I was looking for the word to describe what I thought went wrong for the US in the Morocco game. The word I kept coming back to was experienced: the guys Arena started in that game were experienced players. That’s precisely why we lost.

In the context of American soccer, when I say someone is “experienced” I mean something quite specific. It’s not so much a factual matter or a quantitative measure of how long a player’s been around as much as it is an attitude or a mindset.

It is the mindset of the traveler in a foreign land, the attitude of the interloper, the one who is not supposed to be there. The first priorities are not to offend, to know one’s place, to tread lightly. Players with this mindset develop a sort of conservatism. They watch their step, minimize risk, maintain control. There is always a shade of doubt in everything they do: it might be the wrong thing. They fear, above all else, making a mistake.

With exceptions, this, I think, has been the predominant attitude of the first couple generations of American players playing for European club teams. To my mind, Claudio Reyna is perhaps the classic example. And there are also American players who have never played for European clubs who fall into this experienced category. Josh Wolff, for instance, is an experienced player. He plays with doubt; at the critical moment he recedes into himself and plays small. This, to me, is what the word “experienced” currently means when applied to American soccer players.

Don’t get me wrong: experience is a virtue. A winning team must be controlled, be careful and minimize risk. But a virtue taken to its extreme often turns into a vice. The team whose only virtue is experience is a team without spark, without energy, without creativity, without boldness. It is not, then, that I do not value that virtue they call “experience,” but I try to recognize its limitations and its pathologies.

There was a time when experience was just about the only virtue the US team had. And that was enough to get us reasonably far. But I think things began to change, particularly after 1998. Since then we’ve seen the emergence of an entirely new kind of American player. With a few notable exceptions (Gooch to name one) this new American player developed almost entirely in Major League Soccer.

The new American soccer player is a very different breed from the old experienced sort. I suspect soccer fans abroad (and soccer fans in the communities of Eurosnobs that we harbor in our midst) think these new players are arrogant, that they don’t know their place. The new American soccer player certainly challenges such suppositions about the place and status of Americans on the world soccer scene, but I think it is a mistake to ascribe the cause of that challenge to arrogance.

What marks the new American soccer player is not arrogance as much as it is innocence. They, for whatever reason, do not harbor the nagging, lacking sensation – almost a kind of guilt or inadequacy – that is the mark of the experienced player. They suffer no such burdens and are free just to play the game, to play it with a kind of innocence.

They play without fear of offending, without fear of making a mistake, without fear of some secret lack being revealed. They don’t feel the need to watch their step. At the critical moment experienced players grow smaller, stay within boundaries, keep things controlled, but in those same moments innocent players grow larger, break boundaries, play with abandon. That innocence is their virtue, the dynamic strength of their play.

This is why, back in his day, we were all so enamored with Clint Mathis. It was a brief but magical moment: he played without fear, he did things American player weren’t supposed to do. He did not play like an experienced player, he played like someone who didn’t know any better, like someone who’d never been put in his place. We talk today of Mathis’s downfall, of his nearly complete implosion. But we sometimes forget that we talk about that only because we saw in Mathis something remarkable and unprecedented in American soccer.

But Mathis was merely the first. Today when we think of this new breed of American soccer player we think of Dempsey, Convey, Twellman, Johnson, Rolfe, Gooch and, perhaps most of all, Adu. These are the kind of players who may very well revolutionize the game in this country – perhaps even beyond this country.

Bruce Arena put a number of these players on the field against Venezuela, and the win, I think, can be attributed to the energy they brought. But for now these players are often very young players; they are inexperienced players. Against a team like Venezuela that inexperience is tolerable, but against better teams it is not.

A balance between innocent and experienced players is better than an imbalance (and such a balance may be all we can expect in Germany). But such a balance is not the ideal. What we need, instead, is a new kind of experienced American player, a player that combines the virtue of experience with the virtue of innocence in a single, unified, package. We have precious few such players today. Indeed, Landon Donovan may be the only one.

A specter is haunting Major League Soccer – the specter of Canadianism.

Last week, along with everyone else, I learned the disturbing rumors were true. The Canadian National Team Toronto FC will join Major League Soccer next season. I don’t want to incite any unnecessary panic (I assure you the panic I intend to incite is completely necessary), but I am deeply concerned about this latest Canadian incursion into American culture.

As everyone well knows, the Canadian menace has been infiltrating our fair and innocent country for decades. First they came for the entertainment industry. William Shatner and Monty Hall seemed innocent enough, but they were only the beginning. Then it was Paul Anka, Rich Little and Alex Trebeck. By the time Howie Mandel and Bryan Adams came on the scene it was already too late.

And how little we took notice of the steady march of Canada’s Arctic imperialism. Just witness the bitter dispute over Hans Island. Once they take that island and the rest of the Arctic they will head for Europe. And then falling like dominoes it’ll be Africa, Antarctica, South America, Central America and then … That’s right: Hans Island and then Texas.

It’s starting to make sense now, isn’t it? If only we Americans had resisted Canada as valiantly as the brave warriors of the Hans Island Liberation Front then perhaps this dire situation could have been averted.

But no, we thought we were insulated from the Canuckian scourge. And I’m sorry to say the denial was doubly deep among American soccer fans. “They don’t play soccer up there in those few acres of snow. Hockey’s their game and they can have the NHL for all we care.” That’s what we said. We were wrong.

The signs were there. The ubiquitous presence of the Canadian production “Fox Sport World Report” on America’s Soccer Channel. Frank Yallop in San Jose along with Pat Onstad and Dwayne DeRosario. Geoff Aunger. Mark Watson. They were vanguard troops sent to infiltrate American soccer, that most vital and strategic sector of American society. We should have acted. But we didn’t.

Today we find Onstad, De Rosario and Adrian Serioux, the latest Canadian apparatchik to infiltrate American soccer, down there in Houston - in Texas - just waiting for those dominoes to fall.

And now to learn our leaders in New York are in league with the Canadians, that they’re willing collaborators in the evil Maple Leaf agenda? It’s all so very troubling.

If we fail to act now soon every soccer specific stadium in the United States will become a Canadian foothold. That’s when the Canadian plot would take its most sinister turn. In an attempt to introduce a foreign substance into our precious bodily fluids Budweiser would be replaced by Molson. That’s the way your hardcore Canadian works.

Believe me when I tell you Toronto FC is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Canadian plot we have ever had to face. I can no longer sit back and allow Canadian infiltration, Canadian indoctrination, Canadian subversion and the international Canadian conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Every single time Real Salt Lake scored a goal I erupted in a fit of hysterical laughter. I find it quite pleasurable to see the Galaxy lose. I admit that. But in between goals I also found myself wondering whether the score - Real Salt Lake 3, Landon Free Galaxy 0 - really was the best result for both teams.

See, I’ve come to believe for both the Galaxy and RSL that it’s in their long term interest to lose games, and to lose them badly. Los Angeles, who have lost their last three games by an aggregate score of 8-0, has been doing an admirable job of securing its interest. I’d like to think that Alexi Lalas knew the Galaxy’s interest before last weekend, but I’m absolutely positive he knows it now. Steve Sampson has to go.

Just because you know what has to happen doesn’t always mean you can or want to make it happen. For any number of reasons, but particularly for lack of a suitable alternative, Lalas and Company may (indeed probably) feel right now is not the time to send Sampson on his merry way. Perhaps I buy into those Klinsmann coaching the Galaxy rumblings a bit too much, but you’ve gotta admit something about it rings very true. Point is, I think Sampson’s going to hang on to his job until after the World Cup.

But there’s a real danger in deferring the inevitable: the coach who needs to be fired might start winning. That’s a bad thing. Crew fans understand what I’m talking about. Back in October I wrote the following about the Crew’s 2005 season:

We all woke up on May 15, 2004 and read in the morning press that today was a day of reckoning for Greg Andrulis. Win that afternoon or face the axe. In retrospect Columbus probably should have thrown the match. Instead they won and delayed the inevitable for over a year. Yes, the inevitable.

There was not a single bit of difference between the Greg Andrulis whose team missed the playoffs in 2003 and went winless in its first five games of 2004, and the Greg Andrulis whose team beat New England on that unfortunate Saturday. Not one bit of difference.

I don’t know if John Ellinger would have been fired or not had Real Salt Lake failed to win against the Los Angeles Galaxy. I have my doubts, and I strongly suspect Ellinger’s job security is considerably more secure than it ought to be. But the basic fact of the matter is that he should have been fired a long time ago. The win against Los Angeles changed absolutely nothing in that regard.

There is no difference between the John Ellinger whose team went 18 games without a win and the John Ellinger whose team had a very good day against a depleted and effete Los Angeles Galaxy.

Eighteen. If you’re a Real Salt Lake fan you know what that number means.

Another game and you’re in ‘99 Metros territory. And you know as well I that nothing is going to change so long as Ellinger is in charge. If this continues much longer there will be no dispute about it: Ellinger’s Real Salt Lake will be the worst performing team in Major League Soccer history.

Now there’s a certain dignity in supporting a lousy team. But let’s be clear: that dignity is conferred only retrospectively. It’s only later, when you’re actually winning games, that you can look over at those newly arrived bandwagon bums and know that you are better than them because you were there during the darkest of days.

That dignity does not exist during the dark days themselves. The dark days are miserable days, they are days of fomenting anger, an anger whose primary object will always rightfully be the negligence and incompetence of the team’s management. And let me assure you Real Salt Lake fans if your team has gone eighteen games without a win and your coach hasn’t been fired, then the management of your team has been negligent and incompetent.

Supporting a team as poorly managed as Real Salt Lake is undoubtedly a miserable endeavor. But some people cannot cope with misery. Such people foster within themselves a sort of cognitive dissonance that helps them deal with the situation. They refuse to cast judgment, they refuse to place blame. The team, they say, “tried” really hard every week and “the coach is not the problem.” In fact, when pressed these people will deny there is a problem. And if you say there is a problem, if you blame the coach, if you criticize the tactics (or lack thereof), they will admonish you for not supporting the team. (Yes, this type of person occurs frequently today in the political world as well.)

These are the happy-go-lucky idiots who support the team “win or lose,” “no matter what.” They have conned themselves into believing that everything is going well, that everything is going according to plan. Those people are insufferable. They’re the soccer fan equivalent of that wretch in high school who was so confused that he laughed and smiled whenever he was picked on and beat up. He couldn’t admit his dire social situation and he couldn’t admit that something was very, very wrong. So he pretended it was all a lark and constructed his own explanatory reality in which things weren’t at all as bad as they truly were. In fact, to him things were just splendid. Such dissociation from the genuine reality of the situation is therapeutic to be sure. It is also pathetic.

There is another way. When you’re a good team that goes bad (as DC United did a few years back) then it’s harder for the fans to stomach the downturn and I suspect they react visibly and vocally more quickly. But Real Salt Lake is a young team. It’s a team that has never experienced genuine success on the field. I can’t be certain, but I suspect that’s why there remains to this day a lack of visible protest and criticism in the stands. It’s time that changed. Real Salt Lake fans need to stand up and say, as the old line goes, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Now there are a lot of ways to do this – banners, chanting, booing, walking out en masse to name a few. But I think my favorite, and the one that always seem to make it onto TV and into the newspapers is hiring an airplane to tow a “fire the coach” banner over the stadium while the game is in progress. I would like to say that the DC United supporters on BigSoccer.com were the first people in Major League Soccer to use this tactic, but apparently Eric Wynalda was the first when back in MLS’s early days he hired a “small plane that towed a banner encouraging the team to fire [coach Laurie] Calloway.” I will say, however, to the best of my knowledge those DC United supporters were the first fans to take such action.

After 9/11 there were some rumors that flying a banner over a stadium was no longer legal. There is a grain of truth to this rumor, but that grain is not applicable to most Major League Soccer situations. It’s only illegal to fly a banner over a stadium during a game if there are more than 30,000 in attendance. Since this is very, very rarely the case in Major League Soccer, planes towing “fire the coach” banners remain a viable tactic for disgruntled soccer fans.

Of course, when hiring an airplane you also have to choose your game carefully. The DC United fans chose an ESPN2 game (Real Salt Lake’s only ESPN2 game this year is on May 27). But I’m personally not sure that ESPN2 games are the best choice. Seems to me those games are more or less scripted and they’re not that likely to give much attention to any airborne stunt. In DC United’s case the plane was shown on TV, but there was very little discussion about it. A case could be made for preferring a locally broadcast game.

So that’s the choice. You can gleefully stick your head in the proverbial sand or you can take a vocal and visible stand. (Hey, that rhymes!) And there’s nothing more visible than aerial advertising to convey your “fire the coach” message.

And if that doesn’t work? Well, don’t let them tell you ninjas are never the answer.

There’s a new trophy to be won in Texas: an 18th-century mountain howitzer.

The Hoops and Dynamo will play four games this year - the first of the Texas rivalry - and the home team for each game this season will maintain the cannon and be able to fire it as it wishes. At the end of the 2006 season, the team that has won the season series will keep the cannon for all of the 2007 season, with the trophy then only changing hands after each season.

In true MLS style (oh, no, not again) they’re holding a (rigged and/or inconsequential) “contest” to name the cannon.

There is, without a doubt, an absolutely perfect name for this new Texas prize. The cannon should be called “Gonzo” or “The Gonzo” in commemoration of the famed Battle of Gonzales “come and take it” cannon. But I suspect, in another case of major league cowardice marketing Major League Soccer will (again) shy away from any name that might possibly be offensive to anybody. It’ll surely be called something warm and fuzzy - like Dynamo.

And that is a shame. The historical reference would lend a certain depth to the rivalry. I’d like to see Dallas and Houston trade “come and take it” jabs back and forth. I’d like to see some “come and take it” flags in the stands. But after the league’s spineless reaction to the 1836 controversy I simply can’t imagine it happening.

Deprived of any historical relation Major League Soccer’s newest trophy will be little more than a contrived (and strangely Freudian) spectacle.