U.S. regroups after Argentina loss
Juergen Klinsmann was still sifting through the smoldering wreckage of his team’s 4-0 loss Tuesday to Argentina in the Copa America Centenario semifinals when he noticed his boss, U.S. Soccer Federation President Sunil Gulati, sitting, legs crossed, in the back of the room.
“If we can get a friendly against Argentina, please do it,” he called to Gulati. “With Brazil, please do it.”
And not because Klinsmann has any strong desire to watch his team get thoroughly dominated by superior opponents. It’s because enduring that pain is the only way to make it stop.
“Hopefully we can play these teams every year,” said Klinsmann, who will play one of those teams, No. 3 Colombia, in the Centenario’s third-place game Saturday. “The more often we can play these teams, this caliber of team, the more we’re going to learn. The players will be more and more confident to take them on.
“You’ve got to take these teams on in order to learn. I think they learned a lot tonight.”
Lessons like it’s difficult to beat the No. 1 team in the world when you get just one corner kick, no shots and manage only 32% possession.
Argentina played much more cohesively as a unit, taking out U.S. defenders with screens on the edge of the box, making lightning-quick transitions and running elaborate plays to shed defenders and create space deep in the offensive edge. Their ball-handling was often breathtaking as well.
And when they couldn’t find a hole in the U.S. defense, they passed the ball back to goalkeeper Sergio Romero and reset their attack.
The South Americans also used some subtle gamesmanship, as when Lionel Messi deftly moved the ball forward five yards before burying his first-half free kick in the upper-right corner of the net.
“If he’s five yards back he’s not shooting the same ball,” Klinsmann said. “So those are little things we have to [learn].”
But if Tuesday’s loss, the most one-sided in the Klinsmann era, took some of the luster off the U.S. performance in the Centenario, it didn’t erase the progress the team made just to reach the tournament semifinals.
Last summer the U.S. finished fourth in the CONCACAF Gold Cup following consecutive losses to Jamaica and Panama. This month they beat a World Cup quarterfinalist in Costa Rica, shut out Paraguay and beat 13th-ranked Ecuador, becoming the first CONCACAF team to win three consecutive Copa America games.
Last fall the U.S. was shut out by Trinidad and Tobago, and in March it was blanked by Guatemala in World Cup qualifiers. This month it reached the final four in one of the premier events in international soccer, becoming the first CONCACAF team to do that since Mexico in 2007.
Then it ran into Argentina, which showed why it’s rated No. 1 in the world. Gulati said all that will be taken into account when he and his staff gather to discuss Klinsmann’s future and U.S. Soccer’s way forward.
“We don’t do things on a game-by-game basis,” Gulati said. “After this tournament is over we’ll look back and reflect on it and talk to the right people. And we do that after every major event.
“We just lost a game where we weren’t really in the game after the first few minutes so it’s hard to ask me about feelings. Today’s a disappointment that it wasn’t a more competitive game. But overall, for the team to get here, that’s a positive.”
One that left the players, like the coach, wanting more.
“Yeah, we can pat ourselves on the back and be happy we got here to the semifinals. It’s obviously a massive achievement,” U.S. defender Geoff Cameron said. “But we didn’t perform as well as we should have or could have. We’ll look back and be disappointed, for sure.
“And we have another game to fix that.”
The third-place game, Saturday in Phoenix, will also be against a top-five team, which means there will be more lessons to be learned.
“There will always be a step backward and then there will be two more forward. This is part of our process,” Klinsmann said.
“So I told the guys heads up and just swallow” the pill.
kevin.baxter@latimes.com
Twitter: @kbaxter11
