Jurgen Klinsmann Continues to Surprise, This Time with a Conservative Gold Cup Roster

Following the United States Men’s National Team remains one of the more confusing and often frustrating experiences in sport. At best, the National Team plays 15-20 matches in a calendar year, but since they represent the country many American fans feel a visceral connection to the team. Some might only pay attention to soccer through the National Team.

As I’ve written about before this creates a weird situation. If your only connection to soccer is the USMNT, well, you want results but you also want entertainment. International soccer is not club soccer. Results, above all, count more than anything else.

And with results, the wave of emotion and media narratives with the USMNT tend to shift as rapidly as the wind blows, thanks in no small part to social media. Doom-and-gloom one minute; U-S-A! U-S-A! America Fuck Yeah, the next.

Tuesday Jurgen Klinsmann announced his 23-player roster for the group stages of the Gold Cup. Realistically, the only way this announcement would have made waves was if he dropped captain Clint Dempsey following his petulance in the U.S. Open Cup — an unlikely scenario. U.S. Soccer suspended Dempsey three games and accordingly Klinsmann called his number for the tournament.

It’s not as if Klinsmann is afraid of making bold decisions — axing Landon Donovan before the 2014 World Cup will be included in the first graph of the AP story when he eventually leaves the job. Reading a little bit yesterday, it appears Klinsmann remained in Europe after the friendlies with the Netherlands and Germany, so perhaps the Dempsey incident was off his radar. So be it.

In 2015, Dempsey is still a valuable contributor in the attacking third, who provides goals when needed. In the short term he’s still going to help when World Cup qualifying begins. Eventually there will come a day when the team will need to move away from relying on Dempsey, a fan favorite, since it’s difficult to see him a a 90-minute contributor when 2018 comes around.

Maybe this comes off a little harsh on Dempsey, who’s scored seven times in MLS play this year. Without a crystal ball it’s impossible to gauge what his form and fitness will look like in 2016, let alone 2018. Hell even his 2015 might be hard to predict since he hasn’t played for the National Team since February against Panama.

After sitting back and thinking it strikes me as odd that Klinsmann threw out most of the experimentation from the first six months of 2015 and went with basically a 2014 World Cup lineup 2.0. Is he going to try to go through the Gold Cup in a 4-4-2 with Dempsey paired with Altidore? I’m sure this could work and prove effective, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, is it? (Yes, this is hypocritical given the lede to this post, but perhaps proves the point of how confusing it can be to follow this team.)

Admittedly this is all recency bias and probably overrating the second halves vs. the Netherlands and Germany — when it was apparent neither opponent played defense like the game mattered. Still, there’d be a little more buzz and excitement if Klinsmann included Jordan Morris or Juan Agudelo among the forward pool. Both players can be recalled for the knockout stage, via the Gold Cup rules.

The natural target of Internet scorn here is Chris Wondolowski — saying nothing of his miss vs. Belgium. 32-year-old target forwards with checkered scoring records don’t readily endear themselves on the Soccer Internet. That said, seven of Wondolowski’s nine international goals are against CONCACAF teams and he plays a role somewhat unique in the U.S. camp. In short, you’re not going to win a Word Cup starting Chris Wondolowski, but you can win a Gold Cup as we saw in 2013.

Often Aron Jóhannsson still feels more like hype-unseen based on scoring goals in the Netherlands compared to what he’s done in his 12 caps.

So mostly it’s surprising that Klinsmann, who throughout most of his tenure with the U.S., flaunted a clear IDGAF attitude toward his roster, toward veteran status, and toward where players ply their trade professionally, decided to go conservative for this tournament. The U.S. is almost playing with house money for the Gold Cup this summer. By winning in 2013 the team ensured, at worst, it plays the winner of the 2015 tournament in a playoff to determine who goes to the 2017 Confederations Cup. This afforded a little leeway to continue experimenting in a tournament setting and who’s to say a new-ish look lineup couldn’t win the tournament — Agudelo and Morris each scored vs. Mexico in April, albeit with both rivals fielding makeshift squads.

Above all, three years away from a World Cup remains a brackish place in the international calendar, so any and all roster decisions probably should be looked at in the immediate vs. the long term. For whatever it’s worth the 2011 U.S. roster for the Gold Cup consisted of mostly veterans with the only “new” players Jermaine Jones, Eric Lichaj, Tim Ream, Alejandro Bedoya, and Agudelo. That roster also included Freddy Adu and spelled the end of the road for Bob Bradley in charge.

On the more-encouraging side for 2015, hopefully Klinsmann continues to utilize the speed DeAndre Yedlin and Gyasi Zardes flashed in recent games. He’s also giving Ream another look and it wasn’t that long ago (2010-11) that the ex-Red Bulls defender was considered a shoo-in for a prominent place in the National Team.

No matter what Klinsmann does he’ll never make everyone happy. In that regard he’s the perfect coach for the Twitter era.