I have been ruminating over the past few days over the United States 2-0 Australia match, pouring over what the internet has had to say about the match, and watching other World Cup matches. And I really can’t stop thinking about how the US played and how impressive it really was. Here are three things lingering in my mind.
1) The USMNT is a Pretty Complete Team
It’s kinda interesting to think about the United States Mens National Team’s 2-0 victory over Australia from the Aussie’s perspective. Australia beat Türkiye by setting up an organized
low block, leveraging their physicality, and attacking on the corner. They tried to do much the same against the US (albiet with some rather baffling lineup changes), but it didn’t work. Instead, the US broke through and scrambled their backline into conceding an own goal. Australia was also supposed to be contesting and physically imposing themselves on the opposition, but the second goal came from the US winning a freekick and then reacting faster on the second ball to put it in. Which is to say, when they fell behind, Australia neither had the flexibility to change their gameplan fast enough to get back into the game, nor were able to maintain their physical dominance for the full 90 minutes for a second game. It wasn’t until the last 20 minutes or so, after making a slew of major changes at the half, that Australia began to actually impose themselves and began to dictate the game. However, even then, they barely made anything out of all that time. You can actually see that in this Expected Goals (xG) timeline, with Australia making nearly nothing from the 70th minute on.
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Which brings us back to the United States. Because the US used to be quite a lot like this current Australia team. They were all about attacking on the counter and having a physical and organized defense. The US definitely did a bit of that organized deep defending, what has apparently been coined by Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta as “suffering”, in their history. I normally love the Adam Cleary Football Channel on Youtube, but there was something that he said in his review of the US v. Australia game that caught my ire. Cleary mentioned that this was the first time that he saw the US “suffer” and suffer so well, by which he meant defensively manage the game even without control of possession by essentialy parking the bus. And what annoys me about that is that the US actually has a very long history of this “suffering”. You go and look back at some of the biggest moments in the team’s history, the 3-2 victory over Portugal in the 2002 World Cup, the 2-0 against Mexico in the same tournament, the 2-0 against Spain (then the best team in the world) at the 2009 Confederations Cup, the 2-1 victory over Ghana… There’s a lot of time spent sitting back and defending a lead. What is true, however, is that the US has not been nearly as good at this in a while. Under Berhalter, the team didn’t want to defend in a low block and strangle opportunities. They wanted to control possession to slow the game down, limit opportunities for the opponent to attack on the break and then, after taking a lead, continuing to hold possession to starve the opponent of time and chances at goal. In that regard, this is a bit different.
This is all to say, this USMNT team is suddenly both able to be strong in attack and, as shown against Australia, be able to sit back and absorb. We aren’t the kind of sit deep, be organized, and counter team anymore. We can break down a deep defense. We can by physically imposing. We can keep possession to starve a team of chances AND we can sit deep and defend. That’s a lot of really positive attributes that are suddenly on display, and there’s not a lot of weak phases of play to point at.
2) The US is a Top Team
I mean this rather literally in the sense that the US is officially finising at the top of Group D through just two games. But I also mean this to say that the quality of the US’s play has consistently been among the best of showings out of this tournament. When the fixtures were being scheduled, the US was assigned a Pot 1 spot, the pot with both the hosts and the top teams, simply because the US were hosting (along with Canada and Mexico), and not out of quality. But the US has 6 points through two matches, more than highly regarded teams like England, Spain, and Belgium. And the US has consistently looked like the better team against both Paraguay and Australia, through the whole of the match, the team clearly in control, unlike France’s first half performance against Senegal or Germany through much of their game against Ivory Coast.
Of course, the retort for this is that this is merely against Paraguay and Australia. But that frankly isn’t very convincing for me. Paraguay and Australia in isolation aren’t peak rated teams, but they are comparable to the sides that other teams are facing. Actually, the US is far exceeding expectations. There were fears (including from me) that the US could be elimited entirely in the first round, and those such fears have been thoroughly exorcised. Indeed, the apparent consensus on the internet going in was that Türkiye was most likely to top the group, a prediction that looks all together ridiculous now that Türkiye has been eliminated after just two games with 0 points after scoring 0 goals. The reality is that the US’s group was largely considered among the tightest with all of the teams having the potential to advance. And it’s really been the US that has elevated themselves to stand above the rest.
This isn’t to say that the US is necessarily going to be able to beat all the other top teams. Rather, it is to say that the US is playing up to that higher level and the praise is well deserved. I don’t really know what the expectations for this USMNT team really should be at the moment because they are essentialy operating at the level of “Pleasantly very surprised”. How far can this team go? Well, signs suggest we should be very optimistic.
3) This Team Can Function Without Pulisic
And another reason to be optimistic is because this US team has largely done this without their star player, Christian Pulisic. Pulisic was of course central to the team’s attacking performance in the first half of the Paraguay game, but he was pulled out at halftime and has not played a minute since apparently out of an abundance of precaution following a calf injury. The team hasn’t exactly been at the same level without him, but that hasn’t stopped them from scoring three goals and winning two matches.
Against Australia, the switch was to tweak the formation and bring in striker Ricardo Pepi. Both Pepi and striker Folarin Balogun were willing and able to peel into that left side, secure with the knowledge that there was another striker there to operate in the middle. And Australia simply could not hang with it. That’s how the first goal happened, with Balogun drifting onto the left and torching his man.
The message for the rest of the world is that the US has dangerous players besides Pulisic, particularly Balogun and Weston McKennie. And that is very interesting given that Pulisic is coming back. He’s been reported to be fit and back in training, so there’s a lot of potential for this US team to be dangerous come the knockout rounds.
That’s it from me. Tell me, what is lingering in your mind? In the meantime, the US will return on Thursday, June 25th, for their final match against Türkiye before the knockout stages start.
