Premium: Casting His Spells Again
McKennie Buries Honduras in Frigid Minnesota As the USMNT Bags Three Big Points
SAINT PAUL, Minn. — Weston McKennie does a funny thing at the start of games in cold weather. Even when he’s running, the 23-year-old U.S. midfielder will hold both his arms ramrod straight, like a gymnast supporting himself on the parallel bars. The effect makes McKennie look like a little kid who would prefer to be just about anywhere else than in this minus-15-degree wind chill icebox of a World Cup qualifier.
And then, out of nowhere, he’ll burn you for a goal and make you realize it was a rope-a-dope all along.
McKennie has been the best U.S. player for club and country for a while now, scoring goals and running relentlessly for both Juventus and the Stars and Stripes. And Wednesday’s 3-0 victory over Honduras was McKennie’s signature game of the 2022 World Cup qualifying campaign. He scored the opening goal off a seventh-minute set-piece, a thumping header that has become his trademark. He created chances for teammates with deft passing and movement in transitions. He bossed the game.
“With Weston, he’s a guy that leads by his performance,” U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter said afterward. “I thought he had an outstanding window. You could tell that he’s in big form at Juventus the way he came into this window, and he’s dominant. I think he’s one of the best midfielders in this region, if not the best. So it’s great to have a strong performance from Weston. We’ve almost come to expect that from him.”
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The win kept the U.S. (21 points, plus-9 goal difference) in second place in the Octagonal behind Canada (25) and a hair ahead of Mexico (21; plus-6), with a slight gap over Panama (17) and surging Costa Rica (16). Long story short: With three games left to play, a home win over Panama on March 27 will likely be enough to put the U.S. in the World Cup, though getting a result at Mexico (March 24) and/or Costa Rica (March 30) in the other two remaining games sure wouldn’t hurt.
The truth is that it will be the hardest window of the U.S. qualifying campaign, and being able to rely on McKennie is welcome news after he was sent home from the September games for violating team rules. It wasn’t until Tuesday that McKennie, one of the national team’s most engaging talkers, did his first media availability for U.S. Soccer since before the incident.
“I think it was just a learning lesson,” McKennie said. “As I went back, it was important for me to put my head down and work, and Juventus definitely helped me out with that a lot. I struggled for a bit and lost some of my confidence. I felt like I had let my team down and let my country down and my family and myself. So whenever I got called back in, it was just to try and rebuild the relationships and the trust with everyone and just perform and show that I’m there for the team. That I’m there to try and win.”
Most of the time the USMNT is all business, even inside the team hotel. But during World Cup qualifying camps, U.S. Soccer has also flown in two barbers from New York City who have developed a trust with the players, and they’ve been a hit.
“The best thing as a person to do is be available. So I think that was my biggest thing, just to be available and not have a situation like that again.” If 80 percent of life is showing up, well, McKennie has been doing a solid job of it for the USMNT ever since, highlighted by his November goal to finish off Mexico and Wednesday’s performance to bury Honduras.
It’s not hard to imagine McKennie being the USMNT’s breakout Madison Avenue star in November if the team qualifies for the World Cup. He’s the U.S.’s most charismatic player, he scores goals, and he’s young and photogenic, the kind of guy who likes to celebrate his scoring strikes with a young-wizard homage to Harry Potter. His teammates love him, whether it’s the U.S. or Juve. What’s more, his actions since the September suspension have put himself in a position to be that guy.
Back in September, one of the strongest voices criticizing McKennie was Landon Donovan. But after Wednesday’s game, it was Donovan who spoke most glowingly of McKennie on our podcast. “The longer that game went 0-0, the worse it was going to be for us,” he said. “So credit to Weston McKennie, who is hands-down, unequivocally, the best player the U.S. has at the moment. And thank god for him because he has single-handedly in my opinion just taken this team on his back and said, ‘I’m going to lead us to the World Cup.’”
In historical terms, Wednesday’s game will be most remembered for the weather conditions. U.S. Soccer chose (chose!) to put a crucial World Cup qualifier outdoors in Minnesota in the dead of winter when it could have staged the game in a temperate location like Florida that would have maximized the U.S.’s talent advantage over Honduras.
Sure enough, the National Weather Service in the Twin Cities issued a warning on Wednesday about wind chills as low as minus-25 to minus-30 degrees and advised anyone with outdoor plans to dress appropriately, given that frostbite can occur in as little as 10 to 20 minutes in such conditions. Two Honduras players, goalkeeper Buba López and midfielder Romell Quioto, had to be treated for hypothermia at halftime and were subbed out. For his part, Honduras coach Hernán Darío Gómez said the game should not have been played due to the conditions.
Such extreme temperatures aren’t good for anybody, including the U.S. players, and U.S. Soccer officials spent part of Tuesday asking the match commissioner if it would be possible for players to wear neck gaiters and balaclavas, in addition to having heaters on the benches and a way to keep the game balls warm on the sidelines. The temperature at kickoff ended up being 1 degree, the lowest by far of any USMNT game going back to 1999 per Paul Carr of TruMedia.
LOWEST KICKOFF TEMPERATURES AT USMNT GAMES GOING BACK TO 1999 (Source: Paul Carr, TruMedia)
1 degree (USA-Honduras, 2022, Saint Paul, Minn.)
22 degrees (Canada-USA, 2022, Hamilton, Ontario)
29 degrees (USA-El Salvador, 2022, Columbus, Ohio)
29 degrees (USA-Costa Rica, 2013, Commerce City, Colo.)
29 degrees (USA-Mexico, 2001, Columbus, Ohio)
A source with knowledge of the situation said U.S. Soccer never approached the USMNT players association about the possibility of staging the game outdoors in Minnesota. To their credit, the American players weren’t critical of the decision publicly before the game when asked about it. On Tuesday night, just after returning from training at the stadium, winger Paul Arriola thought carefully on how to frame the topic when I asked him about it.
“The one thing that I always say about the weather is initially it can be a shock to one person individually, but whoever else is there for the game is going to be feeling the same as me,” Arriola told me. “So of course it’s freezing. Of course it’s cold. It will definitely be the coldest game that I’m a part of in my career. But it’s just the conditions, and we’ve got to go through it, and hopefully the other two games [this window] have helped make it easier for us to know what to expect. Honduras is going to have to go out there, and I’m sure it’s going to be a shock to them as well. So it is what it is. But yeah, it’s a little colder than what we thought it would be.”
There was a bit more candor after the game from Tim Weah, who posted a photo of a frozen man on his Instagram and wrote: LOVE YOU MINNESOTA BUT THIS WAS ME THE WHOLE GAME. WORD TO EVERYTHING I LOVE I’M RETIRING NEXT TIME WE HAVE TO PLAY IN WEATHER LIKE THIS.
Before this past week, Arriola said the coldest game he had played in as a professional was the 2019 season opener for D.C. United, when it was 36 degrees with freezing rain. “My mouth was frozen,” he said. “I remember trying to do a postgame interview and just couldn’t get my voice, couldn’t even enunciate the words.” Wednesday night was more than 30 degrees colder than that.
The breakneck pace of playing three games in an international window instead of the usual two has meant that teams can’t spend much time at all looking backward at previous results when a new game is already bearing down upon them. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing for the U.S. after losing 2-0 at first-place Canada on Sunday.
“To be fair to the team, I thought we played well [against Canada],” said Arriola, who missed just wide on a second-half bicycle kick shot attempt. “In the end, we just weren’t able to execute in certain moments. Immediately after the game, I think everyone was frustrated with us losing that game. We all looked around at each other, and we talk about this brotherhood that we have. And I think we all felt that we deserved more from that game.”
It’s useful to remember, too, that players aren’t robots. They’re human. The cold affects them. So does the stress of World Cup qualifying and other aspects of the sport. These international games coincided with the end of the transfer window, and a few U.S. players went through that uncertainty this past month, including Arriola (who was the subject of bids from Club América but ended up being traded from D.C. to Dallas), goalkeeper Matt Turner (who will be moving from New England to Arsenal this summer), winger Brenden Aaronson (whose Salzburg turned down a $27 million offer from Leeds United) and Kellyn Acosta (who was traded from Colorado to LAFC but said he would have preferred to be transferred to a suitor abroad).
“We’ve all talked individually and had table talks [at meals],” Arriola told me. “It was important for me to try to put everything to bed before qualifying started. I made that very clear. Obviously, it was a stressful situation. It’s chaotic. Last year I was in national team camp, and on deadline day I ended up going [on loan] to Swansea. So now I’ve experienced two winter transfer situations, and they’re really not fun. It’s a constant rollercoaster of emotions, and it can really play with you. My goal was to try and block it out and focus.”
Most of the time the USMNT is all business, even inside the team hotel. But during World Cup qualifying camps, U.S. Soccer has also flown in two barbers from New York City who have developed a trust with the players, and they’ve been a hit.
“They stay for a few days, and they’re great guys,” Arriola said. “That’s something that’s huge for us. You know, the way that guys look is important to how they feel on the field.”
The barbers will be back for the last window of World Cup qualifiers in March. Plenty of drama is likely in store, including a final verdict on whether the U.S. can finally move past the failure to qualify four years ago and look forward to returning to the world’s biggest carnival.
Congratulations to the players and staff for surviving this qualifying window! What challenging condition through which to play! We are still struggling in front of the goal and I return to a previous post - speed of play is not sufficient. The whole process of moving the ball takes too long, from first touch to decision making and from pace of pass to time of release. All this must become quicker.
We can expect, I think, both Panama and Costa Rica to want to play low block and counter. Only quick and incisive ball movement will give us chances to score against these opponents.
That “frozen man” is Jack Nicholson from the end of the shining.