Premium: Laces Wild
Dest's Golazo with an Untied Shoe Powers USMNT's 2-1 Comeback Win over Costa Rica
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COLUMBUS, Ohio — The great ones do it with their shoes untied. Remember when Usain Bolt won the 100 meters at the 2008 Olympics? He set a world record, and the laces on his left spikes were undone. Or remember when Diego Maradona did the most memorable warmup of all time, dropping outrageous ball skills before a 1989 UEFA Cup semifinal to the Opus song “Live Is Life”? Both of Maradona’s cleats were untied.
The U.S.’s Sergiño Dest is not in the Mount Olympus realm of Bolt and Maradona—the Barcelona fullback is just 20 years old—but the equalizing goal he scored in the U.S.’s 2-1 win over Costa Rica on Wednesday was something special, a left-footed jolt of kinetic energy that felt like it could launch all of Lower.com Field into orbit. That Dest struck the ball with his weaker foot at the end of a 13-pass, 35-second buildup involving nine U.S. players was breathtaking. That his left shoe was untied the whole time made it preposterous. When coaches tell you to strike the ball with your laces, they presume that you’ll knot them first.
Dest, however, is an unconventional character. When Lionel Messi held his tearful farewell press conference at Barcelona, Messi wore a suit and tie, and most of his teammates dressed for the momentous occasion. The Dutch-born Dest wore a red Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls full kit, shorts and all.
“I never really think what I’m going to do,” Dest said after Wednesday’s game, referring to his goal, not the Bulls kit. “Weston [McKennie] made the run in behind, and the guy followed him, so there was space for me. I just cut it inside, and I thought the only thing I could do in that moment was just shoot it. Because we had to score, we were 1-0 down. I felt like we needed these points. So I was just trying to shoot, and it was an amazing goal.”
Dest’s play so far In the Octagonal has explored the full spectrum of the Sergiño Experience. He was out of his element on Matchday 1 in El Salvador, his first game ever in Central America, leaving his teammates exposed while he dribbled into dead ends. Bringing a Barcelona starter to Estadio Cuscatlán felt like taking a bottle of Mouton Rothschild to a Jägermeister-drenched freshman dorm party.
Last month’s window became a wash when Dest got injured against Canada. But he came back strong against Jamaica in Austin last week, serving a delicate cross for Ricardo Pepi’s first goal, and after sitting out the loss in Panama he brought the goods against Costa Rica.
“Sergiño is an interesting player because it’s almost like the sky’s the limit for him,” U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter said on Wednesday night. “He could be as good as he wants to be. And you saw today with his attacking play, it’s unreal. … For Serge, it’s just hanging in there mentally, really pushing himself to be the best when he’s on the field. And I think we’re forgetting how young he is. Defenders rely on experience, and he just needs to gain experience. He’s doing a great job now. He’s played over 60 games for Barcelona already. That’s a really impressive record, and he just needs to keep working.”
Truth be told, Dest hadn’t covered himself in glory defensively on the strange goal that Costa Rica scored in the first minute of the game, silencing the crowd as the American Outlaws were still lowering their tifo. Dest couldn’t keep up with Ronald Matarrita, whose cross found Keysher Fuller open in the box. Fuller’s shot beat an oddly rooted Zack Steffen, who was starting in the U.S. goal in place of Matt Turner. Dest, who was all the way over on the right side, kept the Costa Ricans onside despite U.S. protests, and suddenly the Yanks were down a goal and staring at a fate similar to the devastating home qualifying fixture loss to Costa Rica four years ago.
“My initial thought was here we go,” said Berhalter. “We challenged the guys to respond after a poor performance in Panama. And this was going to be another element that we needed to respond to. It was early enough in the game. If we stayed calm and stuck to the game plan, I thought we’d be okay. It briefly flashed in my mind, Costa Rica could just go into a really, really low block. Thankfully they didn’t do that. But credit to the guys for staying calm, hanging in there and playing our game.”
The U.S. had some luck along the way. After McKennie and Yunus Musah combined to gift-wrap a first-half scoring chance for Costa Rica, Chris Richards—making his World Cup qualifying debut—dove in for a tackle at the last moment and avoided what could have been a penalty. Then in the second half, a bad pass in the back from Miles Robinson sprang 36-year-old Bryan Ruiz on a slow-motion breakaway, only for the 24-year-old Robinson to reel in Ruiz like a Bassmaster and prevent him from even releasing a shot. (Had it been anyone other than Ruiz, the Ticos could have gone ahead.)
Nobody wants to see a player be injured, but the last bit of U.S. luck involved Keylor Navas, the great Costa Rican goalkeeper, who went off at halftime with a muscle injury. That set the stage for the U.S. game-winner. In the 66th minute, Tim Weah pounded a shot that hit the post and then deflected off goalkeeper Leonel Moreira before trickling into the net for an own goal.
Weah, who only learned he was starting five minutes before kickoff when Paul Arriola got hurt during warmups, said afterward that he had seen Matthew Hoppe on the sideline and knew he was about to come out of the game. “But my goal was just to stay focused until then,” he explained. “And it just so happened that the ball came out wide to Serge, and I saw the run and I just hit it one-time and it happened to go in.”
The impact of that deserved U.S. goal is immense. A loss to Costa Rica would have vaulted the Ticos past the U.S., which could have fallen to as low as fourth place in the Octagonal. Instead, the U.S. finished the window with a win for the second straight month and is in second place behind Mexico, with 11 points. Four years after failing to qualify for World Cup 2018, the USMNT is on track to make it to Qatar 2022.
What’s more, the U.S. is doing it with a historically young team. The average age of Wednesday’s starting lineup was 22 years, 61 days—the USMNT’s youngest ever in World Cup qualifying. “That's basically unheard of in international football,” Berhalter said. “If you go look at the Germanys, the Frances, the Brazils, they're basically playing 28-year-old, 29-year-old teams. So for us to be navigating through this CONCACAF qualifying, which is a monster, with this group and the amount of poise they showed on the field today, particularly going down a goal, and then the second half being up a goal and managing the game really well…. I mean, [19-year-old] Gianluca Busio comes on and he's playing like he's 30 years old.”
Heading into Wednesday night, the U.S. had gone a remarkable eight straight games without scoring a first-half goal, a futility streak that dated all the way back to the Gold Cup quarterfinal against Jamaica on July 25. After the Panama loss on Sunday, several U.S. players said the team was lacking intensity, confidence and energy.
“It’s something I noticed myself, that we don’t seem to score early,” said left back Antonee Robinson on Tuesday. “We’ll [grow] in confidence in games, and maybe going forward that just means we need to be a bit more ruthless. Obviously we respect our opponents, but we need to realize how good a team we are at the same time, and maybe not be so conservative when we know we’ve got the quality to go and attack teams at full strength early on.”
There’s a famous moment in USMNT history that took place in the locker room before the U.S.’s 3-2 upset of Portugal in the opening game of World Cup 2002. Coach Bruce Arena looked at his players and said: “First tackle today, first foul, first shot, first goal”—meaning that he wanted them to seize the initiative from the outset. All of those things happened, and the U.S. pulled off one of its greatest victories, going ahead on John O’Brien’s fourth-minute goal and shocking the Portuguese with three first-half strikes.
Berhalter was a player in that U.S. locker room—he nearly became a World Cup hero that year when his goalward shot in the quarterfinal against Germany was blocked by Torsten Frings’s hand on the goal-line, only for no penalty to be called—and you couldn’t help but wonder if Berhalter would make a pregame locker room speech on Wednesday like the one Arena did in 2002.
Asked on Tuesday about the first-half scoring drought, Berhalter acknowledged that upon rewatching the Panama game he was unhappy with the U.S.’s performance, from its slowness in engaging the press defensively to a lack of movement off the ball in the attack. But he didn’t want to slam his team for what had happened in first halves over the last eight games.
“When I look at some of these games, I think we created chances in the first half,” Berhalter argued. “We didn’t always score them. And all of these games are tight. I think the first thing that we need to understand, the games you’re referencing are either tournament games or World Cup qualifier games, and look at the scorelines across the board, they’re one-goal games. These are tight games. They’re not going to be blowouts. For us, it’s about the key moments of the game. It’s about staying focused. It’s about bringing that intensity. And these are things that we all talked about.”
From an energy perspective, it’s also worth noting that due to the pandemic these World Cup qualifiers are the first in the history of CONCACAF in which teams are playing three games instead of two in a seven-day period during the FIFA window. That third game feels like an exponential change to the players, many of whom are also putting in significant travel miles flying to and from Europe.
As a result, U.S. Soccer has used everything in its arsenal to enhance recovery between games. “What aren’t we doing?” Berhalter said with a laugh when I asked him about the details. “We’re going through all the stops here: cryotherapy, floating tanks, recovery labs set up in the hotel, Normatec. You name it, we’re doing it. Flushing right after the game. So immediately that night we stayed in Panama, we did recovery there. The guys that played got flushes. The travel time was all programmed.”
It’s true that all the teams are having to play the same number of games, and if we’re being honest, the USMNT has an advantage with the three-game windows over most of its competition in the Octagonal. The U.S. flies charter between games, spends more money on recovery and travel support and has greater depth on its roster, the better to rotate players (though the seven changes in the lineup against Panama were hardly a success).
But over the past week, players around the world have started to criticize confederations for scheduling too many games to make up for pandemic postponements and not doing enough to protect the health of the players themselves. “Nobody cares about the players anymore,” Belgium goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois said of UEFA, which has scheduled three-qualifier FIFA windows and had Belgium play in the Nations League semis and third-place game over the weekend. “We are not robots. It’s just more and more games and less rest for us, and nobody cares about us. When will we get a rest? Never. Next year we have a World Cup in November, and we have to play until the latter stages of June again. So in the end, top players will get injured and injured and injured.”
Did CONCACAF have to stage its Nations League semis and final in June? No, and it could have used those dates for final-round World Cup qualifiers that would have mitigated the need for these three-game windows. But CONCACAF wanted the revenue that came from a USA-Mexico Nations League final, and that’s what it got.
“I think you’re asking a lot of players to be able to play three games in one window,” U.S. goalkeeper Sean Johnson told me in a one-on-one interview Tuesday night. “Ninety minutes for three straight games is pretty demanding on players that are coming from a club environment where guys are being asked to play a lot of games already. Not only physically, but mentally it’s a challenge to make sure you’re recovered, prepared and ready to go again. But we’re dealing with it. We’re embracing it, and we’ve got to figure out the best way to take advantage of the schedule the way it is.”
Yet instead of easing the load on players, CONCACAF and UEFA are still jamming the schedule with unnecessary Nations League games, and FIFA is pushing hard to make the World Cup once every two years instead of four. But while FIFA has trotted out a bunch of big-name former players to endorse its once-every-two years World Cup plan, conspicuously missing from the list of proponents are current players.
Courtois and his Real Madrid teammate Gareth Bale are just two of a growing number of active players to come out publicly against the proposal. Along with the fact that the players were not consulted for last spring’s stillborn European Super League idea, it’s enough to make you wonder if global soccer, which has never had a strong players union like those in the NBA, MLB and the NFL, might finally have one sooner rather than later.
While two of the team’s stars, Christian Pulisic and Gio Reyna, were missing this window due to injuries, they still made their presence felt inside the team over the past week. “Those guys are always connected,” Johnson told me. “We have group chats. They’re always wishing the group well. That’s the beauty of it, man. From a distance, those guys are just as connected to the group as if they were here. We need all the energy we can get, and everybody’s been a part of that.”
For its part, the USMNT has had one of the stronger unions in the sport over the years, and the current U.S. team has reflected that unity internally, even after the loss in Panama. And while two of the team’s stars, Christian Pulisic and Gio Reyna, were missing this window due to injuries, they still made their presence felt inside the team over the past week.
“Those guys are always connected,” Johnson told me. “We have group chats. They’re always wishing the group well. Last I heard, those guys are making their way back to full recovery, and we’re excited for them to get healthy and contribute. But that’s the beauty of it, man. From a distance, those guys are just as connected to the group as if they were here. We need all the energy we can get, and everybody’s been a part of that.”
The plan now, of course, is for Pulisic and Reyna to be healthy, on-site and involved in next month’s qualifiers against Mexico in Cincinnati and at Jamaica. The Mexico game on November 12 will almost certainly draw more buzz than any previous USA-Mexico home qualifier, and the next chapter of one of the world’s greatest international sports rivalries awaits. After the crucible of these first six games, a young and unified U.S. team should be ready—all the way down to its shoelaces.
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Whew was my feeling after the match. Felt we should’ve had more goals but the 3 points are what matter. Great response by the team after the Panama letdown. Props to the excellent midfield play, Miles Robinson’s speed & Bryan Ruiz’s lack of it.
Dest’s golazo was as awesome as it was timely. How he connected like he did with the untied laces could be a whole other story—how on earth did his boot stay on?
Glad we got the big W & looking forward to the Mexico match—hopefully with Pulisic & Reyna back.
Regarding your point about the crowded qualifying cycle, I agree that is too much. Do you think this 3-games-in-a-week will be the standard going forward in future WCQ cycles Grant? It must be more onerous for UEFA countries as they also play in Euro qualifiers.
"Bringing a Barcelona starter to Estadio Cuscatlán felt like taking a bottle of Mouton Rothschild to a Jägermeister-drenched freshman dorm party." ..That's journalistic poetry. 🤯