The more things change...

Wednesday was just an all-around depressing day for U.S. soccer. The bad news started before kickoff, as most of us abruptly discovered that half of America couldn’t even watch the game. Thanks to Telemundo’s refusal to sell the TV rights to ESPN at any reasonable price, CONCACAF’s biggest World Cup qualifier was broadcast on some monstrosity called “Mun2”, Spanish television’s equivalent of ESPN 8 the Ocho. A soccer-skeptical friend of mine best summarized the result: “The U.S.-Mexico match had me excited for soccer for the first time ever. I eagerly turned on the TV to watch it, only to find out that it wasn't on TV. My opinion stands-- soccer blows a big one.” Score another one for TV politics.

Sitting in the middle of Kentucky, I was in the half of America that didn’t receive everyone’s favorite Telemundo spinoff channel. As such, I turned to the Internet to pirate miserable Spanish-language feeds, changing every 10 minutes as each one was shut down in succession for copyright violation. In short, just watching the damn game was an adventure, and I’m sure that between the terrible broadcast quality and frequent stalling and switching, I missed some important observations. And yet, what I could see made it abundantly clear that nothing has changed lately in the U.S. camp.

Oguchi Onyewu embodied the positives in the American defense, strong in positioning and athleticism. The level of practice he gets in Milan is already lifting his game, and he leads the team naturally

now. Aside from his unlucky reaction that allowed the second goal, he turned in a stellar performance.

The rest of the defense followed his lead, but with more mistakes. The American backline’s work rate is unmatched, but Jay DeMerit and Carlos Bocanegra continued the propensity for occasionally awful tackles. Furthermore, Bocanegra gave Israel Castro all the room in the world to unleash his marvelous first goal. Is somebody going to step up and tell them that these mistakes are inexcusable at this level?

Also, a good portion of the team remains largely invisible at times. Brian Ching, Clint Dempsey, Michael Bradley, Ricardo Clark: I’m looking at you here. Only Bob Bradley knows why Jozy and Jonathan Spector started on the bench, but unless it was a reaction to the conditions at Azteca, we could have used their offensive threat.

Charlie Davies, however, continues to prove that he is the perfect striker for the USA’s counterattack strategy. Landon Donovan gave him a great through ball on the American goal, and he received it brilliantly. With his speed, he’s going to put those away every time, and he was unlucky to be called offsides on a potential winner in the 71st.

On another note, the U.S. continues to suffer from an obvious double standard in yellow cards. Apparently, even commentators noted that directly after DeMerit and Bocanegra earned yellows for bad tackles, the Mexicans got away unpunished for similar ones. I can only assume that bad tackling is a stereotype that referees have of American soccer, since we saw a similar trend in the Confederations Cup. We’re certainly contributing to the perception, but it’s unfair and frustrating that it hurts us in such key matches.

For their part, Mexico continues to epitomize exactly why most Americans hate soccer. On the day, they started a stupid fight, they writhed in pain at every foul as soon as they got the lead, and they delayed play at the end of the game, petulantly dribbling away from Tim Howard. Yes, as an American I’m biased, but I’ve seen enough games on television and in person to objectively decide that this isn’t an isolated incident, it’s a plague. (I’ll leave the swine flu jokes to you.) Watch any SuperLiga game for proof: it always happens, and it’s obnoxious. (Apologies to any offended Mexico fans. For what it’s worth, you also play a more attractive brand of soccer than us.)

Finally, lots of fuss is always made over the Azteca’s smog, heat, altitude, and hatred from the Mexican crowd. But the smog was allegedly not bad on the day, the heat was mild for a summer afternoon, and the players are professionally prepared for the altitude and crowd. We were ready to face all of these problems, and yet the deciding factors weren’t a result of the atmosphere, but of our same stupid tendencies. In other words, let’s stop pretending like it’s a given that “no U.S. teams win in Mexico”, because that excuse is becoming a crutch. We’re better than that.

I feel like I’m writing about the same strengths and flaws over and over again, just replacing the specific instances of each individual game. It really shouldn’t be that hard to correct our problems, and frankly, I’m sick of writing the same thing without seeing change. Let’s fix this already and get to 2010.