Ben did well and keyed the defense when he got in but I think you are very harsh on Landon. Maybe I'm biased because he seems like a good person.
One thing about the big show. When your team doesn't do as well as you'd like, the finger pointing always gets out of hand. I don't like it and see no need for it.
We weren't suppose to get out of the group of death and we didn't.
I love what I saw in the future of US Soccer. For those of us who've loved this game a long time, just to have respect on the world stage means a lot. Many nations don't get out of the group stage and advance or even make every World Cup. Look at Portugal or Poland or even France who didn't even score a GOAL as defending champions.
That's how competitive the World Cup is at this level. You know that.
Everyone should lighten up, get over the media hype and understand the big dance is a process. Portugal had Eusebio and then the Golden Generation who were suppose to carry them to glory. It never happened.
To put this into perspective, we don't have the quality strikers yet to scare the big guys, but we can take them down on any given day. That's not a bad place to be on the grand stage.
And our pro baseball players were no world beaters either now, but they seemed to have gotten over it easy enough.
Onwards and upward!
Good post, but I don't agree that we can take down the big guys on any given day. Not yet. The closest we came was against Germany in 2002. That match, however, convinced many in the world to take us seriously and hence teams were better prepared to play us than in 2002 (where we shocked Portugal early).
The draw against Italy was also impressive, but I do believe they took us lightly.
I'm not depressed about our performance. We are simply not good enough to advance out of the group stage every time --- especially when we were in a very tough group.
France has scored ONCE in five games, and they have Thierry Henry, who has more talent then every striker who ever played for Team USA put together. We didn't advance, but at least we fought hard. France has just been awful.