A crisis was looming at a pivotal moment in this World Cup campaign—and to some extent for soccer in America. Team USA needed to strike fast. It was time do what their German-born coach, Jurgen Klinsmann, had been exhorting them to do for months: It was time to play soccer like Americans.
For nearly a century, the world's soccer-playing nations have tried to forge connections between the way they see themselves and what they do on the field
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Before Mr. Klinsmann took the reins of the American team three years ago, playing like an American meant, for the most part, sticking to an assigned position and reacting to the other team's attack. To Mr. Klinsmann, a former German star and national-team coach who moved to the U.S. in 1998, the strategy struck him as wholly un-American.
Mr. Klinsmann, soccer's Alexis de Tocqueville, wanted to build a winner, but he wasn't interested in teaching Americans how to play like anyone else. He wanted to create a squad that represented what he sees as the defining American characteristic—a visceral hatred of being dictated to.
"American nature is to take the game to our opponents. We don't want to just react to them," he explained in an interview last month near his home in Southern California
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He believed the modern game had no place for teams that hang back and try merely to survive—"parking the bus in front of the goal" in soccer-speak. For the U.S. team, he felt this strategy was wrong on another level: it was un-American. "You want to take things in your own hands," he says of American behavior on and off the field.
Mr. Klinsmann taught the U.S. players to see the field differently—to impose themselves on opposing defenses, and for defenders to push high into the middle of the field and even to join the attack. Midfielders, who have to both attack and defend, were sent down the sides of the field where they could send crossing passes in front of their opponent's goal.
Most important, he implored them to keep the ball moving around the field, and the only way to do that, he explained, was to stay in near perpetual motion, to search constantly for the open space where they can receive a pass.
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Mr. Klinsmann made it clear he thought the players were too proud of themselves for making it out of the group stage of the 2010 World Cup before getting ousted by Ghana, a poor nation less than one-tenth the size of the U.S. Such a result, he noted, would cause a national crisis in Germany.
I'm with you...just saying if things are slightly different he's on Italy for the 2nd time.
