Let’s just call it The Debacle. American soccer fans know what I’m talking about.

Since The Debacle I haven’t cared much for writing here. And I’ve been busy. But, of course, I’ve been busy before and that never stopped me from posting here before. (Well, sometimes it did.) But even when busy I usually found a way to write something - you know - as “preparation” for work or as a “break” from work. But since The Debacle I just wanted to stew and fume in silence. Hence my absence.

Well, that’s not entirely true. See, a few days after The Debacle I jotted down some notes on its aftermath but then I never found the time to convert them into something substantial and I certainly didn’t have the inclination to make that time. But they’ve been gnawing at me for weeks and it’s time to get them posted because it’s plainly obvious unless I post them nothing will ever be posted on this blog again. And I like this blog. I just have to get over The Debacle.

So here without much editing are my notes:

• Our Way. After the success of the 2002 World Cup US Soccer produced a DVD on the accomplishment. It was called “Our Way” and that phrase accurately captured the character of that team. In 2006 we didn’t play our way. If we’re going to be successful we have to do things our way. That means we have to play our game. If that means we lose, then so be it. The point is we’re never going to win unless we do it our way.
• Transitional Era. The reality is this cup came at a bad time for US Soccer. As all the post World Cup retirements attest, our player pool was in very much in transition.
• Prima Donovan. Landon Donovan is a very talented but very limited player. The sooner everyone realizes that the better. He should be on the team, but he is not the kind of player around which you can build a team. Things could have been different for Donovan, but it’s clear at this point he has reduced himself to a high caliber role player.
• Playing Soccer While American. (Some will get that reference.) We can never expect calls to go our way. It’s not because they’re against us, it’s because we’re Americans playing soccer. There will always be a presumption against us. That means we have to be better than both the other team and the referee. It’s not fair, but those are the breaks. We either learn to cope with that fact or we will forever fail on the world stage. If that means we have to be twice as good to get the result we’d get on an even playing field then so be it. We’ll just have to be twice as good.
• MLS vs Europe. For the moment the core of the team should be European players getting time (like Gooch) and MLS players looking to jump to Europe (like Dempsey). Career MLS players (like Pope and Donovan) should, at most, be role players on the team.
• We are hated. I knew this beforehand, but it bears repeating. When we lose billions are happy. Embrace the situation and stop whining about it.
• McTargetForward. We don’t necessarily need a big, lumbering, hard working target forward. I look forward to the day when US Soccer realizes this.
• MLS is both a problem and the solution. Our standout players at the World Cup generally came from MLS. The league can create solid soccer players. But it does not foster a truly competitive player – that is someone with the habits and mindset to deliver every single time he steps on the field. It is a significant problem that a star in Major League Soccer admits he wasn’t “tuned in” during the World Cup and laments that he doesn’t know why some days you’re on your game and some days you aren’t. Professional players in competitive leagues cultivate the habit of being “tuned in” and they know exactly how to make sure they’re on their game in every game. Major League Soccer fails to cultivate any of that. So Major League Soccer is a problem. But at the same time there is no other possible body but Major League Soccer that can solve these problems.
• Captain American’t. He said “we’re still a small footballing nation” and in the 2006 World Cup he did his best to prove that. Good riddance. I’ve had enough of “experienced” players. Speaking of experience …
• Experience and Innocence. Yup, that was the most experienced team the United States ever sent to the World Cup. I was right about the perils of experience.
• The Bruce. The 2002 World Cup (the one four years ago) accomplished one thing for us: it solidified our position as a powerhouse in CONCACAF. That was Bruce Arena’s ultimate accomplishment. He made us a power in CONCACAF. We can debate if we’re better than Mexico – but the point is Arena made that debate real. That was, however, all Arena was capable of doing. He accomplished this feat backing 2002. We’ve been stagnant ever since then. The bitter truth is it is four years past time to move on. (By the way, we’re going to learn a lot about Bruce Arena when he takes over the New York Red Bulls. And what we learn may not be pretty.)

Oh, and I take back everything I said about playing like buffaloes. (Maybe I should have said buffoons.)

I’ve always been a fan of African style soccer nicknames. The Indomitable Lions. The Elephants. The Super Eagles. The Mambas. The Lions of Teranga. The Black Stars. They’re wonderful, colorful, rich names. And although I think they’re terrible official names (I’m looking at your Raging Rhinos) they’re superb unofficial nicknames.

The USA has never had an absolutely accepted nickname. All we can agree on is an acronym: USMNT. Now I’d be pretty happy with Yanks being our nickname. I’d be even happier if we sang Yankee Doodle in the stands. But I understand the term “Yank” is controversial in the former Confederacy. That’s too bad because I’d much rather have the television commentators call us the Yanks than the insipid and generic Team USA.

But after yesterday’s performance against Italy I’d like to offer up a nickname I’ve had in mind for quite some time.

It was a hell of a match against Italy. You may never see another one like it. It certainly wasn’t beautiful. But it was a gutsy, powerful performance. We got the draw through brute determination. Everything you need to know about that game was written on Brian McBride’s bloodied face. We finally lived up to that “don’t tread on me” motto that’s lately all the rage in US soccer circles.

It was a genuine show of American character. But I’m here to tell you we didn’t play merely like men, we played like buffaloes. The Buffaloes. That should be our nickname.

Yes, technically the animals are called bison, but I prefer the colloquial buffalo. The buffalo is a great, immense, powerful, completely unpredictable beast. It is a traditional symbol of strength and a traditional symbol of America. Despite its lumbering appearance it is capable of incredible speed, finesse and grace. It is also capable of levels of aggression rivaled in North America perhaps only by the grizzly. The buffalo doesn’t take a damn thing from anybody.

The Buffaloes. It seems like a fine and fitting nickname for the team that gutted it out against Italy with only nine men. Whatever happens in this World Cup, I’ll always be thankful for that performance. It was one of the finest moments in US soccer history.

Ghana’s Black Stars versus America’s Buffaloes. It should be a great match.

Some years ago I was driving down the usual road when all of a sudden a cat darted out in front of me. I had just enough time swerve and miss him. Thing is it had actually been raining that day – raining quite a lot – and the roads were real slick. So next thing I knew I was hydroplaning out of control. Then I spun 180 degrees, slid backwards and smacked into the embankment. When the car finally stopped a single thought came immediately to mind: should have hit that damn cat.

It’s been a long couple of days since the Czech Republic defeated the USA. I’ve had some time to digest it but I keep coming back to the same thought again and again: should have hit the damn cat. That’s the first thing I thought when the whistle blew after 90 minutes. That’s still what I think. Bruce Arena and the USMNT saw that Czech cat dart across the road months ago. They had plenty of time to react. It was natural to react. It was probably the “right” thing to do. You can hardly blame them for reacting. But they did end up turned backwards and smashed up on the side of the road.

We should have hit the damn cat. It still might have been a mess but at least we would have been facing forward at the end of it.

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.

There you go. That’s the roster. Of course you can bellyache about this inclusion or that inclusion, but such bellyaching is completely futile.

First, there’s really not much on Bruce Arena’s roster about which to debate.

I suppose you could bellyache the Jimmy Conrad selection and say Berhalter would have been the more obvious choice. But isn’t that nagging little ache just the tug of your inner-Eurosnob, isn’t that just the squeaky little voice that doubts Major League Soccer, that can’t quite shake that old superstition that says European based players are inherently more prepared for the international stage than players plying their trade right here in the States? And isn’t that nagging little achy voice overdue for a right and proper beating? Jimmy Conrad earned his spot.

Perhaps I would have taken Taylor Twellman over Brian Ching. Perhaps. But truth be told I really can’t justify taking one or the other. I think I understand why Bruce chose Ching. If Brian the Elder takes a knock, Brian the Younger will come in handy. Of course, I can come up with an equally valid argument for Twellman. Perhaps I’d even consider taking Twellman over Wolff. But, then again, I’ve never been a great fan of Wolff. And there is something to say for his international experience. Back and forth it goes; it’s an exercise in futility.

So Hejduk gets pulled with an ACL injury the day after the roster is announced and Albright comes in to take his place. It’s lousy for Hejduk but when you get right down to it Hejduk vs Albright isn’t going to make much difference. Hejduk runs all day (like a chicken with its head cut off some say) and has loads of experience. But I don’t trust him one bit and whenever he steps on the field I think he’s a red card or a penalty kick waiting to happen. To me he’s always been the soccer player equivalent of a ticking time bomb. Albright? He’s a top notch defender and he’s more versatile than Hejduk in the attack. He lacks experience but he brings other attributes to the team, namely crossing and set piece ability. Ticking time bomb with plenty of experience vs an inexperienced but more versatile player? It’s a wash. Anyone who spends much time worrying about it is wasting his time.

Second, it’s done. The roster is decided and there ain’t nothing you can do or say about it. For this brief moment there is nothing to talk about. It is what it is and nothing’s gonna change that. Right now we just have a list of 23 names. Those are our guys: come what may.

Come what may. That’s been the underlying sense for me since the roster was announced. Come what may: whatever happens will happen. Come what may.

I know the fatalism will wear off as June draws closer. Training camps and friendlies will instill in us a sense that we control our fate. Come June we’ll have a structure of reasonable expectations, we’ll have criterion for judgment and we’ll have a sense of exactly what to expect from this team. No matter what happens in camp we’ll go to Germany and with an idea of what has to occur if we’re going to control the situation and dictate the games.

Of course this sense of control is merely by proxy. And, yet, it is not unreasonable. If we, “the home viewer,” can speak with some facility about what we have to do to control the situation then surely the coaches and players, who see and (hopefully) know more than us, can do the same. Particularly at the World Cup, particularly in evenly matched groups like ours, every team - at least as an intellectual exercise - ought to be able to anticipate and understand what it must do to succeed.

But there is a distinction between thinking you know what you have to do, and truly knowing what you have to do. There is also a distinction between knowledge and actualization. You can’t tell where teams end up amid those distinctions until the game is played. That is also why this sense of control is only temporary. Once the whistle blows that fatalism will take hold again. There’ll be 11 guys on one side and 11 guys on the other: come what may.