Donovan’s goal sparks U.S. to victory
For five, 10, 20 seconds, Landon Donovan didn’t move. The Gillette Stadium crowd of 22,412 was on its feet screaming. Panamanian goalkeeper Jaime Penedo was bouncing nervously on his toes. And impatient referee Neil Brizan was waving the U.S. team’s leading scorer forward.
A Gold Cup quarterfinal hung in the balance, yet Donovan remained motionless, squatting a dozen yards from the Panama goal and staring into the grass.
“It was an exciting moment, and too often I get excited,” Donovan said. “So I like to calm myself down and think of it like you’re in your backyard against your brother. Not with 30,000 people and pressure on it.”
And how did he do against his brother? “I beat him,” Donovan said “all the time.” On Saturday he beat Penedo too, with his second-half penalty kick breaking a scoreless tie and sparking the U.S. to a 2-1 Gold Cup win that sent the Americans to Thursday’s semifinals, where they’ll face Canada, a 3-0 winner over Guatemala in Saturday’s other quarterfinal.
For the U.S. team, which dominated the Gold Cup in group play, this was more an escape than a victory. Half a dozen times in the first half they wasted good scoring chances, with Taylor Twellman heading one shot off the crossbar, Penedo making a brilliant one-handed save on Donovan to end another rush and Twellman drilling a point-blank shot on teammate Clint Dempsey’s heel.
“We were getting at them,” Dempsey said. “We had a lot of chances to put the game away in the first half.”
Instead they went to the intermission scoreless for the first time since a friendly against Guatemala three months ago. The turning point came 15 minutes into the second half when Donovan got loose down the right side and took a perfect pass from Dempsey, leaving Panama’s Carlos Rivera with two choices: concede an easy shot or commit a foul. He chose the second option, wrapping both arms around Donovan and bringing him to the turf.
“Great ball from Clint,” Donovan said. “We kind of made eye contact quickly and there was a lot of space there to put it, so I knew when I got inside of [the defender] he was either going to have to let me go to finish it or foul me.”
Panama Coach Alexandre Guimaraes took issue with the call -- just as he took issue with many things that have befallen his team over the last 3 1/2 days, starting with a foul-plagued group-play loss to Mexico in which three of his players were given second-half red or yellow cards that left them ineligible for Saturday’s quarterfinal.
“Curiously, just like our last game, we finished the first half tied 0-0 and then in the second half we saw some very questionable officiating,” said Guimaraes, who also lost Manuel Torres to a red card late in Saturday’s match. “We’re very, very, very, very disturbed.”
Donovan’s goal infused Guimaraes’ offense with a sense of urgency, but that created opportunities for the U.S. too, and it capitalized when Carlos Bocanegra headed home a corner kick from DaMarcus Beasley in the 63rd minute to give the Americans a 2-0 lead.
Panama finally scored on a right-footed rocket by Blas Perez in the 84th minute. And though that’s the only goal the U.S. has given up in its last five Gold Cup matches, it wasn’t enough to bring the short-handed Panamanians back.
“Tough game,” Dempsey said. “But at the end of the day we won. As long as we keep advancing it doesn’t matter how the games go. The most important thing is to get to the final.”
To do that the U.S. will have to get by Canada, which got two first-half goals and an assist from Ali Gerba to eliminate Guatemala.
The surprise winner of Group A, Canada last got past the quarterfinals in 2002, when it also won its group and faced the U.S. in the semis. It lost that match on penalty kicks.
“These are difficult games. Especially in this stage,” Donovan said. “Anything can happen. It’s not a shoo-in that we’re going to be [in the final].
“But we’re going the right way.”
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