Dave Sarachan’s explanation for the USMNT losing out on hyped prospect Jonathan Gonzalez was unsatisfactory, as a lot of things have been lately. (Getty)

It was business as usual.

For the first time since its failure to reach the 2018 World Cup with a loss in Trinidad and Tobago back in October, the United States men’s national team played a home game on Sunday. Yet, somehow, it felt like no major shock had ever been felt. Like the U.S. wasn’t about to miss its first World Cup since the first year of Ronald Reagan’s second presidential term.

Things looked like they always had in the non-FIFA date friendly to cap the traditional January camp for domestically based U.S. national team pool players. A team of relative nobodies playing before a half-empty stadium with inexplicably high ticket prices. (On-field seats were $200; standard midfield seats were $60; the cheapest ticket was $25, and that’s all before fees.)

And a lineup that was, on average, about five years too old.

Average age of this experimental, supposedly developmental starting XI: 25.1 That’s probably older than a few World Cup starting XIs. Yuck. https://t.co/0eYkgy5R0n — Henry Bushnell (@HenryBushnell) January 29, 2018





First, those ticket prices. It was hardly surprising that enormous swaths of the StubHub Center looked immaculately clean. The U.S. has had trouble drawing five-digit crowds for stateside friendlies the last year or two. That was before it failed to reach a World Cup. Why in the world the federation thought prices above a hundred dollars for premium seats were still appropriate in spite of that inconvenient fact is incomprehensible.

If anything, this might have been a good time to show some goodwill to the beleaguered fan base, which is being asked to sit tight and hold its interest through at least eight years without a World Cup. Maybe slash prices for a few games, as a good-faith gesture.

Now let’s talk about that lineup. The Americans started a 30-year-old Justin Morrow at left back and handed a debut to a 28-year-old central defender, Ike Opara. Out wide, it played 26-year-old Gyasi Zardes who has already demonstrated to lack the capacity to do a job at the international level. And up front, a 29-year-old C.J. Sapong plainly has nothing to offer the program in the long term.

Yet there they were. As if this were just a regular World Cup-year January camp, useful for unearthing a role player or two to fill out the back end of the roster at the big tournament this summer. Rather than the beginning of an almost half-decade rebuilding process, a total reboot of a national team that had stagnated and then badly regressed after the 2014 World Cup.

This isn’t the time to be handing minutes to 30-year-old left backs. Or blooding center backs who will be 33 when the U.S. next has a chance to be at a World Cup. Or to get wingers on the field who have proven only that they don’t belong in 37 prior caps. Or to play through strikers who have recorded 10 or more goals in just one of their seasons in Major League Soccer.

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If a player has no chance of contributing to the cause at the 2022 World Cup, or the qualifying path towards it, he has no business being around this team right now. Not even in a January camp. There are plenty of young players who could have benefited enormously from those spots, whether they’ve made a dent or debut at the pro level or not. Indeed, even a promising under-17 player could yield more net benefit to the program than some journeyman who will never get close to Qatar, five summers from now.

Yet there they all were.

And then, to complete the trifecta of damning evidence against a federation that has had almost four months to think about all that has gone wrong, but hasn’t apparently drawn any useful conclusions yet, there was the interview acting head coach Dave Sarachan gave to SI.com. The subject, predictably, was the failure to keep mega-prospect Jonathan Gonzalez from defecting to Mexico’s program.

View photos What good did it do U.S. Soccer to play Gyasi Zardes (9) and other older starters against Bosnia and Herzegovina? (Omnisport) More

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