Ryan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”
If anything will stick from the USMNT’s mostly unmemorable 2-1 loss to Turkey last week, it’ll be either Jack McGlynn‘s first goal with the team, or the unfortunate moment when Johnny Cardoso flicked the ball into Arda Güler‘s shin and into his team’s own goal.
But the most illustrative moment from the exhibition match happened a few seconds before the ball was trickling past goalkeeper Matt Freese and across the goal line.
Alex Freeman had just won the ball from Juventus‘ Kenan Yildiz right outside the USMNT’s penalty area. He shifted the ball over to Cardoso, who had the opportunity to play a quick, long, forward pass into tons of space on the left side of the field. Turkey had just lost possession, so it hadn’t yet shifted into its defensive shape. Instead, Cardoso hesitated and then played a safe pass to Chris Richards. As this happened, U.S. manager Mauricio Pochettino threw his hands into the air, jumped up, spun around and yelled something toward the bench. A couple of seconds later, Freese was scooping the ball out of his net.
While the goal itself was a freak play — somewhat bad luck that the ball was deflected in the first place, entirely bad luck that it deflected in such a way to then spin into the side netting — the entire possession was a microcosm of the team’s biggest problem under Pochettino: It plays too slow. While most of the modern USMNT era has been characterized by constant, hectic overactivity, the past couple of months have flipped back too far in the other direction.
Pochettino knows this; he addressed the play postmatch, reacting in the moment, and he made similar comments after the 1-0 loss to Panama in the Nations League semifinals. But if the team is going to make a run at the World Cup next summer, he’s going to have to find a way to get his players to, well, run.
