Hello World

• Landon Donovan: Wildly overrated. Can barely dribble the ball without falling down or losing it (or both).
• Eddie Pope: Should have known better than to get that red card against Italy. It was a bad call but he shouldn’t have given the ref the opportunity to make it.
• Kasey Keller: I dunno. He looked okay to me (although I missed the Czech slaughter, so maybe that’s not accurate). Time for him to sign with RED BULL NEW YORK and enjoy a life of leisure.
• Oguchi Onyewu: Out of control, inept, terrible. Deserved or not, the guy:yellow cards::philatelists:stamps. I swear, somebody’s gotta explain to the man that he’s not supposed to just drag people to the ground with awkward rugby tackles.
• Brian McBride: Gutsy, creaky. If he wants to, he can spend the next year parleying his manly performance into unlimited, um, romance.
• DaMarcus Beasley: Mediocre, invisible most of the time. But he played a terrific ball for the US offense’s only goal of the World Cup.
• Claudio Reyna: A disappointing mistake sullies an otherwise decent career. To be honest, though, Reyna has never been any more than a reliable and boring midfielder. The way that he gave Ghana their first goal demonstrates why this should be his final cap.
• Clinton Dempsey: Hey look guys, sombody on the team actually likes shooting balls at the goal. Imagine if somebody else had tried that!

Looking good on paper doesn’t get you into the second round of the World Cup, nor should it. The US need not be ashamed of its effort or its results this year, but they should use the disappointing tournament experience as motivation to improve its myriad weaknesses (playing balls to space, defending without fouling, upping game tempo to take advantage of superiority in conditioning, etc.) in 4 years.

And Arena, who advanced the US team’s prospects enormously four years ago, should no longer be the head coach next week.

As for the whining about the officiating: The refs screwed the US this year, but maybe if we had tried actually playing decently things would have gone our way. The draw against Italy was inspirational, but today against Ghana we looked as sluggish and unambitious as the final score indicates. (I think the Dallas Mavericks need to learn the same lesson: great teams make their own luck.)

I will say this, however: I love the fact that the American team doesn’t spend half of the game writhing on the ground in a craven attempt to garner free kicks and red cards. The fact that such odious antics are effective is FIFA’s cross to bear, not ours.

Overall, I think the team got what it deserved, from getting destroyed by the other eventual Group E losers to exposing the Italians as a bunch of smelly cheap shot artists to wilting under Ghana’s relatively weak attack. We weren’t gonna win it all this year, so maybe we’ll be able to use this experience to give us a chance next time.

Meanwhile, I’ll be rooting for Switzerland but I expect Argentina to continue steamrolling everyone they play. Brazil is the only team with a reasonable chance of beating Argentina, and that’s if they (Brazil) stop screwing around and actually bother to focus.