On This Day in 2010, Ching and Kljestan Rescue a Rain-Soaked Night in Tampa, But Questions Linger as South Africa Draws Near
The hangover from October had barely lifted when January arrived with a fresh humiliation. Stripped of its European-based core, the United States traveled to Carson, California, for an exhibition against Honduras—the same Honduras it had dismantled four months earlier on that soaked field in San Pedro Sula—and was thoroughly outplayed, 3-1. Jimmy Conrad was ejected in the 17th minute. Carlos Pavon converted the penalty that followed. By the time Roger Espinoza slotted home the third in the 53rd minute, the result had stopped being a match and started being a verdict. "It's tough to fight back," Jonathan Bornstein, the one regular in a lineup of reserves, said afterward, "especially a man down." He left the more uncomfortable truth unspoken: even with 11 men, this group had never really been in it.
The context mattered, as it always does with the national team. The players who had finished first in the CONCACAF hexagonal, with Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, Tim Howard and Oguchi Onyewu at the spine of the side, were still in Europe, still playing for their clubs, still unavailable until the calendar allowed otherwise. What Bob Bradley sent onto the field in Carson was less a national team than an audition, a roll call of domestic players competing for spots on a roster that would be announced in the spring. The loss stung, but its significance was always more diagnostic than damning.
Still, a diagnosis can be unsettling. The Americans were four months from their opening match against England at Rustenburg, and the gap between what they were and what they needed to be remained visible to anyone watching.
February brought them to Tampa, to Raymond James Stadium, and a Wednesday night in the rain against El Salvador, ranked 71st in the world, a team that had not qualified for South Africa. A team that, on paper, should have provided little resistance. The roster Bradley assembled was nearly identical to the one that had lost to Honduras: 20 players, 19 from MLS, the lone European-based exception being defender Clarence Goodson, who had flown in from Norway's IK Start after New England's Kevin Alston strained his hamstring. Charlie Davies was still months away from anything resembling a return. Onyewu's patella tendon, severed on the October night after Davies's accident, kept him sidelined.
The February 24 game itself unfolded with the ambivalence one might expect from two teams with different stakes. The United States controlled the first half in the way a superior team often does, without actually threatening: five shots on goal to El Salvador's one, a pair of diving saves from goalkeeper Miguel Montes to deny Sacha Kljestan and Robbie Rogers, corners accumulated without conversion. The Americans were pressing but not piercing, moving the ball but not finishing—the same imbalance that had haunted them in Carson.
Then Brad Evans, starting at right back in place of the more experienced Bornstein, made an errant header deep in his own end that appeared intended for goalkeeper Nick Rimando, the surprise starter ahead of Troy Perkins. Rudis Corrales read it before either of them did, collecting the ball and putting El Salvador ahead in the 59th minute. A crowd of 21,737, gathered in part to signal Tampa's ambitions as a potential host city for a future World Cup bid, fell quiet. This was the script from Carson replaying itself: an undermanned opponent taking advantage of a team that couldn't afford the errors it kept making.
Brian Ching had entered at the start of the second half, replacing Conor Casey. At 31, he was fighting a different kind of battle—not just for a result on this particular night but for a place on a plane to South Africa. He had been on the 2006 World Cup roster, made the trip to Germany, and never gotten off the bench. Four years of that memory had sharpened something in him. In the 75th minute, Heath Pearce delivered a long cross from the left that Montes misread and mishandled. Ching, arriving late and low, met it with a diving header from seven yards and redirected it into the net. The kind of goal that doesn't require much explaining. He was a forward doing what forwards do, reading the moment before anyone else does.
"I was extremely disappointed in 2006," Ching said afterward, the understatement carrying the full weight of a man who had stood on the game's biggest stage and watched it from the wrong side of the touchline. "Anytime you go to a World Cup, you want to be on the field. I wasn't able to last time, so it was a goal of mine as soon as it ended to put myself in a good position to make the team first of all, and hopefully get in and play a little."
The equalizer changed the atmosphere without yet changing the result. El Salvador, defending a lead they had no business holding, dug in. The U.S. pressed with 18 shots to three on the night, nine corners to two, but precision continued to elude them. And then, two minutes into stoppage time, Kljestan picked off a careless pass just outside the penalty area, slipped a quick exchange with Ching, and drove inside to slot the ball to the far post. The stadium exhaled. The Americans had their first win of the World Cup year.
Kljestan was 24, a product of the 2008 Olympic side, a player who had impressed in qualifying and who understood this moment for what it was. He had squandered two decent chances in the first half. The winner was partly redemption. Bradley, speaking with the tempered satisfaction of a man who knew exactly what he had and hadn't seen, framed it carefully. "(The win) was especially important for this group. To have the chance to come back in February, work a little more and get another game and get a result," he said, "yeah, it feels good."
It felt good partly because it needed to. The win was earned, the statistics comfortably in the Americans' favor, the comeback against a team ranked 57 places below them perhaps more than it might otherwise appear. But the subtext hummed beneath everything. The players auditioning tonight, like Ching, Kljestan, Bornstein, and Heath Pearce, among others, knew this was likely their final audition before the European regulars arrived in May and reset the hierarchy. "Everyone's in the same position now. We really don't know," said Jeff Cunningham, who played 22 minutes and found nothing decisive. "You just have to make the most of your opportunities and wait."
The next test came a week later in Amsterdam, and it arrived with the cruelty that only a match against a third-ranked side can produce. The European-based players had returned: Donovan, Howard, Jozy Altidore and Carlos Bocanegra. The team that took the field against the Netherlands on March 3 more closely resembled the one that had won in Honduras, qualified in October, and defied expectation all autumn. For a night at least, this was the real team.
What the night revealed was harder to absorb. Bornstein, so recently the hero of the RFK equalizer, gave away the penalty that Dirk Kuyt converted in the 40th minute, grabbing Wesley Sneijder's arm in the penalty area. The second goal was equally painful: Klaas-Jan Huntelaar's shot in the 73rd deflected off Bornstein's chest and left Howard helpless. Two-nil, and the Americans had contributed to both. Bocanegra pulled one back in the 88th minute, heading in DaMarcus Beasley's long free kick with a sharpness that suggested the game's margin was narrower than it had looked. But it ended 2-1, the United States' fifth consecutive loss on European soil.
Stuart Holden had limped off in the 34th minute with a bruised shin, taking X-rays and joining a list that already included Dempsey, Onyewu, Richardo Clark, Benny Feilhaber, Steve Cherundolo and Davies. The list had become its own kind of story. It was a roster of absences that shadowed every lineup, every tactical conversation, every projection about South Africa. Bradley, coaching on his 52nd birthday, acknowledged the positives in Beasley's performance while absorbing the result with the composure of a man who had spent two years managing exactly this kind of complexity. "There are always going to be tough decisions," he said. "As a staff, we're committed to seeing as many games as we can, and we have a lot of work to do."
The road to South Africa still ran through May exhibitions against the Czech Republic and Turkey, through whatever the MLS labor situation would ultimately produce, through the fitness reports and form assessments that would shape a 23-man roster announced to a nation now paying genuine attention. England waited on June 12. Slovenia after that. Algeria to close. The questions from October, the ones that had hung unanswered in the cool Washington night, had not disappeared. They had only multiplied.