Dog Bites Man At Azteca

Expectations among sports fans are funny. In soccer, sometimes it seems even more so.

If you had told an American soccer fan two months ago that the U.S. would drop a 2-1 match against Mexico in Mexico City, he (or she, but let's face it, probably he) wouldn't have blinked. They might not have been happy, but nobody wins at Azteca. We, in particular, have never won at Azteca.

Then, this summer happened, and everything changed.

If things had gone to plan, we still would have lost in the Confederations Cup to Italy and Brazil, except maybe more "respectably," and would have gotten a win, or maybe even just a draw, against Egypt. We then would have gone home to prepare for the Gold Cup, which maybe we would have won. Or at least not conceded in the championship match to Mexico by a score of 5-0. This would have kept the conventional wisdom intact, and a loss with a good effort in Mexico City would have been entirely normal. Jamie Trecker would likely have had no problems with it.

Of course, this isn't how it turned out. The poor performance in South Africa against Brazil -- and I still won't concede that Italy was that bad a performance, given that the red card was harsh and very, very early in the match, and we still were able to stake a 1-0 lead -- made the Egypt match a must-win. Then the upset against Spain made the final with Brazil a might-win, and certainly the first half got our hopes up. But we couldn't hold on to a lead in a match most people would say we had no business leading in the first place. Brazil is, on balance, a much better team than us. Also, the sky is blue.

Yes, it sucks that this was the match everyone was watching. I get that.

Then, the Gold Cup. Might it have turned out differently had the U.S. coaching staff had more than a day or two to work with a mostly green group of players upon returning from Johannesburg? It's tough to say, because no matter how much time you have getting accustomed to your national team teammates and environs, Jay Heaps is still going to be crap. There's not much getting around that. But the lopsided loss in the final ended up stoking expectations even further, because it stung, and certainly the first-team players felt they now had something to prove.

So, the storyline heading into Wednesday became the team that beat Spain and almost beat Brazil going to Azteca to exact revenge on El Tricolores for beating up their little brother on the playground. This was not the storyline anyone might have written back in early June. Then Charlie Davies had to go and score a goal in the first ten minutes, and the U.S. had to go and hold on to the prospect of grabbing a point in one of the most difficult stadiums in the world to play for another 70-plus minutes.

But at the end of the day, this was a match that was always going to be very difficult for the U.S. to get even a draw, just as the Confederations Cup match was always going to be very difficult to get a win. You can get as bent as you want about the missed marketing opportunities of these losses, but the goal here is the World Cup, not market share. We started off the summer conceding early goals to teams we should be able to beat consistently, and ended the summer coming reasonably close to beating Brazil in a final and getting a draw on the road against Mexico. How is that not progress?