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.