What was that? Seriously, what the heck was that? I mean, where does anyone start after a debacle like that. Thank God I don’t get paid to write this stuff or I’d go broke. For the last 18 hours I’ve been trying to come up with some kinda positive to take out of yesterday’s match—everyone else got a fast jump on the negatives—and I can’t come up with a thing. Well, maybe the performance of Eddie Johnson when he came on. He and Reyna were about the only sparks on the pitch for the US yesterday.

After watching the Aussie’s make a great comeback in the final 10 minutes, I kept blindly hoping that the US could to the same. However, while the Aussies kept fighting and attacking the Japanese, the US just seemed to give up about the 60th minute…if not before then. The US lacked any creativity when they did have the ball—which was the majority of the time based on the stats—simply slinging cross after cross into the Czech box which usually had half-a-dozen 6’ + Czech defenders and one of the best keepers in the world and maybe 1 or 2 blue shirts. C’mon, if something doesn’t work the first few times, why not try something different. Actually, they did try something different the last 10-15 minutes, we started getting the hoof and hope approach where a defender hoofs it forward and hopes someone in a blue shirt is somewhere close to the ball when it lands.

That was probably the worst performance by the US team since ’98. Arena has ripped the team apart (as they should be) but a lot of the blame should be placed on him as well. My feeling is that the team was too overconfident. They thought they could mail yesterday’s match in and focus on getting past Italy. The coach is the one who should be keeping that mindset in Czech (err, check).

Well, that’s it. Saturday the US has a lot to prove. I expect to see Eddie Johnson and Clint Dempsey starting and probably several other changes (maybe Beasley, Lewis, Donavan and McBride will show up for the Italy match) as Arena tries to kick-start this campaign. Let’s just hope things in Germany turn out better than they did for Howard Dean.

Oh, I almost missed it because of the little tournament taking place in Germany but it seems that LA has managed to get a point. Also, they’ve now managed to score two goals in two matches. Looks like Yallop has started to right the ship. There’s still a long way to go. That would be big news in the US Soccer World, however, why does the league continue to go up against the World Cup? The league gets hardly any publicity and with the World Cup taking place, that coverage is reduced or buried even more than usual.

What’s that? The Fire played a home match in Bridgeview? Who knew?  ¶ 7:46 AM