The World Cup has come and gone but it isn’t hard to beckon back a year and a half ago and remember that a man who ultimately was left off the World Cup roster was, for a brief respite in time, the toast of the proverbial town. Indeed, USMNT fans felt shaggy-haired Chivas USA attacking midfielder Sacha Kljestan was nearly a lock to be paired alongside Junior in the American midfield in South Africa. Kljestan had netted a hat trick against Sweden, been a force… Read more
The 15 finalists for the USA Men’s Basketball roster came out today for the 2010 World Championships. After reading through the names on the roster, I began to think about what a USMNT roster could look like if these guys had been playing with their feet for as long as they’ve been hooping. The roster is as follows: Chauncey Billups, Tyson Chandler, Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Rudy Gay, Eric Gordon, Danny Granger, Jeff Green, Andre Iguodala, Brook Lopez,… Read more
As a few The Yanks Are Coming readers are aware, our Editor In Chief and fearless, visionary leader Daniel Seco does not have a favorite English Premier League Team. He’s dabbled a bit with the boys at Craven Cottage but never fully bought in. Same for the Billy Beane Sabermetrics club success story that plys its trade at the Emirates. So he’s not a Gunner, and he’s not a Cottager, but let’s call those two clubs the leaders in the clubhouse. As we… Read more
Since we got our butts kicked last month by a team we had no business losing to – a team whose best player was injured, whose GNP per capita ranks 194th in the world behind such worldwide superpowers as Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, and Mauritania, and whose land area is somewhere between the size of Michigan and Minnesota – I have seen a number of arguments about who our next coach should be. Before I address that though, I should tell all of you that to… Read more
Six US Midfielders on the Radar For 2014 Alejandro Bedoya, Orebro–The Boston College product had such a promising season in Sweden, endearing himself to Orebro fans and USMNT fans alike– that he received a surprise call-up to the final USMNT World Cup camp and had a legitimate shot of making the roster for South Africa. To some, including this writer, it was curious given that all we saw of him in a national shirt was a pair of cameos in two friendlies a… Read more
This is the second of a four-part Series of Report Cards for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s Four Year World Cup Cycle, 2007-2010. While we are not issuing grades for all 92 players capped by Bob Bradley during the cycle, we will feature players not on the World Cup roster who figured prominently in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup. We will issue grades of A-F, rather than player-rankings style grades of 1-10. This edition is likely the longest, focusing on… Read more
This is the first of a four-part Series of Report Cards for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s Four Year World Cup Cycle, 2007-2010. While we are not issuing grades for all 92 players capped by Bob Bradley during the cycle, we will feature players not on the World Cup roster who either figured prominently in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup. We will issue grades of A-F, rather than player-rankings style grades of 1-10. We’ll also account for players who will… Read more
With the Go-Go-USA lovefest starting to fade into the rearview mirror, we’ve reached the one time of year tough for soccer fans—the dog days of July. It’s always tougher to deal with the dog days after the excitement of a major international tournament, and nearly impossible after a World Cup. A week removed from the World Cup Final, soccer junkies from Atlanta to Australia are stuck, for the moment, in soccer Siberia. Essentially soccer’s dog days of… Read more
Soccer is a passion. To me, soccer is an incredible game with which I grow more deeply connected nearly every passing day. It has something for everyone. Beauty and grace, physicality, athleticism, moments of wonder, moments of agony, political power and meaning, religious controversy. Lately it has shed, or is shedding slowly its traditional old-guard modes of player evaluation and tactical constancy, incorporating science and math into its unwritten guides to… Read more
Posted by Puck in July 2010
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, World Cup fans of all ages, the greatest holiday of the year is rapidly approaching. No, I am not talking about Canada Day (fuck those Sidney Crosby loving buffoons, but Pam Anderson is cool.) I am talking about the 4th of July. We celebrate independence from our former colonial oppressors like no one else in the world. Families and friends gather around grills, porches, decks, and parks, getting shit hammered on American… Read more
As I’ve chronicled on this website before, The Yanks Are Coming was born out of the failure of the 2008 Olympic squad, the disappointment of the Orozco Red Card, the pain of the Netherlands draw, and the heart-ache that stems from elimination of the promising young team in our brief modern footballing era. Appropriately then, this blog continues after a failure even more painful than the Olympics. We all know as USMNT fans that usually if something can go… Read more
Now that I’m on the road to accepting what happened last Saturday and I’ve finally managed to crawl my way out of this empty bottle of whiskey, I guess I should go back to writing about the big worldwide soccer tournament which is apparently still taking place. Most readers of the most important blog of all time lost their biggest rooting interest when the Yanks were eliminated, or the next day when the Limey Wankers went down in TYAC writer Guy Bailey’s… Read more
Posted by Puck in June 2010
After the heartbreaking loss to Ghana last Saturday, I was furious. How was it possible that with this once in a lifetime opportunity to get to the final four of the world’s largest and globally significant tournament that we could blow it? When we started extra time, I had this feeling slowly creeping into my brain. If we could manage to play good defense for the first 10 minutes, we would find a goal to win and not have to go to penalties. Then, my… Read more
The compliment to my “Out of Miracles” piece, and a painful reminder of the U.S. exit as it stands to be my final player ratings piece of a competitive (non-friendly) match until next summer’s Gold Cup, which again becomes a point-of-emphasis for the U.S., as victory ensures qualification for the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil. Tim Howard, 5—His distribution was excellent again and led to a couple of counterattacking chances for the U.S. as… Read more
