SPORTS UPDATE
AUSTIN, Texas —The day before the U.S. men’s national team’s friendly against Ecuador, head coach Mauricio Pochettino wasted no time reminding everyone that his focus for the time being is performance rather than results. He got a game that encapsulated that exact sentiment on Friday night at Q2 Stadium, where the USMNT came from behind and settled for a 1-1 draw, showcasing some genuine signs of progress and lending credence to Pochettino’s idea that the team is, at long last, trending in the right direction.
Pochettino’s first year in the job was marked by unimpressive — and at times, uninspiring — results, but as he celebrates a year in the role, the USMNT have traded a sense of doom and gloom for some downright normalcy. In some sense, they were merely the latest victims of Ecuador’s egregiously defensive approach that saw them finish second in CONMEBOL’s World Cup qualifying competition despite scoring just 14 goals in 18 games, the 35-year-old (or ageless) Enner Valencia nicking a goal from a quick counterattack before the half-hour mark. The U.S. team were not exactly perfect throughout, the midfield trio of Weston McKennie, Tanner Tessman and Aidan Morris not always clicking after months away from a group with a new look, while the hosts were a little bit wasteful in attack as the game continued. None of the USMNT’s issues on Friday evening, though, seemed atypical of a team that still has eight months to go before the opening game of the World Cup.
As Pochettino marks his first anniversary, the stamp he is beginning to leave on the team is clear and was on full display against Ecuador. While a newfound competitiveness for playing time was apparent from the moment the roster dropped last week, Pochettino’s version of the USMNT has a tactical flexibility that the previous iteration under his predecessor Gregg Berhalter did not. The back three he debuted in last month’s friendlies against South Korea and Japan returned against Ecuador, this time with some new tweaks — or specifically, a different look in and out of possession.
“I think we keep, now, playing the way that we plan to play,” Pochettino said after the match. “I think we defend with a back four, two midfielders and three and one and of course, the ‘keeper — 1-4-2-3-1 — but then our formation building from [the] back, we [were] building with three, two and then five.”
The personnel choices were equally as intriguing, with Miles Robinson joining mainstays Chris Richards and Tim Ream at center back while Max Arfsten and Tim Weah balanced each other out in respective roles on the left and right flanks. Weah described his role pre-match as the one of the “fake wingback,” simply explaining afterward that “I would be doing less defending ’cause Miles was covering the whole time so that was pretty much it and in the attack, I was playing like a normal winger.” Pochettino noted how Arfsten, a more traditional fullback, and Weah’s distinct styles added new layers to Friday’s game plan.
“That is about hav[ing] different dimensions but that change depends on, also, the position of how we want to attack, how we want to use the channels, how we want to be vigilant if [the opponents] play with one striker, two strikers,” Pochettino said.”That is really important and we start to see how [to] change the set-up depend[ing] on the height [of the defensive line] of the opposition — low block, medium block — or when you are in the opposite half, different situations can happen. My appreciation, my opinion on his performance is that I think he did well. He did well when he was a winger trying to go in the diagonal to try to create chances. He had a few shots from the outside of the box and then when he was like a wingback because, [Pervis] Estupinan first and then when [Yaimar] Medina [was switched] in, to force him to defend a little bit closer than Miles and then close to [substitute] Alex Freeman.”
There was still a mixed bag element from the USMNT, the team openly admitting that they could have turned more of their 11 shots into clear-cut opportunities. That said, there was a clear idea at play. Each time the USMNT had the ball — which was often in a game in which they had nearly 65% possession — the emphasis was to attack as quickly and cohesively as possible. Their attacking outing was also impressive in its own right considering the circumstances — Sebastian Beccacece’s Ecuador conceded just five goals in 18 World Cup qualification matches and it is not all that hard to envision a reality in which a more clinical USMNT would have scored multiple goals against them. Even if a draw is a fair enough result for both sides, the game started to tilt in the U.S.’ favor in the second half.
“We started to look the fresher team as the game wore on and listen, as someone who’s been on the other side of that, you know and you smell that,” Ream said. “You’re like, okay, these guys … are starting to be a little bit gassed and you actually feel more energized and it allows you to get on top of them more and start making more little plays, being connected better. I think we were connected pretty well in the first half but even closer connections in the second half and I’ll tell you what, it takes a toll on teams and it did that today.”
This version of the team felt incomplete in part because Christian Pulisic, Antonee Robinson and Tyler Adams were not in the starting lineup for varying reasons — Pulisic came on as a substitute and Robinson is not fully fit yet, while Adams did not make the trip as he and his wife await the birth of their second child. None of this comes as a surprise at this point and there are still questions to be answered about what the USMNT is capable of if those players are not on the field, especially Adams. The puzzle pieces feel like they are starting to finally come together, though, with a handful of standout individual performances headlined by Malik Tillman, who continued to prove his worth as one of Pochettino’s breakouts with the assist to the USMNT’s second-half goal. The credit for that, in the end, went to Folarin Balogun, who has two goals and one assist in his three games under Pochettino so far, reasserting himself once again as Pochettino’s go-to No. 9.
The normalcy of the moment was not lost on Pochettino, either.
“I think the performance was a very, very serious performance, very professional,” he said. “I think what works the most is that we are here talking about actions, concepts, formations, things like this that for me, after one year, I am so, so, so happy that we don’t talk about other things like commitment, attitude or things that normally in the past we were talking [about]. I think that this is a massive step up because I think we need to forget that always, win or lose, it depends [on] our performance. If we are better and [if] we make sure we are better than our opponent, we can win. If we don’t show that, it’s because it’s a soccer problem, not [that] it’s another problem that is dangerous when these types of things happen in a team.”
