Dec. 28, 2006
THE SOCCER ROUNDTABLE
A year-end closeout special
Bueno, Zimmerman, Melendez and Canales discuss

After a holiday hiatus, the folks at the Soccer Roundtable have returned to tackle an important question. What was the biggest U.S. soccer story of 2006?

Joining LASoccerNews.com editor Luis Bueno is assistant editor Andrea Canales. Guests at the Roundtable are The Orange County Register’s Miguel Melendez, the paper’s Chivas USA beat writer, and The Long Beach Press Telegram’s Matt Zimmerman, who also covers the Chivas USA beat.

Luis Bueno, LASoccerNews.com
I think when people look back, they’ll think of how the US lost in the World Cup. Hands down, with so much build up over the last four years, to come in and lay a giant egg, to score only one goal that really didn't matter, I think that's got to be the biggest story.

Matt Zimmerman, Long Beach Press Telegram
Indisputably, it was the biggest story in US soccer.

Miguel Melendez, Orange County Register
It was the biggest letdown in sports history.

Zimmerman
I disagree. I'm one of those guys who walks around reminding everybody how lucky the U.S. was to advance in 1994 and how lucky they were to advance in 2002. They got into the next round, they acquitted themselves well, but they needed a lot of help. We’re still one of those countries that hopes for a good draw.

Andrea Canales, LASoccerNews.com
And this time we didn't get a good draw. We got a tough draw, and we didn't do well. I don't think the letdown was so out of character. To me, the biggest story was definitely the buildup to the US in the World Cup. Frankly, I'd never seen anything like that before. The fact that expectations were blown so high, the fact that US fans actually traveled in such huge numbers abroad, I'd never seen that before this World Cup. I was here in 1994. It didn’t seem like that many US fans came out to support the team even when the World Cup was played in their own country.

Zimmerman
There was only one game in 1994 - I was lucky enough to attend a game, at the Rose Bowl, where the US fans were out in force. It was against Romania. That's because it was right after the Columbia win, and that got a lot of people excited, and it really brought out the bandwagon. They were yelling, USA!, doing the wave, all this party stuff.
I saw a lot of the same thing early this year at the Norway game, a lot of fans who didn't know a whole lot about the game, wearing their new jerseys, acting like Taylor Twellman was going to be a big-time guy in the next World Cup. With more fans, you get the uninformed fans.
The buildup was massive. I heard US soccer gave out more credentials this year than they had ever given out.
Obviously, a lot of it was because of 2002. No matter how many times Bruce Arena said that there is no natural progression from the quarterfinals to the semi finals, people still really jumped on the bandwagon. Now this is the time that really separates the wheat from the chaff as far as the media and fans go, because we did so poorly.

Bueno
Time will tell how that's going to affect the next build up, and if the interest will still be there. In that sense, I think the US dropped the ball. All they had to do was beat Ghana - the horrible performance against the Czech Republic aside, all they had to do was beat Ghana to put that out of everyone's mind. But they didn't. We'll see how that affects future competitions.

Zimmerman
In 2002 as well as in 1994, we needed a little bit of luck to advance. Even in 2006 they got some of that luck, because we had no business being in it after that Czech game. But all they had to do was beat Ghana, and instead they came out timid and didn’t look good at all.

Canales
To me, it was just a continuation of what the US had established as a pattern. They are good starters, or they're not. They don't come back well. They had a crappy opening game, which they sort of came back from with mostly a defensive game against Italy. But they never had that complete sharpness moving forward. They got their heads down once Jan Koller scored his first goal. The US doesn't have a track record of bouncing back well. If they don't have a respectable start, it's hard for them to turn things around. France did - they started off badly in the World Cup, but then they had the experience to crank it up to another gear.
I just don't think it was a completely different kind of team compared to 2002 - but in 2002 they had a good start and it gave them confidence.

Zimmerman
For all intents and purposes, this should have been Landon Donovan's World Cup. He was hyped as the best player, everybody thought he was the best player, but he didn't play like the best player. You're right, they don't have those guys on the team to turn it around. You need to have a guy who can read everybody the riot act, who is going to get in people's faces, who is not going to accept anything less than maximum effort. Who is that guy in this generation?

Canales
Who was that guy in 2002?

Zimmerman
They got lucky in 2002. In South Korea, a bunch of guys stepped up. In 1994, I think guys like Wynalda and Harkes did that.

Melendez
I think we’re going off-topic. The issue was, what was the big story of the year? That's the letdown for the US. How it happened, why it happened, how it started, that whole letdown, the biggest disappointment.

Canales
I guess all the other stories that I can think of are still related to that, like Arena losing his job.

Melendez
What about Zinedine Zidane? The head butt?

Canales
Aren't we talking about US soccer? If you look at it like that, no one really cared about the US outside of the US. They're not arguing in Ireland about why the US didn't advance. Zidane and the head butt is a much bigger story.

Zimmerman
No, we are talking about US soccer.

Melendez
We’ll disregard the headbutt, then.

Zimmerman
What's hilarious is how all those bandwagon fans who jumped on after the last World Cup, are now the ones walking around saying that Arena sucks and Arena can’t coach.

Canales
Arena was untouchable before the World Cup. People were saying he should coach the team for as long as he wanted.

Zimmerman
All of a sudden, because of one horrendous game against the Czech Republic, he is terrible.

Bueno
My issue with Arena is, when he went into Mexico City in 2005 for that qualifier, he went with the one forward. He didn't play McBride. He got away from what the team had been doing. Then he did the same exact thing against the Czech Republic. He didn't learn his lesson. So wasn’t like it was one shot, ‘Ok, I’m going to tinker with something that I haven’t done before.” He did do it before, and it backfired in his face.
When he did it again, it's like, ‘Bruce, you tried that before.’

Zimmerman
Against Ghana, they just didn't come out aggressively.

Canales
I'm not taking anything away from the fact that Landon Donovan had a specifically poor World Cup, but I also think that it was on Bruce Arena that he took Donovan out of where he’d been playing as a midfielder and put him in as a forward, where he hadn’t been playing with the national team. He was suddenly expected to click back into that position, while the reins were handed over to Claudio Reyna in the midfield as a playmaker.

Zimmerman
Claudio Reyna needed John O’Brien there. They had no control in the midfield. O’Brien in 2002 was great at holding the ball and passing the ball. Without him, Reyna is not a playmaker.

Melendez
But they knew when they called O’Brien up that he was hurt. Why call him up at all?

Zimmerman
It shows how important he would have been had he been healthy, that they would take that chance on him.

Melendez
But he wasn’t healthy.

Zimmerman
I think it was a risk worth taking. Who do you take instead? Freddy Adu?

Melendez
At least he was healthy.

Bueno
I think that if you look back at Arena's tenure, yeah, he did a lot of good things, but I don't even know that you could call him the best US coach. Everybody just assumes because they made the quarterfinals, that he is. But what about Bora? Bora had a lot less to work with, but he did a lot more with it, if you look at the state of US soccer back in those days.

Canales
Bob Gansler, too.

Bueno
Those were coaches with practically no resources, nowhere near what Arena had, who managed to get results. Steve Sampson even got a point out of Azteca.

(Canales and Bueno laugh)

Zimmerman
What?

Bueno
We were saying earlier, that anyone who mentions Steve Sampson’s name in a positive connotation gets condemned by so many people.

Canales
You lose all credibility with them.

Zimmerman
I was about to say that I was hoping you’d mention it, because I didn’t want to be the first. With Bora, we had a couple of 7-0 wins against, I think, teams like St. Vincent and the Grenadines, but under Sampson, the team achieved the best run of results ever to that point. He had a lot less to work with. How many of those guys would start on today’s team?

Bueno
Maybe one or two.

Zimmerman
Sampson, if you look at what he did with the national team, until he had that ultimate brain fart in spring of 1998, he did an excellent job.

Bueno
He did. Before that, he was great.

Zimmerman
Of course, since then, he’s made a career of having brain farts.

Bueno
Arena, they trumpet his record and all-time wins, but a lot of those came against teams that were nothing.

Zimmerman
Why were we playing Guatemala and Jamaica in tune-ups for the World Cup? Just so we can pat ourselves on the back for winning those games?

Canales
We played those games to prepare for Latvia and Morocco.
It's interesting that against the one team that was a legitimate contender, Germany, Arena was saying, ‘We shouldn’t have played that game,’ after the loss.

Zimmerman
It's better to build false confidence with a bunch of 3-0 wins.

Bueno
I've always said that friendlies are absolutely meaningless. They mean absolutely nothing. But so many people said, ‘Look we’re getting these wins, we’re getting these results.’ Who cares?

Zimmerman
I get excited about certain friendlies. England versus the U.S. If we’d had Argentina on the schedule, I’d get hyped about that. Italy, etc. But generally, results in friendlies mean less than nothing. It’s all about the development of the players.

Bueno
If the U.S. did beat England or whoever in a friendly, what would it really mean? For any team, friendlies don’t matter

Zimmerman
How many of a team’s number one players even play in friendlies? If you’re lucky, they have their A- or B team out there, unless it’s a hard-core rivalry, like if Brazil played Argentina in a friendly.


The Soccer Roundtable will return soon with the reporters' takes on other topics. Check out the opinions as the reporters review the biggest local stories of 2006.

We’d like to hear your feedback! Let us know about any other topics you would like to have us discuss. Please e-mail us at LASoccerEdit@aol.com.