I’ve been mulling over Saturday nights El Salvador - USA match for a few days now.  I’ve read more than a couple of the knee jerk “the sky is falling” blog posts from US fans about the performance.  However, those comments just haven’t sat will with me.  I don’t think it was all that awful a performance.  No, it wasn’t great but, the sky isn’t falling either.

I’ve believed this most of my life and I’ll continue to say it as long as someone will listen–heck, I’ll probably repeat myself without an audience–the key to the sport is controlling the game in the midfield.  Did the US midfielders control the ball in the midfield?  Yes, they pretty much dominated the middle third of the box.  However, were things really went wrong was going forward.  Heck, I even had a clever tweet about it during the match.  

If I were to sum up the match in a sentence it would be, “El Salvador scored a couple of goals against the run of play and then sat back to defend the lead allowing the US to push forward and level things late.”  Sound fair?  Sound accurate?  It should.

While most people will watch the EPL on the weekend, the team I’ve followed most of my live is currently a level below.  I’m going to generalize a bit here to show my point but, in the Championship you basically have 2 types of teams.  The ones who bounce between the Premiership and the Championship and the ones who bounce between the Championship and League 1.  What you will often see is that the smaller clubs will go up against the larger clubs and try to earn a result of some kind by sitting back and hoping to catch the opponent napping or something.  At a minimum, they are looking for a 0-0 draw.  

That’s what it seemed El Salvador was doing the other night.  They were soaking up everything the US had.  Their box was crowded so the US kept taking more and more shots from well outside the box.  El Salvador got a couple of fortuitous bounces which lead a couple of 1 on 1 situations with Guzan left standing on his line (yeah, defensive breakdown but Brad didn’t do enough to make the goal smaller) and, well we know the result.

Here’s the other positive, the US didn’t drop their heads and let it go.  They still controlled the middle of the park.  El Salvador, with fans going mental, sat back for a large chunk of the second half to preserve the three points.  They were playing out of the skin as was evident by the number of Salvadorian players going down with cramps.  They pushed too hard and paid the price.

This allowed the US all the space they needed to build up decent attacks.  Sure, it still wasn’t enough space to help a poor terribly Demarcus Beasley.  Of course, bringing Jozy Altidore helped too.  Yes, Bradley should have made chances sooner than he did.  But at the end of the day, we came away with a hard earned point on the road.  There are no truly easy matches in CONCACAF.

I know the Euro’s (English) will go on about how easy CONCACAF qualifying is while celebrating another momentous win over some newly independent Eastern European country which is about the size of Rhode Island and who’s team traveled to Wembley on a fleet of fishing boats.  But CONCACAF isn’t that poor a region.  Yeah, the US and Mexico are well ahead of the rest.  However, don’t forget how well teams from TnT, Costa Rica and Jamaica have done once they reached the World Cup?  They sure haven’t embarrassed themselves.

Just as the US has figured out how to own Mexico on US soil (well, we get enough matches here to make sure we are well practiced) perhaps other countries are figuring out a way to play the US.  The sitting back and hoping to catch the US napping gag sure worked on Saturday.

There’s no doubt that our toughest road trips (Mexico City and San Jose) are ahead of us.  They were never going to be easy trips.  But we’ll be fine.  Heck, they they are the only two matches the rest of the way we don’t win, can we really complain?  No, it wasn’t a great result. Yes, the team needs some work.  However, we are no where close to needing a panic button (besides, the Mexican’s are spending all their time hovering around it) so relax.  We are at home to TnT tomorrow night. I should be a decent match.  Better make sure my DVR is set to record both the match at Lost.

Oh, and I reserve the right to change my mind on everything I just posted after seeing how the boys do tomorrow.