U.S. let chance for German Coach Joachim Loew slip away
Could it be that U.S. Soccer got it wrong?
Could it be that the federation offered the job of national team coach to the wrong German?
Should it have been Joachim Loew who was pursued instead of his friend and former sidekick Jurgen Klinsmann?
There is a case to be made.
Because while the U.S. under the rehired Bob Bradley continued to stumble into an uncertain future with a 2-2 tie against Poland at Soldier Field in Chicago on Saturday, Germany, under Loew, is sweeping all before it on its march back toward soccer’s international summit.
On Friday night, even though the team was missing its most influential player, midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger, Loew’s Germany brushed aside a not-so-weak Turkey, 3-0, at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium to remain unbeaten and untied in qualifying for Euro 2012.
The fact that it was a Polish-born player, Miroslav Klose, who scored two of the goals and the fact that it will be Poland that will be cohosting the European Championship with Ukraine in 20 months’ time, is merely coincidental.
The fact is that Germany, if it continues on this course, has to be considered the favorite to not only win Euro 2012 but to go on and challenge strongly for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
No worse than third in the last three tournaments, Germany is piecing together the sort of side that could very well garner the country its fourth World Cup title.
And it is doing so with the 50-year-old Loew at the helm and a team of young 20-somethings, all of them rapidly rising stars in the international firmament, plus a veteran or two such as Klose.
Loew was out of contract for a while this year and was not seeing eye to eye with the Deutscher Fusbal-Bund, or German soccer federation. That might have been the time for U.S. Soccer to make an approach, if not an offer.
There is nothing to indicate that Loew would have listened. He likely would have had a private laugh at the very idea. Klinsmann has said that U.S. Soccer talked to him about the post but then would not give him the sort of control he wanted — and indeed needed — in order to do the job properly.
Loew, one assumes, would have had the same demands. So would Guus Hiddink, Jose Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and all the other top-flight coaches who are light-years removed from U.S. consideration.
Of course, the assumption is that Loew, or any other coach, could have unearthed the sort of talent in the U.S. that he and Klinsmann before him unearthed in Germany.
Somewhere in the U.S., surely, there must be players of the caliber of Thomas Mueller, who turned 21 last month and was the top goal scorer at South Africa 2010, or of Toni Kroos, 21, or Marko Marin, 21, or Sami Khedira, 23, or a host of other top-flight prospects in the German pipeline.
Then again, perhaps they don’t exist in the U.S. Perhaps the legacy of this country’s youth, college and MLS coaches is that they are uniformly mediocre, having failed season after season to produce players of true world-class ability.
Instead, in its latest push to elevate its game, the U.S. has turned to a 28-year-old German reject, which is an admittedly harsh way of introducing midfielder Jermaine Jones.
Having turned his back on the land of his German mother, Jones stepped onto the field for the first time Saturday to represent the land of his American father.
He played all 90 minutes against the Poles and did the sort of things that he does for his Bundesliga team, Schalke 04. He ran, he tackled, he defended, he destroyed and he created the first U.S. goal.
All in all, a useful debut.
But Jones is the sort of physically combative player that all too many American coaches seem to prefer over those with, shall we say, actual ball-playing skills.
“When he’s on the field, you know he’s on the field,” German-based U.S. defender Steve Cherundolo told the Associated Press last week. “He’s got a good presence about him, and he’s tough. He’s somebody to deal with.”
All of which is well and good, but such players are a dime a dozen — just look at Bradley’s son, Michael.
What the U.S. needs to either find or produce are the sorts of young, creative, unpredictable, technically skilled and tactically aware players that now feature prominently and exuberantly in Germany’s team.
Where, for example, is the U.S. equivalent of Mesut Oezil?
Oezil, who turns 22 on Friday, parlayed an outstanding World Cup in South Africa into a move to Real Madrid, where Mourinho has said: “Oezil makes the game look easy, and that’s an art form.”
The artists are lacking in the U.S. The canvas remains depressingly blank and the brushes are in Bob Bradley’s hand.
grahame.jones@latmes.com
