Thursday, March 20, 2008

China bound

I really enjoyed watching the US team emerge with a convincing victory against Canada tonight to earn their way into the Olympics this summer. The team has definitely shown improvement in each match. Makes you wonder how well we'll actually do in Beijing against the top world powers, because right now, a pretty good run certainly looks possible.


1. Freddy Adu - Should be the unanimous MVP of the tournament. His two goals off of set pieces were impressive, but I would have loved to see him get a hat track off that volley that just missed wide left around the 64th minute.

2. Jozy Altidore - Now I'm thinking that he must have had a modest injury in the early matches, because he looked like a totally different player tonight.

3. Jonathan Spector - I wasn't expecting him to be much of an upgrade over Ianni, but Spector was a huge presence, and the biggest reason why Canada had so few scoring opportunities.


1. Maurice Edu - I like him in the holding midfield role next to McCarty in the bruiser role. I'd be interested to see Edu with the senior national team playing next to Clark.


1. Marvel Wynne - I don't like him on the U23s, and I certainly don't like him on the senior squad. Sure does have a long throw-in though.

It's a great feeling to be able to watch your national team play and actually have some confidence in them. But now that we're officially in the Olympics, watching this match has really got me thinking about who our 3 senior players should be. We'll do a full post on that later.

2 comments:

beanjah said...

i thought wynne had a pretty good game. he was hooking up with Freddy Adu and Sacha Kljestan pretty well and making great tackles on his side. he is more of an athlete than a soccer player, but i don't think that affected his performance last night. i will admit that this is one of the few times i have seen him play though, so maybe i'm missing something.

Martin Shatzer said...

Well I did miss the entire first half (They've got to stop scheduling soccer games at the same time as Lost) so my observations were only based on the final 45 minutes. You're right about him being a great athlete, and he's intimidating, but I just don't like his touch.