U.S.A. suffered from a failure of imagination
Anytime there's failure in a high-profile setting, it doesn't take long for the knives to come out so that blame can be assigned and excuses carved into the chosen scapegoat.
For the U.S. National Team, there are already a number of strong contenders in the scapegoat derby. I've heard blame placed on the ref; on Bruce Arena; on the players; on FIFA, for seeding only eight teams instead of all 32; and on MLS, for not providing a competitive enough environment to develop young talent. I'm sure that there are more that I'm forgetting.
The sad fact of it is that if only a few small things had gone our way, we U.S. fans would have been cheering as the team went through to the second round. It's the nature of the World Cup, though, to make every moment, every unexpected bounce of the ball, something that we relive, analyze, and re-analyze endlessly in hopes of solving something that can't be solved. Things went our way in 2002 and they didn't in 2006.
That's not to say that the team's results were simply a matter of luck. As Obi-Wan Kenobi said in the first Star Wars film (er, fourth, I guess), 'In my experience, there's no such thing as luck.' I will stand on that same, seemingly invisible platform, and say that the U.S. didn't do enough to create its own luck in this tournament.
How do you create luck? That's a question that has a very long answer, and I'm not going to try to address it all here. (Sorry. Maybe someday you'll get lucky and hear me answer that question completely.) I can address one aspect of it, however, and that involves believing in what you're doing.
Believing in yourself and your ability to accomplish your goal is one of the key ingredients in accomplishing anything. In many ways, it's the foundation upon which achievement is built.
The importance of this ability is not a secret but its implementation is. I'm not talking about "Believe in Yourself," a static slogan that you might see on a motivational poster at work. I'm talking about a process that has many steps: choosing a goal, failing miserably, learning from your mistakes, having the courage to go back to whatever you're trying to accomplish armed with that new information, and trying again. And again. And again.
It's simple but not easy. There are always plenty of opportunities to stop before the process is complete. Maybe the people around you never thought you could achieve your goal to begin with; maybe the ball hits the post; maybe the referee mistakenly gives your opponent a penalty kick just before halftime. The hard part is in experiencing that setback and then letting it go, trusting again in your capabilities so that you can address your goal once more with all your energy.
Unfortunately, that's something that both U.S. coach Bruce Arena and his players did not completely acknowledge. It's ironic that one's intellectual knowledge of a situation can interfere with one's performance, but that's what happened. Arena knew how rare it was for a team to come back from a 2-1 deficit to win a game and that knowledge kept him and his team from being able to keep attacking their goal, relentlessly. Did you notice that the U.S. players who did best in this World Cup—Bobby Convey, Clint Dempsey, Jimmy Conrad—are the ones who hadn't been there before? They only knew it was the World Cup, something they had worked all their lives to get to, and they were going to do their best to succeed.
I thought this was something Arena understood but I know now that he doesn't, and maybe never did. I am reminded of the San Jose Earthquakes' 2003 playoff win over the L.A. Galaxy in which the Quakes overcame a 2-0 deficit in the second leg of their playoff series and a 4-0 aggregate score to win the series in extra time by scoring five unanswered goals in about 80 minutes. A fan hung a sign from the rail that said "We Believe," and the team and its supporters rallied around that idea and refused to give up, even when most soccer experts would have said that the cause was lost.
In fact, there was one particular soccer expert in the crowd that day who made several interesting comments about the game afterward. When interviewed by Sports Illustrated's Grant Wahl, this man was full of praise for the Earthquakes after their miraculous effort, saying "it was the best game I've ever seen in terms of the excitement and what had to be accomplished... I can't say it was impossible, because it's not impossible. They did it... They had to get four to go into overtime... It was truly remarkable. The crowd was into it. And the soccer by San Jose was pretty good, you know. They had to break down an L.A. team that was putting a lot of players behind the ball and had a great goalkeeper [Kevin Hartman] who made two fantastic saves."
That man who was so in awe of the Quakes that day was, of course, Bruce Arena. What's most telling about his attitude was something else he told Wahl:
"Before the game, I told [Earthquakes coach] Frank [Yallop], 'You can't let them get the first goal, and if they get the second goal [to go up 4-0 overall] then head to the bar.'"
So here we have the USA's problem in a nutshell: They weren't resilient enough and they didn't believe enough. Does this mean the U.S. needs Frank Yallop as coach? Maybe, maybe not. But it's certain that the U.S. needed more believers in Germany.