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      Panama 1, U.S. 0: First Loss for U.S. in World Cup Qualifying

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      A listless performance by a shuffled lineup in a defeat at Panama cost the Americans some valuable momentum.Continuing the good vibes from one performance to the next can be tough, it turns out, when you switch out all of your top performers.That was one of the harsh lessons learned by the U.S. men’s soccer team on Sunday as it fell limply to host Panama, 1-0, in its fifth qualifying match for the 2022 World Cup.Things had looked so different on Thursday, when the Americans stomped to a 2-0 win against Jamaica in Austin, Texas. But with a quick turnaround between matches — and a third game to play on Wednesday night in Columbus, Ohio — U.S. Coach Gregg Berhalter made seven changes to his lineup.The result of cycling in all those different faces was an utterly unrecognizable showing from the Americans, who struggled to connect on passes or mount attacks as they absorbed their first defeat in qualifying and fell to 2-1-2 in the final round standings.“We know we’re playing in extreme heat, extreme humidity, and we know we traveled four and a half hours, and we know we have another game on Wednesday, and we wanted to rotate players,” Berhalter said. “If it didn’t work, then it’s on me, and it’s my responsibility.”To be fair, Panama offered a stiffer challenge than Jamaica had on Thursday. It had allowed only two goals in its first four games, and a loss last week in El Salvador left the Panamanians eager to regain their footing in front of their home fans.The loss, in Berhalter’s 40th game as the team’s coach, ended its unbeaten streak at 13 games. The United States plays its third and final match of the month against Costa Rica on Wednesday night in Columbus.Such an aggressive rotation of lineups from game to game during qualifying has become a preferred option for many coaches — and especially those who believe they have deep pools of talent — after FIFA tweaked its scheduling rules to allow confederations to hold as many as three games in each international window. Many coaches, Berhalter included, have been hesitant (with a few exceptions) to ask players to start three games in the course of a single week.That meant the 18-year-old striker Ricardo Pepi, who scored two goals against Jamaica on Thursday, started Sunday’s game on the bench. So did Tyler Adams, one of the team’s leaders and midfield linchpins, and Brenden Aaronson, one of Berhalter’s best playmakers over the past two months.Weston McKennie, another regular, stayed in the United States to rest a sore leg. And Antonee Robinson and Zack Steffen, who play professionally in England and would have faced a lengthy quarantine upon their return if they had traveled to Panama, did not make the trip, either.(Other top American players, like Christian Pulisic and Giovanni Reyna, never joined the team for this camp while dealing with their own injuries. Pulisic, for example, spent Sunday watching an N.F.L. game in London.)Striker Ricardo Pepi, who scored in the past two U.S. qualifiers, started Sunday’s game on the bench.Arnulfo Franco/Associated PressThe United States, so sharp and aggressive against Jamaica, looked stagnant from the start against Panama. Clunky touches and wayward passes kept the Americans from establishing any sort of continuity or assembling anything close to a threatening attack; they managed only five shots, but none of them were on target.Panama was clearly the aggressor. In the 14th minute, Rolando Blackburn found himself open in front of the goal, with a teammate’s cross hurtling toward his feet, but he shanked the point-blank shot wide of the right post, squandering the best chance of the first half for either team.The American goalkeeper Matt Turner, who seems to have established himself ahead of Steffen as the team’s starter with a string of assured performances this fall, was tested throughout the night, watching attacks swirl before his eyes, rising to intercept several dangerous crosses and making numerous nervy saves.He was beaten, finally, in the 54th minute, after Panama won a corner kick. Left back Eric Davis swerved the kick sharply toward the near post, where multiple players jumped to meet it. It was unclear at first who got the pivotal touch — U.S. striker Gyasi Zardes was there, as was Anibal Godoy of Panama — but the result was clear: The ball ricocheted inside the left post. Godoy, Panama’s captain, was more than happy to claim it, sprinting to the sideline with his hand in the air before being mobbed by his teammates.“You don’t normally expect to give up a goal on a ball like that,” Berhalter said.Berhalter exhausted his substitutions soon after the halftime break, hoping to alter the trajectory of the game. Adams and Aaronson came in to start the second half, with hopes they might provide a spark. And about 20 minutes later — and with the United States now trailing — they were followed by Pepi, DeAndre Yedlin and Cristian Roldan.But the jolt of energy never came, and the Americans missed a chance to build on the positivity that seemed to be bubbling within their group.“I think the way to look at it — and this is how I looked at it, and now it obviously doesn’t look like the best choice — but I think we need to wait till Thursday,” Berhalter said. “If we would have played the same players in this game, I’m not sure we would have positioned ourselves in the best way to win again on Wednesday.” More

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      Will British-Born Players Help Jamaica Achieve Soccer Greatness?

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      Jamaica recruited a crop of British-based players to bolster its World Cup qualifying campaign. The question now: Can it quickly mold them into a team?LONDON — Sometimes, the best explanation is the simplest one. Last month, in the aftermath of Jamaica’s heavy home defeat to Panama — a result that left the Caribbean country winless and, at that stage, pointless in World Cup qualifying — the finger of blame shifted quickly from the team’s coach, Theodore Whitmore, to his boss, Michael Ricketts.As president of the Jamaican Football Federation, Ricketts had spent much of the previous year trying to overhaul Whitmore’s squad in a bid to supercharge Jamaica’s attempts to reach its first World Cup in a quarter century.In March, he revealed a long list of British-born players of Jamaican heritage who, he said, were in the process of switching their international allegiance to the country of their parents’ or grandparents’ birth, immediately — in theory — boosting Jamaica’s chances of making it through the arduous slog of qualification.His targets were ambitious. The most eye-catching name was Michail Antonio, the West Ham forward who had, relatively late in his career, emerged as one of the most effective strikers in the Premier League. But beyond him lay a slew of equally familiar faces.Southampton’s Nathan Redmond, the Everton teammates Mason Holgate and Demarai Gray and Newcastle’s Isaac Hayden were all applying for Jamaican passports, Ricketts said. So too were Ethan Pinnock and Ivan Toney, of Brentford, and Max Aarons of Norwich City, some of the brightest talents in the second-tier Championship, and Kemar Roofe, a forward for the Scottish champion, Rangers.By the time the Panama game arrived, a host of the recruits who had accepted Ricketts’s overtures were in the team. Pinnock and Liam Moore started in central defense. Roofe and Daniel Johnson, of Preston, played in midfield. Antonio made his debut up front, alongside Bobby Decordova-Reid of Fulham.It did not end well. A few days earlier, without the vast majority of his reinforcements, Whitmore’s team had come within a few minutes of claiming a commendable point on the road in Mexico. Against Panama, though, Jamaica collapsed to a 3-0 defeat.From the outside, the suspicion was that Ricketts was at fault. It was suggested on television that he had destabilized the team by instructing Whitmore to make room for the new arrivals. “I must dispel that totally,” Ricketts said at the time. He called it “absolute rubbish,” and insisted that Whitmore would back him up. “All the J.F.F. did was make contact with the players, and provide the opportunity for the players to represent the country,” he said.Roofe, for one, has spent some time ruminating on that defeat. “It left a sour taste in the mouth,” he said. His conclusion, though, was not quite as intriguing as a dark conspiracy about outside interference. The problem, in his mind, was time. Or, rather, the lack of it.Along with the vast majority of the new additions to Jamaica’s squad, Roofe had been prevented from joining his teammates in Mexico. The country was at the time on the British government’s coronavirus so-called red list, meaning anyone who traveled there would have to spend 10 days in quarantine on their return to Britain.To circumvent that, it was decided that most of the British-based players would skip the game and head instead to Jamaica. As Whitmore and his squad were preparing to face Mexico, Roofe and a half dozen others were being greeted by representatives of the J.F.F. in Kingston and undergoing their mandatory Covid tests.Kemar Roofe, left, said he and his new Jamaica teammates had troubling meshing in their first game together, a World Cup qualifier against Panama in September.Collin Reid/Associated Press“It was a strange experience,” Roofe said. “The actual squad was in Mexico, so the rest of us flew to Jamaica, met the staff, got a couple of training sessions under our belts. It was good to meet the other players, but it meant when the rest of the team came back, it was a bit rushed.”Roofe and the others introduced themselves, had a single training session — focusing, he said, on “a bit of shape and set pieces” — and then, the next day, went out to play Jamaica’s first home game on a road that, the country hopes, will end in Qatar late next year.“That is the hardest thing in football, having to adapt quickly,” Roofe said. “You’re playing in a team you don’t know, in a style you don’t know, with a manager and players you haven’t met before, and you have to hit the ground running. You can get lucky, and everything just click, but normally it takes a few games.”Ideally, the first of those would have come almost immediately after the Panama defeat, but Roofe and the rest of the squad’s British-based contingent did not have chance: Costa Rica, Jamaica’s next opponent, was also on the red list. Only one player contracted to an English team, in fact — Anthony Grant, of third-tier Swindon Town — started in San José, where Jamaica earned a 1-1 draw.Grant’s case is a little different from many of his new teammates. “I’ve been waiting for the call for years,” he said. “I’d always wanted to play for Jamaica. My grandmother came from there, and went back when she retired. I go every year. I just didn’t really know how you went about it.”Now 34, after more than a decade establishing himself as a steady but unspectacular presence in England’s lower tiers, he had become a little fatalistic about his international hopes. “I’ve had a good career,” he said. “If this came along, I just saw it as a bonus.”He was not mentioned as a potential recruit by Ricketts, but earlier this year he received a message from the J.F.F. through Twitter. His first call-up was the Mexico game. He missed the humiliation against Panama, but impressed against Costa Rica.The divergence in those results has made Jamaica — which entered Thursday’s game against the United States at the bottom of the region’s eight-team table — difficult to assess. There have, so far, been two Jamaicas: the team bolstered by high-profile players from Europe, which as of Thursday had lost its only game to date, and the one without reinforcements, which emerged from its two engagements with a single point but an abundance of credit.How Jamaica’s qualifying campaign unfurls from here — and how much of a challenge it poses to its forthcoming opponents, the United States and Canada — will depend on how easy it is to forge a coherent whole from those twin strands.Aston Villa’s Leon Bailey is among the British-based players who will miss Jamaica’s current round of qualifiers.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat challenge has been made more complex by the absence of several of Jamaica’s recently-minted internationals from this week’s fixtures: Pinnock, Moore and Daniel Johnson are all missing through injury, as is Leon Bailey, the Aston Villa forward. Grant will sit out the game against the U.S. because of an issue with his visa. And, most notably, Antonio decided against traveling for this round of games after consulting with his club, West Ham.“It’s tricky if you are not getting a clean run at it,” Roofe said. “You might only need one training session to feel like you belong, but it takes longer to jell fully as a team, to know the intricacies of the players you are playing with.”There is only one way to solve that particular issue, of course, the same problem that Roofe identified at the root of the defeat to Panama: time. Both Grant and Roofe said they were confident that the Jamaica team that undertakes these three games will be more cogent than the one that played the previous three. And both feel that the longer World Cup qualifying runs, the more dangerous Jamaica will be. The question, of course, is whether there is enough time to make that count. More

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      USMNT Beats Honduras in a Crucial World Cup Qualifier

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      Illnesses, injuries and a suspension marred the start of World Cup qualifying. A trip to Honduras offered a chance to right the ship.SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — For even the most assured players and talented teams, a maiden journey into the heightened drama of the World Cup qualifying tournament in North and Central America can feel like splash of cold water to the face.Here, world rankings have a way of losing their meaning. Club pedigrees and players’ salaries can quickly be forgotten. It is a rude awakening, a rite of passage. And the United States men’s soccer team is experiencing it yet again.Beginning last week, the Americans embarked on a three-game series of qualifying matches over seven days that they hoped would establish a baseline state of confidence for the long path to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Much of the last week had, instead, left them looking frazzled and unsure.After draws in their first two games — on the road against El Salvador and at home against Canada — the Americans’ game late Wednesday night against Honduras at the spartan Estadio Olímpico Metropolitano represented a final chance to salvage the week. A loss would have sent the team home in the beginnings of a tailspin. A draw would have prolonged the slow boil of anxiety.Instead, they strode off 4-1 winners, a result — delivered by four second-half goals after an abysmal, disjointed first half that felt like the nadir of an awful week — that will provide a kernel of positivity to cultivate in the weeks to come.The most valuable thing the players and their coaches will bring home, then, could be the lessons learned: about the perils of trusting too much in past results; about the precarity of the challenge that remains ahead; and about the fragility of a team’s best-laid plans and ambitions.“It’s a different animal than we’re used to,” Coach Gregg Berhalter said after the game, referring to the qualifying tournament. “So I think that this whole window was great for this group. We really needed that in terms of the eye-opening of what this experience actually is.”Brayan Moya’s diving header in the first half gave Honduras a 1-0 lead on Wednesday night.Moises Castillo/Associated PressThe fear was that they were tiptoeing onto the same path an earlier version of the team traveled three years ago, when the United States fell one point short of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, ending a streak of seven straight appearances at the world’s most-watched sporting event. On some level, it seemed irrational: Even with the disappointing results from the first two games, the United States is heavily favored to qualify, perhaps more so after a win that will buoy their mood, and their hopes. But the bad memories of the last cycle remain raw in many people’s minds.“I can see it being, you know, just memories of the past, memories of the last qualifying round coming back,” Berhalter, who was hired after the 2018 World Cup, said of those concerns on Tuesday night. “And people say, ‘Oh, we’re in the same situation.’ I can understand that completely. What I’d say is this is a different group, and we’re focused on winning games, and we’re focused on getting points.”Such talk had not been convincing before Wednesday’s resounding win.Few would go as far as to call the Americans hubristic: The notion of this regional qualifying tournament as a gnarly obstacle course, with challenging factors unique in world soccer, has long been ingrained in the psyche of the team and its fans, and the players over the past week have spoken of the process with all due respect. They know, too, that it will continue with three more qualifiers in October, and two more a month after that.But the lofty standards imposed on the squad, the high expectation and calls for perfection, are in many ways of the teams’ own making.Berhalter said earlier this week that the tournament’s 14 games should be regarded by his players as “14 finals” — effectively labeling the entire slate of games as must-win contests.Christian Pulisic found little space to work, then left with an injury.Gustavo Amador/EPA, via ShutterstockBefore the first game last week, midfielder Tyler Adams laid out the team’s ambitious to-do list: “We’re looking for a nine-point week, bottom line,” said Adams, 22.And Weston McKennie said last week the United States needed to assert its position as the best team in the confederation. “The only way to do that is to dominate it,” he said two days before taking the field for the first World Cup qualifier of his career. “And to dominate, you’ve got to win your games.”These things, for a variety of reasons, did not come true against El Salvador and Canada. And for a half against Honduras, it did not seem as if they ever would. But then the halftime substitute Antonee Robinson pulled his team even three minutes into the second half, and the U.S. started to turn the tide. Ricardo Pepi, an 18-year-old striker from Texas, gave the Americans the lead in the 75th minute, and then set up midfielder Brenden Aaronson, another substitute, for an insurance goal in the 86th.Sebastian Lletget’s finish off a rebound three minutes into injury time closed the scoring, and, at last, restored the team’s smiles.Wins have a way of quieting, if not totally erasing, questions and distractions swirling around a group.On Sunday afternoon, for instance, McKennie was suspended for violating team rules and had to miss the team’s final two games of the week. McKennie said on Instagram before the game against Canada that he had broken Covid protocols.Berhalter said the disciplinary move was for the team’s long-term health. In the short term, it hurt. The suspension deprived the team of one of its best players, and McKennie’s teammates spent the ensuing days awkwardly answering questions about his conduct. World Cup qualifying runs through March, and Berhalter suggested that McKennie, who plays for the Italian powerhouse Juventus, would be back in the picture soon enough.“It’s an open-door policy,” he said. “There will very rarely be a situation where a player would never be allowed back into national team camp. That’s not how we operate.”Yet McKennie’s lapse was only the most high profile of the personnel headaches that have befallen the team since even before it gathered late last month.Timothy Weah, one of the team’s best attackers, never joined the group after hurting his leg while training with his club team in France.Christian Pulisic, the team’s captain and top player, missed the first game while trying to regain his fitness after testing positive for the coronavirus, and then limped out of Wednesday’s win with an ankle injury.Goalkeeper Zach Steffen was ruled out for the first game, and then the rest, first by back spasms, then by a positive coronavirus test.Gio Reyna injured his right hamstring in the first game against El Salvador and was sent back to his German club without taking the field again.Defender Sergiño Dest sprained his right ankle in the game on Sunday and departed, too.These issues made for a particularly complicated situation during a cramped window of games in which Berhalter had made no secret of his plans to rotate his lineup. But they also were just a taste of the ways things can spiral in the unforgiving landscape of World Cup qualifying.“It happens,” said Aaronson, 20, of his team’s simmering turmoil. “You have to get over things. I feel like as a team we just need to get over things.”Pepi scored the Americans’ second goal, giving them the lead, and Brenden Aaronson, right, added the third.Moises Castillo/Associated PressThe next games will arrive fast: Jamaica, Panama and Costa Rica next month, then Mexico and a trip to Jamaica about four weeks later.Before then, the team has some growing up to do. Only six of the 26 players initially called into the squad had any experience in World Cup qualifying. Thirteen of them were 23 years old or younger at the start of training camp. Nine of the starters against El Salvador were appearing in their first World Cup qualifier. (That 10 members of the team are playing for clubs in the European Champions League this year reiterates the level of talent being unfulfilled thus far.)One problem that needed solving as they took the field Wednesday night was finding some scoring: Heading into the Honduras game, the United States had not produced more than one goal in any of its previous six games.They left the field after putting four past Honduras, letting them breathe a collective sigh of relief.“It’s a massive experience that we needed, just to show that with all the adversity we’ve gone through, we’re ready to come back from it,” Robinson said. “Obviously there’s been disappointing times on this trip. But in the end, we’ve ended it on a real high, and now we can attack October with everything we’ve got.” More

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      USMNT Ties Canada, Its Second Straight Stumble in Qualifying

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      After settling for disappointing draws in its first two World Cup qualifiers, the U.S. men’s soccer team heads to Honduras in search of answers, and its first victory.NASHVILLE — If every World Cup qualifying campaign is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows, then the United States men’s soccer team has not yet left the ground.The Americans have played two games in four days to start the final round of their regional qualifying tournament for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and though they expected to win both matches, they have settled instead for two disappointing draws.These are early days, still. There are 12 games to go. And two points are better than none.Tras las segunda fecha de #WCQ, @miseleccionmx sigue en la cima con paso perfecto, y @fepafut se colocó en el segundo puesto. pic.twitter.com/a8EuFXL9Cw— Concacaf (@Concacaf) September 6, 2021
      But there has been a restless desire within the team and its fan base for an assured start to this qualifying cycle given the disaster of the last one, when the team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. This group, which includes young talents employed by some of the world’s best club teams, had hoped to begin the healing process.Instead, there are more questions about the team’s competence, more anxieties about history repeating itself and more desperation to win the next game, which arrives Wednesday night in Honduras.“There’s ups and downs and bumps in the road, and we just have to keep responding when we’re called on,” said Gregg Berhalter, the U.S. coach. “We can do two things. We can feel bad for ourselves or we can continue on with a positive attitude and try to get a positive result in Honduras.”Tajon Buchanan, left, and Canada have as many points (two) as John Brooks and the United States do after two games.Mark Humphrey/Associated PressThe stage was set in many ways for a restorative performance on Sunday night at Nissan Stadium in Nashville. The grass was lush. The home crowd was genteel. The novice players’ nerves were supposedly settled.In other words, none of the excuses Berhalter had tossed around over the weekend to help explain his team’s underwhelming 0-0 tie last Thursday in El Salvador — about the knobbly field of play, the hostile atmosphere, the number of team members playing their first qualifying game — were applicable as the Americans registered another dissatisfying draw, 1-1, in their second game against Canada.The team’s failure to meet the moment left it searching for answers.The Americans looked ungainly passing the ball. They took the scenic route when shortcuts were needed, lumbering around the perimeter of the Canadians’ dense defensive shell. It was a familiar set of problems: copious possession, scant production. The United States kept the ball for 71 percent of the game, but Canada’s sit-back-and-counterattack game plan worked just fine, and the result seemed fair.“We needed much faster ball movement,” Berhalter said. “Everyone could see from the outside, we took way too long on the ball.”He added, “We have to figure out ways to break down a compact defense because I’m sure there’s going to be other teams that come to the United States and do the same thing.”Christian Pulisic, the Americans’ captain and best player, who returned to the lineup after missing the El Salvador game while he recovered from a positive coronavirus test last month, was critical, too — even if it was unclear whether he was targeting the coaching staff, his teammates, himself, or some combination of the three.“I think we need new ideas at times,” he said, adding: “It just felt like we couldn’t break them down. We just need some new solutions. Obviously it wasn’t good enough.”Pulisic went on to suggest that the team could have conducted itself differently after taking the lead early in the second half by making adjustments and perhaps adopting a more defensive mind-set.“I think it’s important in games like this, tough games, to just grind it out and win these games 1-0 at times,” he said.Such pragmatism requires some savvy, and it is unclear how much this team possesses. The squad is populated by intriguing youngsters, many of them technically skilled in ways that subvert longstanding stereotypes about American soccer players. Trophies in two tournaments this summer — the Gold Cup and the Nations League — stoked excitement about what the group could do.But this month the group’s youth, and acknowledged naïveté, have looked like liabilities.“It’s a team sport,” midfielder Tyler Adams said when asked about the players’ strong pedigrees. “It doesn’t matter where we come from. If we don’t go out and do the things we’re good at, we’re just a group of names on a piece of paper.”It has not helped matters that this team has been depleted by a combination of bad luck and indiscretion.Before Sunday’s game, the team announced that Gio Reyna, one of its best attackers, would be out indefinitely with a hamstring injury and that Zack Steffen, Berhalter’s first-choice goalkeeper, would leave the squad, too, after testing positive for the coronavirus.Sergiño Dest left the game with an ankle injury in the first half. Alphonso Davies, right, departed with his own pain in the second.Christopher Hanewinckel/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe team also announced before kickoff on Sunday that the star midfielder Weston McKennie would miss the game in Nashville after violating the team’s coronavirus policy.“I am sorry for my actions,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “I will be cheering hard for the boys tonight and hope to be back with the team soon.”For McKennie, who tested positive for the virus last October, the indiscretion (which the team declined to detail) hinted at a worrying pattern of behavior. In April, McKennie was suspended by his club team, Juventus, after he hosted a party at his home in Turin that violated a local curfew and needed to be broken up by the police.Berhalter late Sunday night declined to say whether McKennie would be available for Wednesday’s game in Honduras.These bouts of misfortune and personal slip-ups are hard to digest when each game carries so much weight. There is only so much time to get things right, only so many setbacks a team can withstand.“The way we’ve been framing it to the guys is that every game is a final,” Berhalter said. “Fourteen finals, that’s how we have to approach it. So the urgency is always going to be there until we’re mathematically secure with qualifying.”The Americans last month unveiled a marketing slogan — “Only forward.” — that reflected a desire to put their recent failures behind them. But Pulisic on Sunday could not help dwelling on the past, noting that in the last cycle the team had lost its first two matches. Those poor results precipitated the firing of Coach Jurgen Klinsmann.By that standard, the Americans are in better shape now. By any other measure, they are falling worryingly short of expectations. More

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      U.S. Ties El Salvador in World Cup Qualifying

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      As a youthful American team took its first step toward the 2022 World Cup, it rued a few missed opportunities.SAN SALVADOR — The formula for success in World Cup qualifying is written in years of hard lessons, hard games and hard nights: Win your home games. Pick up points on the road. Survive and advance.So it should not have a been a terrible disappointment for the United States men’s soccer team on Thursday when it opened the final round of qualifying with a scoreless tie at El Salvador. A point on the road, after all, is better than the alternative.“If you’re not going to win the game,” United States defender Tim Ream said, “then you can’t lose it.”But some points are harder won, and perhaps harder to accept, than others. Fresh off a summer in which it won two cup finals against archrival Mexico, the United States had started Thursday’s match against El Salvador exactly as it had hoped. It produced three excellent scoring chances — by Gio Reyna, Brendan Aaronson and Miles Robinson — in the first 10 minutes and at times displayed the kind of free-flowing, field-stretching ball movement that has made its youth-infused roster the best team in the region again.But El Salvador, in the midst of its own rebuild under the former United States national team player Hugo Pérez, soon found its footing. Backed by a capacity crowd that had begun streaming through the gates as soon as they opened 11 a.m., nine hours before kickoff, La Selecta lacked only the clinical finishing required to cash in the chances created by its deft footwork and incisive runs. Midfielder Alex Roldan came closest to opening the scoring in the 33rd minute, dropping defender DeAndre Yedlin on the left side before curling in a shot that skimmed the crossbar.“There needs to be a calm that sets in after that initial period, where we really start taking over, and we never got that,” United States Coach Gregg Berhalter said. “It turned into too hectic of a game, and we didn’t manage that well.”Tens of thousands of El Salvador fans packed the Estadio Cuscátlan, creating an electric atmosphere.Rodrigo Sura/EPA, via ShutterstockIn the second half, the game drifted inexorably toward a stalemate amid tired legs, wayward passes and a quick succession of American yellow cards. When the final whistle blew, the United States players trudged off, projecting a sense that they could have won, while El Salvador’s basked in the cheers of an adoring crowd that seemed to feel that its team had.In his final prematch comments on Wednesday, Berhalter had called the game an opportunity, a chance to rewrite the team’s destiny right from the start of the final round of qualifying, and to do so even without the star midfielder Christian Pulisic, who skipped the trip as he continued to recover from a bout with the coronavirus.For a few of his teammates, though, it may have felt like an opportunity lost. Berhalter spoke of a lack of connections, of too much individual play and not enough switching of the point of attack. The United States captain, Tyler Adams, pointed out some of the same concerns, but also a need to be “more ruthless” in finishing chances.“It’s our first game,” Adams admitted grudgingly. “We have to take what we can from it.”The Americans’ coach, Gregg Berhalter, expressed frustration at his team’s inability to retain control of the game.Moises Castillo/Associated PressThe Americans will not have long to linger over Thursday night’s result: Two more qualifiers loom in the coming days, against Canada on Sunday in Nashville and against Honduras on Wednesday in San Pedro Sula. The former may present the tougher competitive test, the latter the more dangerous one, mentally and physically, of this compressed window.Those games will mark the first hurried steps of the final round of qualifying, normally an 18-month slog that has been compressed to a seven-month sprint because of pandemic delays and postponements. That means three games in most windows, rather than the usual two, and less time to revel in victories or wallow in defeats. It means injuries and absences like Pulisic’s may prove more problematic, and disappointing results more costly.It means that for a young United States team, whose starting lineup on Thursday had an average age of 23 years and 282 days, there will be no time to look back and wonder how Thursday might have gone differently. Now that it’s over, the Americans will fly home with their hard-won point, their hopes for three more only a few days away. More

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      USMNT Faces El Salvador in World Cup Qualifying

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      Ahead of World Cup qualifying, a young team with a fresh attitude says it is unburdened by the failure of its predecessors to qualify for the tournament.SAN SALVADOR — As drama goes, at least by recent United States World Cup qualifying standards, the news rated a raised eyebrow, not a blaring alarm.Christian Pulisic, still finding his way back to fitness after a positive coronavirus test and 10 days in isolation, had not traveled to El Salvador with his United States teammates on Wednesday, one day before they were to open the final round of qualifying for soccer’s 2022 World Cup. Pulisic would not play in Thursday’s game, the team announced, and neither would goalkeeper Zack Steffen, who was enduring a late-breaking case of back spasms. He had stayed back in Nashville, too, where the United States will return this weekend to face Canada.“We feel like we have a deep team,” Coach Gregg Berhalter said. “Now’s the time to show it.”It was the kind of clipped confidence that has become Berhalter’s signature throughout his coaching career. Losing two starters was not a crisis, but “an opportunity,” he said calmly. Berhalter talks a lot about opportunities. This summer’s Nations League had been an opportunity to prove his best players could go toe to toe with rival Mexico and win, which they did. The Gold Cup that followed had been an opportunity, too, for a different set of U.S. players. The Americans beat Mexico to win that one as well.Christian Pulisic remained in Nashville, where he will train on his own while his teammates face El Salvador on Thursday.Mark Humphrey/Associated PressIt’s a lot easier, Berhalter and his players have found, to talk about opportunities when you’re collecting trophies. For the bulk of the current United States team, though, the eight-team final round of qualifying that begins with three games over the next week is just that: an opportunity to show that a new generation of talents — the current roster’s average age is about 24 — can move away from past disappointments, can rely on new players, can write its own story.“When Greg first came in to the national team, he put a plan in place that I don’t think any national team coach has been willing to take the risk of doing,” midfielder Tyler Adams said. “Basically changing the whole way that the system would work, inside and out, whether it was our tactics, the players that we wanted to have, what certain positions needed to do, the qualities that we needed to have, and basically how we could develop and get better leading up to this point, to our first qualifying game.”He, and they, know there will be stumbles: bad fields, bad weather, bad referees, even bad results. They might come immediately, or they might come in a month or two, but they will probably come. In the last cycle, the United States failed to win a single road qualifier. Then it was the last game, not the first, that had been the biggest opportunity lost.Any assessment of the state of the U.S. team at the start of this qualifying cycle’s final act has to start at the end of the last one: with that crushing loss at Trinidad and Tobago that led the team to miss the World Cup for the first time in a generation.For weeks, Berhalter and his players have been asked about that night. Midfielder Kellyn Acosta’s memory is probably clearer than most — he had entered the match as a second-half substitute and was on the field when his team’s world went dark — but he has learned not to rehash it much in interviews. Midfielder Brendan Aaronson, who was only 16 at the time, struggled to remember if he had seen any of the game live. His teammate Weston McKennie was certain he had not. “I don’t really watch sports,” he said.But the fact that most of the players couldn’t remember the match subtly spoke to something else, something probably more important to them and their coach today: They weren’t there. They weren’t part of it. And they certainly weren’t to blame for it.“I don’t think the group now really sees it as a burden,” McKennie said of the shadow of 2017. “I think it’s more, we’re not really going to focus on what’s happened in the past. Obviously it’s going to be in the back of our heads somewhere, but that’s not going to be our main fuel, our main focus: trying to redeem what happened years ago.“I think right now we’re just trying to create a legacy of our own.”Several of the young stars who could start against El Salvador on Thursday — including Adams, McKennie, Gio Reyna, Josh Sargent and Sergiño Dest — did not make their national team debuts until after the Trinidad defeat. Berhalter wasn’t hired for more than a year after the loss. It was 2019 before he coached his first game.The United States beat Mexico in a cup final in June, then did it again in August. Jack Dempsey/Associated PressNow, though, his team is humming. The summer tournament triumphs gave the players a taste of CONCACAF competition, and of the rough play and hot nights and dubious calls that have often marked World Cup qualifying in the region. And for the first time, the final round will open with three matches in a single window, a clutch of games that should, in theory, favor a Berhalter team that boasts of more depth than the likes of El Salvador, Canada and Honduras.They all know every game matters. For years, the qualifying calculus has been a simple formula: Win your home games and then pick up points on the road. But the new breed is not interested, not really, in how things used to go.“Our mentality is to win all the games we can,” McKennie said. “I don’t think we have a formula where, ‘Let’s win our home games and grab a couple points on the road.’ Our goal is to prove we’re the best in CONCACAF, and I think the only way to do that is to dominate it.”Said Adams: “There’s no Plan B for us. There’s only been a Plan A, and that’s to qualify for the World Cup.” More

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      El Salvador's Secret Weapon: a Fan and His Computer

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      The revival of El Salvador’s soccer team is a tribute to better organization, coaching and talent. But it also owes a debt to a fan with a gift for scouting.SAN SALVADOR — For more than a decade, Hugo Alvarado scoured the internet for soccer players who might improve El Salvador’s national teams. He was, he admits bashfully, pretty good at it.Working from a home computer in California, he quickly identified dozens of members of the vast Salvadoran diaspora, players with Salvadoran-sounding names or Salvadoran-looking faces and places on the rosters of European professional clubs, M.L.S. academy teams and American college programs. Then, one by one, he tracked them down. Those who expressed interest in playing for El Salvador were added to the growing database on Alvarado’s website.There was always one hitch, though: Alvarado didn’t work for El Salvador’s soccer federation. He had no authority to recruit players to its national teams. He was just a fan who wanted better teams to support.“I wanted to see a more competitive national team,” he said this week, more than a decade after beginning his project. “So that’s why I do what I do.”As the final round of qualifying for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar begins this week in North and Central America, there has been much talk about the rebuilding of the United States men’s team in the wake of its 2017 qualifying failure. But its first opponent on Thursday, El Salvador, also has new leaders, a new coach and a new crop of bright young talents. And the reconstruction it has undertaken may be just as comprehensive.El Salvador was the first Central American country to qualify for the World Cup, in 1970, and the first to return to it a second time, in 1982. Its team has mostly floundered since then, boxed in by small thinking, big scandals and an inability — or an unwillingness — to modernize. Quietly, that may all be changing.Last fall, El Salvador’s federation hired Diego Henríquez, a former youth international who had played college soccer in the United States, as its first sporting director. Henríquez’s first hire was Hugo Pérez, a respected former U.S. Soccer player and coach.Their aim, initially, was to focus on stocking El Salvador’s youth teams with better players, from anywhere they could find them. A former United States under-17 player from Indiana with a Salvadoran father. A New York Red Bulls academy product with a Salvadoran mother. A pro in the Netherlands who was actually eligible to play for four countries, and had already worn the jersey of one of them. Even Pérez’s nephew, a former U.S. youth soccer teammate of Christian Pulisic, fit the bill.Joshua Pérez, top, a former member of several United States youth teams, and Enrico Dueñas, who once played for the Netherlands’ under-16 team, are two of the latest foreign-born recruits to El Salvador’s national team.Francisco Guasco/EPA, via ShutterstockThat kind of open-arms strategy is hardly unique — Italy, England, Spain and many other countries have all fielded foreign-born players — and Pérez knows the value of it as well as anyone: Born in El Salvador, he played more than 70 times for the United States and represented the country at the Olympics and the World Cup. And he, like almost everyone else in Salvadoran soccer, had heard about the detective work Alvarado was doing.“Bringing talent from different parts of the world could be a plan in any federation,” Henríquez said, noting the United States has long done it, and Mexico has more recently made overtures to players born and developed in America. “That’s part of restructuring our identity.”Ambition, though, works best with a plan. Under Pérez and Henríquez, El Salvador has a holistic approach: top-quality training and coaching, but also improvements in nutrition and sleep and fitness and an emphasis on “what it means to represent El Salvador, what it means to wear a national team jersey, what it means to come to a camp and be a professional.”The early returns have been promising: Hired to run the youth teams, Henríquez and Pérez added responsibility for the senior team in April, after worrisome results in an earlier round of World Cup qualifying led to a coaching change. Building around young players and new recruits, El Salvador advanced to the knockout round of this summer’s Gold Cup, a major regional championship, and even gave Mexico a brief scare before exiting in the quarterfinals.Toronto F.C.’s Eriq Zavaleta was one of the first players Hugo Alvarado added to his database in 2011. A starter for several U.S. Soccer youth teams by then, he made his debut for El Salvador in June.Brandon Wade/Associated PressEl Salvador has few illusions about the job ahead in World Cup qualifying: The region only gets three and a half spots in next year’s tournament from its eight-team octagonal qualifier, and few expect La Selecta, as El Salvador is known, to claim one. The region’s representation will grow, however, when the World Cup expands to 48 teams in its next cycle.“Our main objective is 2026,” Henríquez said. “We just started, and we know that.”More new players will be part of the plans by then, but so will Alvarado. On the day he was hired last October, Henríquez told reporters that he was open to “anyone who can help” El Salvador improve. One of his first stops was to the man in California with the home computer and the rich knowledge of the kind of players who might be available. In October, Henriquez hired Alvarado as the first full-time scout in the federation’s history.Henríquez said the plan was to refine Alvarado’s hobby and to focus him on finding not every potential Selecta player, but specific ones. Instead of a vacuum cleaner, he would in essence become a personal shopper, presented with a shopping list of specific needs — supplementing an age group’s team, for example, or providing options to look at in a certain position, or a distinct role. He, and Henríquez, still aren’t sure how much talent might be available.“I need five Hugo Alvarados in North America,” Henríquez said.Alvarado’s latest find, the 20-year-old midfielder Enrico Dueñas, is just the kind of prospect he and El Salvador will be seeking. A veteran of the Ajax and Vitesse academies and eligible through his lineage to play for four countries — the Netherlands, where he was born, but also El Salvador, Finland and Curaçao — Dueñas was discovered by Alvarado through the player’s sister, whom he met after methodically going through a list of Dueñas’s Facebook friends.Receptive to the approach, Dueñas made his competitive debut for El Salvador in an Olympic qualifying tournament in Mexico in March, and he has been included in Pérez’s roster for the first three World Cup qualifiers.On Sunday, he arrived in El Salvador for the first time.For Alvarado, Dueñas and another player he identified long ago, the uncapped Costa Rican import Cristian Martínez, have created the kind of buzz he used to covet when he first created his website.But they are also rekindling the memories of how his father used to talk about El Salvador’s glory days of 1982, and 1970, before civil war sent the country’s citizens scattering for safety around the globe. Now he is trying to bring at least a few back.“I strongly believe that we have the talent to put a team in the World Cup,” Alvarado said. “And I’m a strong believer that foreign-born Salvadorans can get us there faster.” More

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      U.S. Men Beat Mexico in Final Filled With Plot Twists

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      Sunday’s Concacaf Nations League final was a roller-coaster of emotion, a game of goals and fights, flying projectiles and video reviews. It ended with the United States lifting the trophy.You will not find the word Concacaffy in any dictionary, but any soccer fan in North America knows what it means and how to use it in a sentence.It can explain anything from a terrible field to a terrible call to terrible behavior, and the word works just as well as an anguished cry or accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders. Can’t believe that foul wasn’t a red card? That’s so Concacaffy. Field surrounded by a 20-foot moat? That’s so Concacaffy. Were there really just 11 minutes of stoppage time after a 15-minute overtime? Sooooo Concacaffy.Even before the United States men’s national team beat Mexico, 3-2, on Sunday night to win the Concacaf Nations League final on Sunday, the word has been tossed around quite a bit. For fans of the two teams — the twin poles of North American soccer dominance and hand-wringing — the whole night was thrilling and frustrating and exhilarating and maddening.It was also pure, unfiltered Concacaf. Missed it? Here are the highlights. And the lowlights.Jesús Corona intercepted a pass by Mark McKenzie, left, and ripped a shot past Zack Steffen.Jack Dempsey/Associated PressA mistake! And a goal for Mexico.Mexico’s night started wonderfully, with a sizable advantage among fans in the stands in Denver and an early goal. It came courtesy of a giveaway by the young United States defender Mark McKenzie — who made a bad decision in his own penalty area. Just over a minute into the game, Jesús Corona pounced on the error, and Mexico was ahead, 1-0.It gets worse for the U.S.! Oh wait, no, it doesn’t.Mexico’s Héctor Moreno doubled the lead in the 24th minute, threatening to send the United States into a dangerously deep hole. But the referee, John Pitti of Panama, is called to the video-assistant review monitor for a second look at Moreno’s positioning, and he rules the goal was offside.Relief for the U.S.! Reyna gets one back.Gio Reyna corralled a header off the post and slammed in the rebound in the 27th minute.Isaiah J. Downing/USA Today Sports, via ReutersMoments later, the U.S. got to breathe an enormous sigh of relief when three of its brightest young stars teamed up to tie the score.Christian Pulisic started the play, curling in a corner kick toward midfielder Weston McKennie. McKennie won the free ball and sent his header past Mexico’s goalkeeper, Memo Ochoa, but the shot hit the far post. The carom brought it right back into the goal mouth, though, where Gio Reyna turned it effortlessly back into the net. Tie game.In the stands, Reyna’s parents, Claudio and Danielle — who both played for the national team — share a hug.Late Drama! Mexico retakes the lead, and the U.S. answers.The second half was when the game got interesting. The Americans made some tactical changes and started to hold their own, and McKennie kept firing headers at Ochoa, who kept managing to keep them out. United States goalkeeper Zack Steffen was doing the same at the other end until he scrambled out to break up a chance and, untouched, went down with a leg injury. He couldn’t continue, and was replaced by Ethan Horvath in the 69th minute.And this is when the game got really fun.The 20-year-old Mexico star Diego Lainez appeared to win the game in the 79th minute when, seconds after coming on as a substitute, he took a pass on the right, nudged it left and ripped a shot past Horvath to give Mexico a 2-1 lead.But that wasn’t the exclamation point it seemed. Within minutes, the game was even again after McKennie — thwarted by the post and by Ochoa for most of the night — finally sneaked a header over the line.Weston McKennie’s late header sent the final to extra time.John Leyba/USA Today Sports, via ReutersTrouble! A homophobic chant and flying bottles.The game was delayed for about three minutes when the referee stopped play to enforce Concacaf’s anti-discrimination protocols. The rules are in place to address everything from racism to homophobic chants, and they nearly stopped a Mexico-U.S. game in New Jersey in 2019.Mexico’s federation, its stars and its coaches have pleaded with their fans for years to stop the chant that has caused the most trouble, but it is still a common refrain at the team’s games at home and abroad.“Once again, I insist — I asked you guys to stop with that screaming,” Ochoa said during a news conference ahead of the final, and after the team’s win over Costa Rica in the semifinals had been paused because of the protocols. “It doesn’t help us at all. It is affecting us as a matter of fact.”Ochoa pleaded with fans to not repeat the chant in the final “and in the upcoming games in the Gold Cup, in the qualifiers, in Mexico, or abroad,” noting that the team could face escalating punishments, and even ejection from tournaments, if soccer officials ever follow through and enforce its most serious punishments.“All the team players are asking you, please, because in the long run, this could affect us.”Still, for the second time in this tournament, a Mexico match was stopped to address it.Isaiah J. Downing/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe players gathered at midfield during the delay, and an announcement — a warning that the game could be called off — was read over the stadium loudspeakers. Play soon resumed, but the trouble wasn’t over.As is often the case, bottles and cups became projectiles on several occasions, most notably after the United States celebrated goals, and as players like Pulisic lay on the grass to waste time late in the match.At least one missile sent Reyna down in a heap, clutching his head, after a goal, and another later hit a Mexican player square in the face.Extra time! Two V.A.R. checks, two penalty kicks, one goal.If you weren’t hooked by now, the game was about to go full Concacaf.Early in the second extra session, Pulisic drove into Mexico’s penalty area and went down under a hard challenge from two defenders. On the ground, he waved his arms in the international symbol for “Hey that was a penalty!” but Pitti ignored him. Until, that is, he got a nudge to review the play on the sideline monitor.“It plays with your head a little bit when it takes long for the ref to decide whether it’s a PK or not,” McKennie said.A second look — interrupted briefly so he could red card Mexico’s coach, Tata Martino, for throwing his arm around the referee’s shoulder as he peered at the screen — confirmed for Pitti that the foul was a penalty. He made a dramatic signal to award it, and Pulisic stepped up and buried it. U.S. 3, Mexico 2.Christian Pulisic went down after a hard challenge in the second extra period.Jack Dempsey/Associated PressAfter waiting out a video review, he fired his penalty kick into the top corner.Jack Dempsey/Associated PressBut the final, and Mexico, was not done. Mexico won a corner in the 119th minute and stroked in a cross. A header appeared to hit McKenzie on the arm, and while Pitti did not appear to see it, every Mexican player did. Back to the review screen Pitti went, and off to the spot went Mexico. By this point, even the announcers were laughing.The problem, at least for Mexico, was the job wasn’t done yet. Andrés Guardado stepped up to take the penalty, and tie the score again, and his attempt wasn’t bad. But Horvath had guessed correctly and, diving to his right he pushed it aside.After that, all that was left was bottles thrown from the stands, 11 minutes (11!) of added time and a final whistle that delivered the United States — which had started the inaugural Nations League final with one of its youngest lineups ever — its first trophy since 2017, and its first win over Mexico since 2018.The confetti flew where the bottles had not, the fans (at least those there to support the U.S.) cheered and the American players picked up their medals.And then they braced themselves to possibly do it all over again in a month, when Mexico and the United States will be expected to tangle again in Concacaf’s regional championship: the Gold Cup.Tyler Adams, who taunted the Mexico crowd as it threw bottles, and Gio Reyna, who took one to the head.John Leyba/USA Today Sports, via Reuters More