ATLANTA — Mauricio Pochettino spent his first 18 months as coach of the U.S. men’s national team trying to change the culture. He insisted that there was no A-team, that nothing would be handed out. He brought in some new faces and trotted out some new slogans. He experimented with tactics, seeming to hit on something with a switch to a 3-4-3 during September camp that kept bringing results in October and November.
If those wins against Paraguay and Uruguay four months ago felt like a validation of everything Pochettino had done so far, then Saturday’s 5-2 loss to Belgium, in which the U.S. lineup was pretty close to its most talented possible XI, functioned as a reminder that they still have plenty left to work through.
There are tactical questions to answer after a switch back to a 4-2-3-1 left the Americans exposed on the wing, but in the main, this is about questions of identity and intensity. For 35 minutes, give or take, the U.S. looked like the better team because they were the more desperate team. That’s in keeping with what’s always been the program’s identity at its overperforming best.
This group is the most talented they’ve ever had, but not talented enough to change that reality.
“The moments we matched the intensity of Belgium, we were even or in some moments better,” Pochettino said. “But as soon as we drop a little bit in our intensity, and how you can confirm that is in too many actions that we were in place, we have superiority, but we were not aggressive enough.
“Like the way we concede the first goal. In this action, I think we have 10 players inside the box but we were not aggressive enough. We didn’t keep that energy during the whole time. I think that is the challenge. That is the challenge and it’s a good reality check for us.”
Indeed, there were three Americans — Antonee Robinson, Johnny Cardoso and Folarin Balogun — in the vicinity of Zeno Debast when the ball rebounded to the Belgium defender outside the box in the 45th minute. All were lax in attempting to close down his space, allowing him to get a shot off that tied the game and changed the momentum completely.
It wasn’t the only time the U.S. looked not just second best, but willing to accept it.
What bites even more is that when Pochettino and his players talked about how good they looked for parts of the game, they were absolutely right. For the better part of the first half, the Americans were going toe-to-toe with Belgium.
“That’s one of the things we can work on for sure,” Weston McKennie said. “Being able to stay consistent in how we start the game to how we finish it with the same intensity and everything.”
The decision to schedule a series of top opponents in the run-up to the World Cup — Belgium on Saturday, Portugal on Tuesday, then Senegal and Germany in a couple of months right before the Americans head to their base camp in Irvine, Calif. — only underscores that.
None of the teams they played in the fall were pushovers, to be fair. But this is a different level, and one the U.S. needs to find a way to reach. They got a harsh lesson on Saturday. They can’t wait another game for it to sink in.
“We need to have 26 players that believe in that, that have the capacity to be intense in every single action,” Pochettino said. “It’s not one action and then I need one minute to recover.
“The problem is that the time to recover the ball, where you don’t have the ball, if you start chasing the ball and you don’t have energy, and then you miss the energy in the key areas. That happens right away. Today is a clear idea, a clear image, example, that in the key areas, we didn’t have the right energy.”
