Huge win for the USMNT. Glad to get some revenge on Ghana. Honestly, it's very hard to keep pace with them. They are an extremely fast, well-conditioned team and they're going to give teams fits. Like us, their defense is a bit suspect. But we shouldn't be ashamed that we couldn't keep up.
Our total lack of ability to keep any sort of possession was alarming, however. Rather than make lateral or even passes back to retain possession, we seemed content to just kick the ball aimlessly forward. We need to improve on that.
Jozy Altidore's injury is a big problem for us. We don't have anybody else who can push the ball up and then wait for the rest of the offense to catch up to cross in, etc. Probably end up with Wondo, as Johannson looked pretty lost. Hard to suddenly jump in to someone else's role, though.
The midfield looked pretty good minus Bradley. No idea where the usual Michael Bradley was -- and the fact that we won with him playing like that is kind of impressive. Jones was fantastic and the only US player keeping pace with Ghana. I thought Cameron was great on D... Beasley was his usual self, wish we had a better option going forward. Thank god we have Tim Howard.
Luckily for us, Portugal looks pretty demoralized after that Germany game, and no Pepe (red card), Coentrão (injury), and possibly Almeida (injury, doubtful) probably helps. You hate to take solace in injuries, but we'll take all the help we can get.
For today, we take the 3 points and enjoy and rest up and hope for good news for Altidore, though I am skeptical given how bad it looked.
