From: cmorris@Ingres.COM (Colin Morris)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.soccer
Subject: Re: Strong Weekend for US Teams
Date: 7 Apr 92 17:27:41 GMT
Reply-To: cmorris@Ingres.COM (Colin Morris)
Organization: Ask Computer Systems Inc., Ingres Division, Alameda CA 94501

In article <1992Apr6.230649.7588@cs.ubc.ca> gibson@crisium.geop.ubc.ca (Brad Gibson) writes:
>In article <15837@bunny.GTE.COM> Andy@rocky.gte.com (Andrew Busa) writes:
>>On saturday, the national team ended a miserable string of games
>>by beating up on China 5-0.  Even though China was not a very good team
>>it was nice to see the boys putting a few in the net.  I can't wait
>>until Tab and Hugo can get a few games together in the midfield.  Hopefully
>>that will occur this summer at the US Cup.  Meola was challanged only
>>a couple of times and the defense was adequate.  I still feel that US will
>>have to strengthen there wing fullbacks.  Once we have all of our players
>>present we will probably have enough halfbacks to put John Harkes on one
>>of the wings.  And if Tom Dooley pans out maybe he could play the other
>>side.  The US next plays in Ireland later this month.  A result like this makes
>>me wonder where the US is compared to the rest of the world?  Most of the
> 
>   For what it's worth, the Canadian National Team beat this same team from
>   China last week by the score 5-2.
>
>>foreigners on the NET consider the US a very poor playing country.  If that
>>is true than where does that put teams like China and Mexico that we can 
>>now regularly beat?
>>
>

Regularly beat? At full International level, the U.S. has never played
China before, and as for Mexico, they beat them in the CONCACAF Gold
Cup but I don't remember other victories over them recently (the 
Olympic tournament is U23 only).

As to the strength of the US compared to the rest of the world, it is
extremely difficult to judge based on friendly games against teams like China.
Also, it's difficult to judge the qualities of individual players
given that few of them play professional soccer on a regular basis.

I went to the game and have rarely seen a team defend as ineptly as China.
Simple marking seemed quite beyond them:- I would have
expected the average bunch of cloggers from the English Fourth
Division to defend more stoutly. Having said that, I was impressed by
some features of the U.S. team, and several of the goals were very
finely taken. Although China gave them oceans of room in midfield, the
U.S. spread the play wide more effectively than I've seen them do in
the past and seemed to have far more confidence and patience to string
sequences of passes together. There has clearly been a marked
improvement from the naivety of the team that went to Italy in '90.

I would personally reserve judgement on the U.S. team right now, but
in no way would I call them "a very poor playing country" even though
their recent tour was fairly unremarkable (defeats against El Salvador (?),
Brasil's "home" squad, Spain and Tunisia). A good test for the
progress of the U.S. team will be when they play as an invited team
in a "real" tournament, the Copa America, in the summer of '93.

--
Colin Morris       Ingres, an ASK company       cmorris@ws2s.ingres.com

"Vote for Brown on account of he's cute and got a one syllable name"