Culpa America: Who is to blame?

Ok, so we didn’t embarrass ourselves, but we certainly didn’t bring our A-game, or our B-game. Actually, I’d say it was closer to C-/D+. And even Bradley admitted that the team he brought wasn’t up to the task.

As we have said over the last few weeks, it is a great challenge to play in back-to-back tournaments. You run into situations with the various clubs, and as a result we brought a younger team here.”

Is he suggesting that there were external pressures that forced him to avoid selecting a more experienced line-up? Certainly, a statement like that is meant to deflect criticism for the choices he made. They made me do it, he seems to say. But who are these “various clubs” that forced him to swim down to the bottom of the national team pool to pull out players like Eddie Gaven and Danny Califf?

Was it European clubs? European club pressure doesn’t make a slot of sense. With their season over and clubs re-shuffling rosters, I think most Euro teams are too preoccupied with the summer transfer market to care how their American players are spending their summer vacations. As for the Euro-based players themselves opting out, you would think that they would want to showcase their talent for their current or future squads. For example, despite Freddy Adu’s poor performance with Real Salt Lake this season, he has seen his international stock rise exponentially thanks to his performance during the first round of the U-20 World Cup. Teams from all over Europe send scouts to Copa America. It is a first class tournament, a place where you can see South American stars go head-to-head, test them in real-game situations. Any agent worth his salt would want his client to participate in that kind of tournament. Finally and most importantly, national teams do not have to listen to club concerns anyway, as the Galaxy will learn when Beckham is pulled out of crucial late-season matches for Euro 2008 qualifying with England.

So, if we can’t blame European clubs, the “various clubs” must be from Major League Soccer. For the sake of argument, let’s say that our Gold Cup roster was our A-team, the team that Bradley would have preferred to bring if not for “situations.” Twelve of the 23 players on the Gold Cup roster were MLS players. Who were the MLS players left behind when Bradley named the Copa America roster? Frankie Hejduk, Pablo Mastroeni, Landon Donovan, Brian Ching, Steve Ralston, and Michael Parkhurst. Certainly, each of these players is important to the success of their respective clubs. So, was Bradley trying to implicate Los Angeles, Columbus, Colorado, Houston and New England when he said, “various clubs”? Was there pressure from on the USSF by MLS bosses to return key players like Landon Donovan to their teams? It would make sense for Los Angeles, especially, since their poor performance in the first half of the season may make their big name’s late arrival moot (in terms of the MLS Cup anyway). Colorado is struggling as well and certainly needed Mastroeni. Houston boasts the lowest “goals for” total of any team over .500, so they definitely would want Ching back in their line-up.

But couldn’t Sunil Gulati and the USSF tell MLS to suck it up for a couple of weeks in order to give some of our best MLS players international exposure? And what about the non-MLS players that were dropped from the line-up: Tom Howard, Carlos Bocanegra, DaMarcus Beasley, Clint Dempsey, Frank Simek, Jonathan Spector, and Oguchi Onyewu.

Bradley’s statement doesn’t mention fatigue as a factor, an excuse I have heard from many Bradley apologists. The conventional wisdom was that they had to choose one tournament for the U.S. stars to play in, so they chose the Gold Cup because we had a better chance to win that tournament and therefore, a better chance to qualify for the important Confederations Cup.

Ok, I’ll buy that we had a better chance against Panama than Argentina, but why couldn’t all these players that I mentioned play in both tournaments. Fatigue didn’t seem to bother Mexico to play in back-to-back tournaments. They won their group and in the process upset both Brazil and Ecuador. And most of the names I listed are players in their early to mid-20s. They are at peak physical condition. The fatigue factor seems like a lame excuse, made posthumously (that is after are team’s chances died).

In addition, the argument that we only have a shot in one tournament so we should dog it in the other one speaks volumes about the belief (or lack of belief) in the U.S. national team and project 2010. If the USSF really thought we were capable of competing for a World Cup by 2010, they wouldn’t be scared of testing our best against the World a couple of years early. It’s time we stop playing down to the expectations of the U.S. soccer leadership in this country. Why did we even accept the invitation to Copa America if we were planning on sacrificing our bottom-rung players to the gods of South American soccer?

When Bradley first named the roster, he defended the selections, saying that many of the players featured could end up on the World Cup qualifying squad.

“Copa America is going to be a great opportunity for our younger players to gain invaluable experience at the highest international level … This group has many of the faces that could play a role in 2008 and 2009 when our focus turns to our ultimate goal of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.”

Exactly what experience did they gain in having the crap kicked out of them in three games? How to lose gracefully? And as for the “faces that could play a role,” I could count them on one hand. Or maybe one finger, the middle one.