Premium: Mission Accomplished (Until November)
On a Night of Many Emotions, the USMNT (Draw Pot 2) Clinches a Berth in World Cup 2022
SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica — Christian Pulisic had been waiting for this day for the longest time. When he was a kid in Hershey, Pa., he’d fantasize about playing in the World Cup and scoring a last-minute goal for the United States. That was the dream—the main one, at least—even ahead of winning the UEFA Champions League, which he has already done now.
But on October 10, 2017, Pulisic saw his dream deferred in the most traumatic of ways. The U.S. lost to Trinidad and Tobago, eliminating the Americans from qualifying for World Cup 2018. It was the biggest failure in U.S. Soccer history, and one of the lasting images for anyone who saw it that night was the 19-year-old Pulisic in the showers, fully clothed, with his hands in his face, crying.
Pulisic, now 23, and his USMNT qualified for World Cup 2022 here on Wednesday night. It didn’t come in ideal circumstances—a 2-0 defeat to Costa Rica—but while he was bothered by losing, Pulisic knew the big picture mattered more. Much more. The nightmare of that day in 2017 will always be with him, but four and a half years later Pulisic and his teammates had responded in the best way possible: by earning their World Cup ticket through 14 qualifying games in eight countries over an arduous six-month schedule.
“I think we can do a lot of damage, man,” Pulisic said of the World Cup on Wednesday. “I think we’re a confident bunch of guys, and I think the country will get behind us. And we’re going to give everything we’ve got.”
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Pulisic briefly appeared overcome when talking about the significance of the moment and all the things, good and bad, that have gone into his experience. “I mean, [the loss in Trinidad] was one of the toughest days of my life. I’ll never forget it,” Pulisic said after emerging from a beer- and Champagne-soaked celebration in the U.S. locker room. “Now to be in this position, qualified for a World Cup, we’re all extremely proud. This is where I’ve always wanted to be. And the emotions are a bit crazy right now.”
Tyler Adams understood. When the final whistle blew on Wednesday, he walked to Pulisic and put his arm around him. Adams was just 15 when he joined Pulisic and Weston McKennie at U.S. Soccer’s residency program in Bradenton, Fla., in 2014. And while Adams wasn’t part of the 2017 failure, he knew all too well what it meant to his friend, to himself and to American soccer to get back to the World Cup.
“Me and Christian grew up together, and it’s more than just football for us,” Adams explained after the game. “We have a friendship and a bond. We know each other’s goals and what we set out to accomplish, and to do that with some of the guys I grew up playing with and lived with in that residency, it’s special. At a certain point they say, ‘Maybe two of you will make it from this age group, maybe two of you will make it from that age group.’ And now to be set out on the same stage and be one of the youngest teams in the world? And we’re qualifying for a World Cup? It’s all of our dreams, so to do that together is special.”
A new chapter begins now. The World Cup draw takes place in Doha on Friday, when the U.S. (being drawn from Pot 2) will learn its three group-stage opponents. And in the seven months that follow, we’ll see how this U.S. team tries to build for a World Cup that challenges the Yanks in ways that are different from CONCACAF qualifying. There is plenty to work on, and that now includes set-piece defending, judging by the two goals conceded against Costa Rica on Wednesday. But the feeling is there that this U.S. team is capable of doing something special in Qatar.
“I think we can do a lot of damage, man,” Pulisic said of the World Cup on Wednesday. “I think we’re a confident bunch of guys, and I think the country will get behind us. And we’re going to give everything we’ve got.”
Or as coach Gregg Berhalter put it: “Being the youngest team in the world to qualify for the World Cup is no easy task. But what we saw was the resilience of the team, the strong mentality of the team, and absolute focus to reach our goal.”
With the U.S.’s World Cup qualification, it’s time to give some dap to Berhalter. Yes, it’s the expectation that the U.S. will reach the World Cup, but Berhalter achieved something that the last cycle’s coaches, Jurgen Klinsmann and Bruce Arena, notoriously did not. And while Berhalter’s tenure will be judged on how the U.S. performs in Qatar, he has now completed his first major task.
When Berhalter took the job in late 2018, I wrote that he might well be the right choice, but the U.S. Soccer process that hired him (as the only candidate it seriously considered) was deeply flawed. And as of today, it still appears that Berhalter might well have been the right choice. We will find out for sure in November and December, but he has established a set of processes running the team that are working.
More than anything, his players are regularly excited about coming to camp and joining the national team. That wasn’t always the case under Klinsmann and Arena. In Berhalter’s USMNT there do not appear to be any malcontents, nobody who curdled the team culture like, say, Geoff Cameron in 2017. Cameron was a good player and should have been used by Arena in the fiasco loss at Trinidad and Tobago, but he also shouldn’t have torpedoed team chemistry by being so constantly angry about it inside the camp and outspoken about it in the media.
Berhalter’s team is different. For starters, it’s historically young for a USMNT group. But there’s more to it than that.
“It’s just fun,” right back DeAndre Yedlin, who played under both Klinsmann and Arena, said here on Tuesday. “With this group there’s no egos. Everybody respects each other. It’s fun to play with these guys. It’s competitive. You feel like you’re becoming a better player every time you come into camp. At first it was difficult because tactically it might’ve been different from what you do at the club level. But I think at this point we all now know what we need to do, and there’s comfort in knowing what you need to do. It’s like when you study for a test and you know you studied, you’re confident going into the test that you’re going to do well on it. And I think that’s how all of us feel now. We’ve now had enough experience with the coaching staff and how they want to play that we’re all confident in what we can do. So that makes it incredibly fun to be able to come in and play.”
Tyler Adams, the 23-year-old midfielder who might be the U.S. captain for the next decade, has played on enough teams by now to know that the U.S. has something special.
“As a team we’ve created bonds and a chemistry that to be honest with you is very, very different than a lot of teams that I’ve played in,” Adams said on Tuesday. “And I think that comes down to the fact that we’re young. We’ve played together in the youth national teams before, and we’ve really prepared ourselves for this opportunity. Gregg speaks on the fact that coming into World Cup qualifying, we really want to rewrite how these American fans view us, not just through our style of play but our intensity, our commitment, our belief that we want to take U.S. Soccer to the next level. And I think everyone has really bought into that fact, and that’s really infected the team in a way.”
Berhalter’s defining moment in the World Cup qualifying campaign may have been his decision to send McKennie home during the first window for violating team rules, causing the Juventus star to miss games against Canada (a disappointing 1-1 home tie) and at Honduras. No USMNT player had ever been sent home for disciplinary purposes during World Cup qualifying, and you could argue that the result against Canada could well have been different with McKennie on the field.
But for the McKennie-less USMNT to come from behind in the second half and win at Honduras changed the U.S.’s trajectory in the tournament. Down 1-0 at halftime to a Honduras team that wouldn’t end up winning a single Octagonal game, the U.S. was playing miserably and causing fans and media to speculate at halftime on which coach might replace Berhalter if the U.S. were to get only two points from the first three qualifiers. Yet Berhalter made smart halftime changes, and the U.S. pulled away for a crucial three points.
What’s more, Berhalter’s handling of the McKennie situation paid off in the end. McKennie returned to the fold the following month and proceeded to become the U.S.’s best player both with the national team and at club level. A broken foot playing for Juve in late February came at an awful time for McKennie, but if he recovers on schedule he’ll be one of the U.S.’s most important players in Qatar.
McKennie was always well-liked by his teammates, but his sometimes questionable decision-making off the field appears to have gone away, and he clearly cares about the team even when he’s not with it.
“It’s a brotherhood,” Adams says. “Three hours before the game in Mexico, I was on FaceTime with Weston and he was wishing me good luck, and he wanted us to take care of business. The next game I wasn’t expecting another call from him, and I got another call from him three hours before the game. So we’re very connected. This goes deeper than the football. We’ve created friendships and relationships with guys that translate completely onto the field.”
Berhalter also deserves credit for his approach to the final qualifying window. He’s a data guy, and so he evaluated the idea of starting a B-team at Mexico in order to have his top players at their best for the more important home game against Panama three days later in Orlando. But Berhalter rejected that proposal and focused instead in this window on “Play to Win.” That approach got the Yanks a point in Mexico—they were unlucky not to bag three—that ended up being critical. Without that point in the Azteca, the U.S. would have needed at least a tie in Costa Rica to avoid the World Cup qualifying intercontinental playoff in June.
Play to Win. That was the mindset in Costa Rica as well. Even though the U.S. needed only to avoid losing by six goals or more, Berhalter pushed his team to focus on becoming the first U.S. team to win a World Cup qualifier in the country. “We’re not taking anything for granted,” Berhalter said on Tuesday. “It’s as simple as that. We’re coming here to be aggressive in the game and to win the soccer game. That’s our intention. We’re not going to be cautious. We’re not going to sit back. We’re not going to play for a tie.”
Did Berhalter handle things perfectly during World Cup qualifying? Of course not. He still hasn’t found a dangerous center-forward who can be counted on to produce in Qatar. He played a significant role in choosing Minnesota in the dead of winter to host a borderline-dangerous World Cup qualifier. And he can still be a little too wonky, as he was when he argued that the U.S. had “dominated” Canada in a 2-0 loss, as if mere possession (influenced by the game state) and not chance creation signifies dominance.
But Berhalter probably doesn’t get enough credit for his management of such a young team, most of which had no previous World Cup qualifying experience. As mature as Adams is, for example, he learned quickly not to make any more predictions of a “nine-point window” after the U.S. was fortunate to produce five points in September. No such predictions came after that.
“We’ve learned a lot as a group so far throughout this journey,” Adams said Tuesday. “And one of the big takeaways is the maturity that we’ve gained in game management. We’ve learned that no game that we’re going to have is going to be easy. You can’t go into any game with the expectation that you’re going to blow a team away. Even when you look at the last game against Panama, it wasn’t our best performance by any means. Panama had chances, and they could have scored goals. And you look back on these performances and you have to see how you can improve.”
Berhalter was also regularly without some of his best players, due to injuries, rotations or discipline. And he acknowledges that one of his most valuable lessons as a coach during this cycle has been that you’ll never have all of your players available. The next-man-up mentality was especially important during this final window with McKennie, Sergiño Dest, Brenden Aaronson, Chris Richards and Matt Turner all out injured.
When I asked Berhalter on Tuesday how World Cup qualifying had met his expectations and what he wasn’t expecting, he was honest:
“I think it’s exactly what we expected, but at times you wish it would have been different, right? Like we wish we would have won every single game of this round. But it’s not realistic. And I think what it turns out to be is exactly what we expected. We expected it to be a challenge. We expected it would be a lot of ups and downs, a lot of trials and tribulations. And we know we have a really young group going through this for the first time … We had a lot of these little circumstances that made the games really challenging. We had the cold series, right? And that’s just dealing with all this stuff, and the group has been really good at being able to focus on the next task ahead of themselves and keep going from there.”
After the game on Wednesday, Berhalter talked in a bit more detail about what lies ahead. He said he may have the team work on a formation different from his usual 4-3-3 just to have another look that it can show to opponents at the World Cup. And he said he was hoping to arrange friendlies in June and September against teams from Europe, South America, Africa and perhaps Asia.
Then Berhalter, his staff and his team headed to the San José airport. One private jet carried players back to Europe. Meanwhile, a delegation from U.S. Soccer, including Berhalter, took off for a stop in New York followed by another leg to Doha, to be there for the World Cup draw at noon ET on Friday.
Life comes at you fast, and the World Cup will, too.
I love the animation Dan did here. It really captures the feeling in my heart this morning.
Great write up! Two questions moving forward-
What do you think the other formations could be that would play to strengths of squad?
What’s up with Darryl Dike? Does he get another shot at the 9 spot in the lead up to Qatar? Thanks much!!