Martin Rogers

USA TODAY Sports

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — There is enough bad news for the United States national team right now that you can take your pick of painful barbs. There is the fact that records, the unwanted kind, have started tumbling.

Or that the U.S., as things stand, is out of the qualification places for the 2018 World Cup. Or that Tuesday night’s 4-0 defeat in Costa Rica was the first time the country has lost its opening two qualifiers of a World Cup campaign. Or the first time it has lost two consecutive qualifiers since 2001. Or that this was the heaviest shutout loss in qualifying in nearly 60 years.

There was no talking his way out of this one for head coach Jurgen Klinsmann. This was a good old-fashioned drubbing, administered by a fearless team full of confidence and attacking intent, to the backsides of an American group that had little to offer and had firmly lost its composure by the end.

“It is a defeat that hurts a lot,” Klinsmann said. “It is a bitter pill to swallow.”

United States falls to Costa Rica in World Cup qualifier

Klinsmann, over the past five years, has greeted every slice of adversity with a positive spin, but even he was at a loss to come up with anything to cling to here. Things have just gotten serious, and there is a chance he pays for it with his job. For U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati to resist the temptation to pull the trigger, he will have to buy into some of the good, or less bad, news.

World Cup qualifying is a long process and, at least in the CONCACAF where the U.S. operates, a forgiving one.

There is enough time and ample games for a revival sufficient to move the Americans into the prime slots of a six-team double round robin that will send three teams to Russia in 2018. Furthermore, both defeats have come against their toughest opponents, this setback following last Friday’s home loss to Mexico.

Yet this is a scenario that is a blow to the gut of American soccer and its growing number of fans. That collective can handle being an underdog on a global scale against traditional heavyweights from Europe and South America, but here, in one of the weakest regions in world soccer, it is supposed to be the bully, the team that dominates, the team that always qualifies like it has for the past seven tournaments in a row. Not a struggler destined for what now possibly looms as a nervous path to soccer’s greatest show.

The U.S. was without top goalkeeper Tim Howard, though there is nothing he could have done to stop this rout. Perhaps more tellingly, it was without Geoff Cameron, who would surely have provided a more stable defensive presence than the apparently terrified duo of John Brooks and Omar Gonzalez.

Bob Bradley has moved on from USMNT, even if not everybody has

It is on Klinsmann too though, the coach who was supposed to take the U.S. to an unprecedented level of style and tactical sophistication when he was brought in to replace Bob Bradley in 2011.

Instead, assuming Gulati keeps the faith, he has to manufacture a way to conjure greater spirit and motivation from a group that was utterly dejected as it left Costa Rica.

“In moments like this you have no choice but to step up and be strong and take responsibility and say we were just not good enough,” captain Michael Bradley said.

Bradley was right, and the pressing question is where the scope of the responsibility lies. With the players, for their inability or unwillingness to respond? With the likes of the hapless Brooks, who was outstanding over the summer in the Copa America but was at fault for Mexico’s winning goal last week and was a deer in the San Jose floodlights? Or with the coach who could not get his troops settled into a tactical rhythm capable of stopping Costa Rica from running riot?

Four months is a long time in soccer, and that is how long the U.S. has to wait for its next pair of qualifiers, a home game against Honduras followed by a visit to Panama.

That is four months to look at that points table, and see its position languishing at the foot of it next to Trinidad and Tobago. Four months for wounds to heal, perhaps. And four months for either Klinsmann to find an answer, or for his employers to find a replacement.