By: Matt Carlson
“Losing is for losers.” I believe it was George Washington, the Father of our Country and an excellent goalkeeper in his own right, who said that very thing when rallying the troops at Valley Forge. I believe that if George Washington had the opportunity to speak with the US U-23 National Team right now, he would say those exact same words to them. Abraham Lincoln, another icon of instant success, also had a similar view of failure. If he had been in the locker room last night after the gut-wrenching defeat to El Salvador which knocked the U.S. from Olympic qualification, he would look the team in the eyes and utter those now famous words, “Four score and seven years ago, we resolved as a nation that losing is for losers.” It’s called the Gettysburg Address. Look it up. You can learn a lot about the future by studying the past. CONTINUE READING AFTER THE JUMP.
I know this is a harsh reality and not something any U.S. soccer fan wants to hear this morning while the wounds are still fresh, but it is the truth. As it sinks in for U.S. soccer fans that the U.S. is not going to be in the Olympics, we have to accept the cold hard reality that no one, and I mean no one, has ever learned a thing from failure. Not Thomas Edison, not Henry Ford, not Michael Jordan. No one. I’m sorry to have to break that to you, but it is a scientific fact that once a team or a person has failed at some task, they can never ever improve or accomplish that task. A quick search of the U.S. soccer-centric messageboards today will confirm that many fans believe this and we all know that if a lot of people believe something, then it is fact.
Hyperbole, you say? Let me drop some knowledge on you, then. Did you know that no country has ever won a World Cup after having lost in a different tournament? It’s a similar correlation to the winner of the Golden Globes being an indicator of who’ll win the Oscars, really. Another fact for your consideration: no soccer player or coach has ever won anything after losing in a tournament of this magnitude. It’s like a race horse that breaks its leg. The only thing left to do is to take it around back and shoot it. Sure, it is sad, and you don’t want to do it, but it really is for the best. It will come as no surprise to many of the posters on message boards today to know that the last three nations to have won the World Cup have been undefeated. The same goes for the last three managers who guided those nations to glory. Undefeated for their careers.
Based on these facts, U.S. Soccer has to take action right away. Caleb Porter made coaching errors in this tournament and we all know this means he cannot be a successful coach in the future, so he needs to be dumped pronto. Next, none of the players on the U-23 roster will ever develop into anything in the future because they have been a part of a failure. Well, except for Joe Gyau who should have played every minute of every match, of course, but aside from him, no other U-23 player on this team will ever improve enough to contribute for the USMNT at the senior level. This tournament result proves that. I expect that the club teams these players are with will terminate their contracts very shortly because they now have conclusive proof that these players have topped out.So, what do we do now? Where do we go from here? I have no idea because honestly, what viable options do we have? Identify the mistakes and work to correct them? Determine what we did right and keep doing it? Work with these players on their weaknesses to develop them into better players? Use this defeat as a learning tool and a motivator for all involved? If only there was some historical example that this type of response to a failure had worked in the past, then I would have some hope for the future. Until someone can find that, though, I want everyone fired!
