By Graig Carbino - ALBANY, NY (Apr 30, 2009) USSoccerPlayers -- The United States National Team has a serious docket of matches lined up for the next couple of months. They'll mix in World Cup qualifiers with the Confederations Cup in South Africa and the Gold Cup right here at home. The debate will soon rage on regarding what sort of rosters manager Bob Bradley should assemble for these various competitions.
The busy summer campaign kicks off in early June with World Cup qualifiers at Costa Rica on June 3rd and in Chicago three days later against Honduras. The team then heads to South Africa for the Confederations Cup. They begin play against Italy on the 15th before matches against Brazil and Egypt on the 18th and 21st. If the team manages to advance out of this difficult group, they could conceivably play games all the way up to June 28th.
Wins would be great in South Africa, no doubt. Somehow making it to the final in Johannesburg would not leave a ton of time for the team to then recover and make it back to Seattle for their July 4th Gold Cup opener against Grenada. Success in the CONCACAF event would mean playing games well into the latter part of July.
If all of these games aren’t quite enough for you, the team will travel to Mexico City for an August 12th World Cup qualifier against El Tri to wrap up a wild few months. Not a bad little summer schedule from a fans perspective. Not great for the players involved.
The summer of 2007 saw a similar scheduling scenario play out as the US competed in both the Gold Cup and Copa America through June and July. Back then, Bradley went with mostly first choice players for the regional competition and sent a younger, less experienced group down to South America. Winning the Gold Cup was the goal back then, playing in the Copa seemed like a secondary endeavor.
In winning the 2007 Gold Cup tournament the US was guaranteed their spot in this June's Confederations Cup. They were thinking about this global warm-up all the way back in 2007 and used their best players to have this opportunity. It would make sense then that Bradley would select his first choice team for South Africa. If that ends up being the case, we'd have to all assume that the Gold Cup group will be less than full strength.
There was some clamoring from fans and observers a few years ago about the strength of the group that Bradley brought to the Copa America tournament. Some folks wanted all the first choice players to rest for the Gold Cup and play the better competition down south. Others looked a bit more long term and saw what the Confederations Cup would offer in terms of competition. This group was all for Gold Cup roster strength and didn’t much care about the Copa.
Others of you were sort of lost in your thinking back then that Bradley could and should just take all the best players to both competitions. Unfortunately that strategy is just not possible.
Players from European clubs need some sort of a break in the summer months and players from Major League Soccer teams cannot be away for two months at a time during the middle of the season.
Balance is the key when trying to assemble competitive teams in this sort of clustered fixture environment. You certainly get the sense from the outside that the Confederations tournament is A-number one as far the US Soccer Federation goes.
They want to send their strongest team to South Africa to get a feel for what the big tournament is going to be like next summer. Makes sense, as they set everything up two years ago to get to this point and the World Cup is obviously the only goal.
Still, can you really send your second team to your own regional championship when said championship is being played right in your own backyard? It would seem to me that as the best team in the region you owe your colleagues the respect of sending a decent team to this event. At the same time Clint Dempsey, Carlos Bocanegra, Oguchi Onyewu and company cannot play all summer.
It might not be right for the region, but in the end you look out for number one. It's World Cup or bust for Team USA and to succeed at that tournament means looking past and above CONCACAF for the time being.
Graig Carbino covers American Abroad and writes a weekly column for USSoccerPlayers. Contact him at graiger11@yahoo.com
