The Travesty in Trinidad Two Years Later: What Has The US Learned?

Update following our loss to Canada:

After Trinidad I was shocked. After the Gold Cup final I was annoyed. After this loss against Canada I'm appalled. There was no heart, no passion, and no tactics out on the pitch, and while it's a team performance, it has to come back to Gregg Berhalter. Of course, the players have to be good enough, but the tactics and substitutions made in this game were just baffling. Once the game ended, the players went over to thank the fans who made the trip up north to watch this disgusting performance. You could tell they weren't happy with the result and knew that it wasn't good enough, but Berhalter just disappeared down the tunnel instead of facing the fans. That, to me, confirms where the problem lies, and Gregg Berhalter and the rest of the cronies in this federation are the ones to blame. It may still be too early to sound the alarm about 2022, but there is no way we qualify if Gregg Berhalter, Jay Berhalter, Earnie Stewart, and Carlos Cordeiro are calling the shots. They have my permission to hand their resignation in.

Original piece: 

I remember that day and night like it was yesterday, and I'll be the first to admit, I liked our chances of qualifying a little too much. Despite losing to Costa Rica at home and only managing a draw in Honduras during the previous international break, we turned it around against Panama with a 4-0 win, and it was almost a given that we would be in Russia the following summer. The only thing standing in our way; a date with Trinidad and Tobago, who had only managed one win the entire Hex campaign, and the situation at hand seemed almost too good to be true. Qualification was on a plate waiting for us, but what ended up happening is what I now call the Travesty in Trinidad, and we all know what happened across Central America and the Caribbean that night. As Taylor Twellman said during his epic rant, it was not about that night; rather years of mismanagement which built up to this conclusion, and you couldn't put the blame on one particular person. But it was hard to sugarcoat what happened. 

One generation's international careers all but ended in disgrace. My lasting memories of players like Michael Bradley, Clint Dempsey, or Jozy Altidore will be that night in Trinidad, when their "leadership" let an entire team and entire country down. More sadly, however, another generation's hopes and dreams were shattered, at least until 2022. Christian Pulisic would've brought a lot to the World Cup in 2018, but now they have to convince him to take part in friendlies. Some of them might not even take their chances with the US again, as players like Jonathan Gonzalez decided to head south and play for Mexico, and Sergiño Dest is still choosing between the Netherlands and USA (After the Gold Cup debacle this past summer Tyler Boyd probably wishes he stayed with New Zealand also-they have a better chance at making the 2022 World Cup than we do at this point).

So as we look back on two years since the Travesty in Trinidad, the question remains; what has this team and this federation learned?

First, let's look at the presidential election. There was a clear choice in this election between federation insiders from SUM in Carlos Cordeiro and Kathy Carter, and reform-minded candidates like Kyle Martino, Eric Wynalda, and Hope Solo, all people well-known to fans, with the latter a World Cup and Olympic gold medalist. But the powers that be in US Soccer chose the insider, as Carlos Cordeiro, Sunil Gulati's vice president, was elected. So far, Cordeiro has presided over numerous young players (and even scouts) choosing to take their talents to Mexico, SUM continuing to let El Tri play friendlies in the US despite their fans' homophobic chants, and butchering Megan Rapinoe's name during the US women's national team victory parade, not to mention MLS deciding that the anti-fascist United Front signage that fans have displayed is preventing fans from being able to enjoy the games. You can't say you're changing the culture when the previous vice president is the new president.

Let's go to the coaching search. Dave Sarachan moved up a spot on the bench after Bruce Arena's resignation in what many people thought would be a brief stint. However, that "brief stint" lasted almost an entire year, only for us to hire...Gregg Berhalter, which totally had nothing to do with the fact that his brother Jay is an executive board member of USSF. I know nepotism has been a feature of the Trump administration, but after reading this piece over the summer, it's becoming one in our country's soccer governing body as well. And it seems pretty clear that Berhalter isn't going anywhere before 2022. Part of me is livid that Jesse Marsch wasn't even considered, especially after his viral halftime rant last week before his Salzburg side stormed back against my beloved Liverpool, but I'm just as happy he's thriving over there and not part of this shitshow over here.

Translation: "The substitutions Berhalter made for the US are worse than those made by Scaloni for Argentina. Nothing more to say." and he followed that up with a tweet which says "Only they understand it."

Now let's go to team selection. The tweets above are from Univision commentator Diego Balado during the Gold Cup final, after Berhalter made two defensive-minded substitutions when the game was still in reach. Before we went 1-0 down, he brought on Cristian Roldán for Jordan Morris, Gyasi Zardes for Jozy Altidore (a straight swap), and after we went down and needed a goal to possibly extend the game, took off Tim Ream and replaced him, not with a striker like Tyler Boyd, but with a defender in Daniel Lovitz. Needless to say, we didn't create anything from then on, and let El Tri have the Gold Cup. I'm not saying the changes were the reason we lost (cough cough Jozy Altidore missing a sitter early on) but that was just the icing on Berhalter's cake of questionable team selections during the Gold Cup, our first competitive matches in over 600 days.

I mentioned nepotism a couple paragraphs ago, but I've yet to find a word that describes a national team manager picking players solely because he coached them at his previous job. Could you call that a form of nepotism? There are lots of players out there that are better than Wil Trapp and Gyasi Zardes at their respective positions, but Berhalter has decided to make this side the United States of Columbus, rather than play the best available players (Zack Steffen doesn't count because he's the best keeper we have now and he's been playing well in Germany). In fact, he was so hell-bent in having Trapp as a DM, he temporarily turned Tyler Adams into a defender before he had to withdraw due to injury, causing RB Leipzig's Twitter to weigh in. 

...as a defender?! 😳

Congrats on making the #USMNT @GoldCup squad, @tyler_adams14! 👏🇺🇸

🔴⚪ #DieRotenBullen https://t.co/OHDX3B8rvL

— RB Leipzig English (@RBLeipzig_EN) June 6, 2019

You know you messed up when one of your players' club teams is questioning your team selection.  While I didn't always agree with Jürgen Klinsmann during his time with the US, he was hired because of his track record as a coach, not because of family connections, and wouldn't just pick inferior players just because he coached them at a previous gig-they had to be actually good. So many players who were set up to thrive during the Klinsmann era have fallen out of favor, such as:

• John Brooks
• Mix Diskerud
• Timothy Chandler
• Aron Jóhansson
• DeAndre Yedlin
• Bobby Wood
• Fabian Johnson
• Danny Williams
• Julian Green (the man scored at the World Cup for us, for goodness sake!)

Klinsmann wasn't a perfect coach by any stretch, but he understood that Europe is the best place to cultivate talent and MLS isn't. The future of this team is coming up in Europe, with players like these flying the American flag:

• Tyler Boyd (Besiktas)
• Sergiño Dest (Ajax)
• Sebastian Soto (Hannover)
• Chris Richards (Bayern Munich II)
• Richie Ledezma (PSV academy)
• Chris Gloster (PSV academy)
• Alex Mendez (Ajax academy)
• Uly Llanez (Wolfsburg academy)
• Gio Reyna (Borussia Dortmund)
• Tim Weah (Lille)
• Josh Sargent (Werder Bremen)
• Christian Pulisic (Chelsea)

These players have been successful because they realized that going to Europe is the way to develop their game. Yes there are players like Paxton Pomykal in MLS who are up and coming, but there's no doubt that these players in Europe will make an impact on the national team in the coming years if they have the chance to do so. Now it's time for Berhalter to see their potential. 

Now let's take a look at soccer in the US as a whole, and it's clear that as long as SUM and MLS are in charge, nothing will change. Rather than taking a stand against the homophobic chanting from El Tri supporters at matches here in the States, SUM is actually adding more fixtures for them, because more money in their pockets. Instead of taking their chance to be a leader on social issues, they ordered security to eject fans from stadiums for displaying United Front banners and other anti-fascist symbols. Compare this to the women's game, which I would argue is one of the most inclusive communities in all of sports. Everyone on the men's side should take cues from them on inclusivity, not just in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation, but socioeconomic background as well. Pay to play is holding us back, and if we truly want to be competitive, soccer needs to become the people's game, like it is in virtually every other country in the world. As long as soccer in this country is still a game only for rich white suburban kids who can afford it, we will never get ahead. And also, the rest of the world has my permission to not take us seriously until we institute promotion/relegation, like virtually every other country has done.

This also leads into the media coverage this team gets. Taylor Twellman rightfully pointed out post-Trinidad that in traditional soccer powers, not qualifying for the World Cup would result in heavy criticism from the media (we saw it just a month later after Italy failed to qualify), but in the US, everyone would move on, and that's precisely what happened. My theory is that the lack of criticism in the media is part of how we got Gregg Berhalter as head coach, in addition to the nepotism. Had there been real criticism in the media, MLS would've been scrutinized just as heavily as USSF, but as long as pundits like Stu Holden and Alexi Lalas, who are probably contractually barred from saying anything critical of MLS and the USMNT, are given a platform, there will be no scrutiny––just arrogance. That's why I watch in Spanish whenever I get the chance. Not only does that help me learn the language, the commentators don't try and sugarcoat everything.

So in short, this team and this federation have learned NOTHING since the Travesty in Trinidad.

With the current crop of youngsters we have in our player pool, I'd say we have a better chance than ever before to make it to the Olympics next summer and ending a 14-year drought in that regard. But making the Olympics or 2022 World Cup won't solve it all, and even if we qualify for both, we will not have learned anything from this until we're a force to be reckoned with on the world stage––not just CONCACAF, but the world stage, like we could've been after 2014. If nothing changes, we'll find ourselves speaking the words of Taylor Twellman after failing to qualify for 2022.

"WHAT ARE WE DOING? WHAT ARE WE DOING?"