made the same mistake we did with a stupid giveaway leading to the tying goal.

But they move on and we don't. Yes the US played tentatively and yes changes will be made. But let's not act like if Italy or Ghana lose anyone is crying for them because they outperformed the US in either of those games. So maybe we don't deserve to move on, but if we didn't get the shaft it would be hard to argue Italy or Ghana deserved it either. Both those teams should be thanking the US for putting Koller out and changing the entire complexion of the Czech team.

[FLHoya]

jerseyhoya34 said:

The call decided the game, but a tie here was as good as a loss. In that sense, the call was not decisive. Nonetheless, the call is one of the worst I've seen at ANY level of soccer, and I've seen a lot of recreational league soccer.

I haven't watched but two games in this World Cup. Could anyone suggest a team that plays some hardnosed defense? I'd rather see a spectacular save and good defense than a spectacular goal when I watch soccer.

You've never seen some of the calls I made when I was a referee!

Actually, on the PK, another story from those days: I was up for a grade promotion, and I was doing the final assessed game I needed to get the promotion. During the game I called a penalty kick because a goalkeeper tripped an attacker in the box--he was coming out to slide for the ball and the attacker beat him to it and he caught the attacker on the way by. Completely easy call to make.

After the game during the assessment, my assessor said to me: "On the penalty kick, was anything else warranted?" And we talked for about 5 minutes on that because I had to justify why I didn't give a yellow card. The implication there is that in order to give a penalty kick, you have to be about 1,000 percent sure of the foul, and most of the time that standard results in anything short of blatantly obvious fouls or yellow/red card offenses being waved off (and I've waved off PLENTY of fouls I would have called anywhere but inside the 18).

Swear to God, I think Markus Merk's arguably the best ref in the world, pretty sure he did the Euro 2004 final. But he blew that call soooooooo badly I don't know what's going on.

Having said all this, now...that ain't an excuse cause aside from McBride's header the USA wasn't even in the ballpark WRT scoring chances in the second half. Nobody to blame but yourselves and your inability to clear the ball from your own end (hey, we got one gift goal our way this game after all!).

On the subject of good hardnosed defensive teams with keepers capable of great saves: I hate to say it, but on both accounts you could do a lot worse than Italy.