Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Impressive 2nd Half Send US on to Quarters

While the initial few minutes of the second half of tonight's match looked dicey for the US (largely because of Landon Donovan being replaced by Taylor Twellman), the squad recovered and played outstanding soccer without its captain for the night and best player. The US offense seemed stagnant until Brian Ching entered the match around minute 60, and from that point forward Ching, occupying the space right behind Taylor Twellman spurned a ferocious US counter attack. Complimenting Ching and Twellman were DeMarcus Beasley and Clint Dempsey who I mentioned in my half time thoughts have a remarkable understanding of one another's game. The counter attack led to two US goals and could have led to more.

The back line which has looked shaky the entire year finally looked steady with Oguchi Onyewu (who served as captain following Donovan's departure from the match) positioning himself well and some great man marking by Jonathan Spector and Jonathan Bornstein. The US carries some momentum into the Quarterfinals having won all three group stage matches and seemingly improved in every match of the competition.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You people are pathetic. Kartik- you can't possibly think winning these matches mean anything. CONCACAF is a joke and pretending like this is the Euros with all of these blog posts exaggerating the strength of the opposition and the region in general undermines your credibility. You want to see how the US does on the world stage? Let's see how badly they get beat on their trips to Sweden and Switzerland later in the year.

Anonymous said...

Typical Eurosnob! We cannot help it that we or Mexico or anyone else are geographically in the CONCACAF region. You must be an ex-pat or worse an American who is addicted to FSC and the EPL. Kartik, ignore this poster who knows nothing of soccer in this region and is simply trying to undermine the credibility and good will your site has built with those of us tired of relying on Brits for our news. (Except when you bash the Galaxy) He must be sour because England last made a title match of any sort of FIFA sanctioned event in 1966!