The Not-Quite-Ready for Primetime Players

I made the point recently that Bob Bradley's primary goal in the Gold Cup was player development, and that notion took a decidedly Nietzschean turn on Sunday, as Bradley's rag-tag band of young and uncapped players got their asses handed to them by Mexico in the final match of the tournament.

For those of you who didn't go to a liberal arts college with a heavy emphasis on humanities and social sciences, Friedrich Nietszche was the one who said "that which does not kill us makes us stronger." Forward Brian Ching summed this up pretty succinctly in his post-game comments, saying flat-out that "You look at anybody in the United States, this loss has got to anger you. I'm pissed. If you're an American and you're not pissed then there's something wrong with you. We've just got to channel this anger, use it, and bring it with us on Aug. 12."

So, what went wrong on Sunday? If you want the simplest answer, look to hopelessly overmatched right fullback Jay Heaps. A lot of people are calling the penalty against him questionable, but it's only dubious in the context of the non-call earlier in the match against Clarence Goodson at the other end. Heaps had a handful of jersey before he got the elbow to the head, but my predisposition is that he's a hack who has to foul to keep up with attackers anyway, so I'm somewhat biased. Then he was nowhere to be found on the two consecutive goals that followed, both of which developed on his side of the field, as did the final tally after he had been mercifully ejected from the match.

The only slightly more complex answer is that the team lost its collective shit after the penalty kick, whether that's because they were young, inexperienced, tired, not very good, overmatched, or some combination thereof.

But the gratuitous Jay Heaps-bashing, as fun as it is, belies the bigger point, and that's the obvious divergence between fans' expectations for this match versus those of the coach. Like any U.S. Soccer fan, I don't like losing to Mexico, especially at home, and especially by such a large margin. It sucks, and I'm angry about it. However, Bob Bradley's stated purpose here was to see how this next rung of players would do, and he got his answer, loud and clear. If there's a lesson to be learned it's that the fourth, fifth and sixth guys down the depth chart for the senior national team at pretty much every position are still secure. It's not like Kyle Beckerman was going to leapfrog Maurice Edu in the defensive midfield pecking order because of this tournament, and never really was. And there still may be some role for some of these players in the future, although the starting XI is probably not one of them for anyone not named Stuart Holden, at least in the near term.

Jamie Trecker makes a slightly bigger point about the U.S. team, which is that we keep getting just far enough to draw the attention of a wider audience before coming up short. That's where I'm really curious to see the response from the only real common thread between the Confederations Cup, the Gold Cup and next month's Azteca showdown in World Cup Qualifying, and that's the coaching staff.

As my Chicago bias is anti-Jay Heaps by nature, it's also pro-Bradley, and I still think I see -- and agree with -- the long game he's playing here. That's why I think Trecker is being willfully ignorant when he calls Bradley's decision to let Freddy Adu and Jozy Altidore go back to their club teams "curious." While, again, it sucks mightily to lose like this to Mexico, it would suck worse if, by focusing on a tournament that doesn't really mean that much, guys who have been struggling for playing time with their European clubs had to play catchup to establish themselves for their upcoming seasons.

We saw how rusty some of those guys were this summer as a result, and the decision to let them focus on playing competitively every week from now until the World Cup over playing the likes of Grenada and Panama over a two-week stretch was, and continues to be, the right one. This match did not kill the U.S., and hopefully it will make the U.S. stronger. Maybe as soon as August 12th.