Nor do I question his courage or desire to play... just stating the obvious though, he is fragile and prone to injury. Pulisic has been injury prone his entire career and it is what prevents him from ascending to the tier of international players who can control tournaments and single-handedly change the fortunes of an entire side in a tough moment. The single greatest ability is and always will be AVAILABILITY, which eludes him as his body betrays him again and again. He still is a top-5 all-time USA born and bred player, but on the international stage he is JAG - just another guy - in reality. That's not meant as a personal criticism of Christian alone, its an indictment on American soccer in general.
I do criticize the performance of the entire team for what they put on the pitch against Türkiye in the final minutes, and the entirety of the match with Belgium. Those performances - as an aggregate - show EXACTLY why the USA is still non-competitive at the highest stages of international play, and I know the result against Türkiye had no impact on the results of group play, but I guarantee you it had enormous impact on the confidence of the team overall and had planted the seeds of doubt that sprouted into enormous tree-shaped obstacles against Belgium. This was the direct inverse of the Miracle on Ice 1980 hockey team - who got thrashed 10-3 by the USSR in the run up to Lake Placid, only to turnaround a couple weeks later and turn the tables forever. In this World Cup, Belgium thrashed our team 5-2 and instead of turning the tables in the rematch, we collectively turned the other cheek and metaphorically said "thank you sir may we have another", to which the Belgians cued up YMCA and smacked that ass 4-1 while laughing and dancing in the end. I am somewhat used to international humiliation with our current President, but this felt like dog-piling a bit...
The USMNT played with great movement and passing and creativity in the early matches and group play (until the collapse while absorbing pressure at the end of the Türkiye match), but that freedom and movement was almost entirely absent from the team against Belgium. They looked tentative and played scared much of the time. It looked like Team USA ALWAYS looks at this stage of the World Cup - totally over matched - not physically, but in creativity, in bravery and in originality. The passes and runs and stringing together all of this to advance the ball and threaten the opponent's goal was utterly lacking. There were times I could have sworn I was watching a team from World Cups past instead of what we had seen last week in group play. There was no creativity from the midfield (which is a historic norm as well) and there was no real sustained pressure on Belgium through out. It was a beat down in every facet of the game and it was depressing to watch.
From a bit of a distance (after the match on Monday I was hopelessly disgusted and resigned to the USMNT essentially digressing again into chaos and another lost cycle before 2030 or even 2034) - there was some progress in this edition, but the increasingly high likelihood that I will shuffle off this mortal coil and join the bleeding choir invisible before we advance to another WC quarter or semi - and the finals look to be a dose of cold hard reality (the equivalent of James Cameron's Unobtanium) - it all makes our progress more of a mirage of unachievable heights in the next 20 years than a measurable step in the right direction for a true breakthrough tournament showing.
Mexico gave England every bit it could handle. Canada advanced further than expected and acquitted Canadian football well for once. Team USA started strong, got ensnared in controversy (*everything Trump touches DIES*), and ultimately was exposed as pretenders not contenders by a decent but hardly generational Belgian side, who is very likely going out against Spain (as the USA would have as well). We looked slow, sloppy, and worse - timid (my god that 3rd goal was just crushingly bad and you could literally SEE the fight go out of our side after that gaffe) and worst of all, predictably bland in attack and susceptible to mistakes on the back end against counter attacks. It seemed like the entire team was playing scared, holding their breath and trying to avoid what came anyway - an international exposure and beat down on the biggest stage, at home - and thus blowing a once in a generation or lifetime opportunity on home soil.
In the end, Christian Pulisic is the face of the team in marketing and international play, but he is simply a solid player with rare skills for USA-born players, but he is pedestrian at the world class level. He is Landon Donovan plus 5% and we need Donovan + Dempsey plus 25% or better. The entire team needs to play with more joy, more passion - more group stage and less knockout round. In a nation of athletes more than capable of playing with the sides around the world, what is clearly lacking on the pitch is hard to define but easy to see. We do not look ready or confident in these settings time and time again. No coach or system is going to be able to bridge that gap either. In a world where USA high school players get $1M+ NIL deals to play college football and the glamour position of NFL quarterback remains the benchmark for athletic success, we remain woefully under-represented on the world stage with the swagger, confidence and jouix de vie necessary to find goals in pressure situations and to make defensive plays under duress and crushing pressure.
Unless or until we can find a starting XI and bench of players that belong in those situations, we have seen the ceiling of USMNT results; and it is round of 16 and no further - until further notice. Not one man's fault, but a reflection of society, in the USA - where the real fame and focus remains on throwing, carrying and catching a different shaped ball on a similar sized field; while physically manhandling each other in terrifying collisions is where we as Americans live. The World Cup is just like pressure in life - it does not create character, it reveals it.
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