The US national team found traction in their last World Cup qualifiers last month, and the next task? Keep going.
USMNT head coach Bruce Arena stressed in a conference call with reporters on Thursday the need to continue pushing on and picking up points in each and every game of World Cup qualifying to ensure qualification to Russia 2018. After entering the March qualifiers in last place in the hexagonal, the Americans picked up four points with a win over Honduras and a draw at Panama to move into fourth place, with six qualifying games to go. Next up is two June qualifiers, home against Trinidad & Tobago and away to Mexico.
But even with the progress, Arena is not ready to rest on his laurels.
“There’s no loss of urgency," he said. "We’re far from out of the woods here. We have, I think, very little margin for error so there’s a lot of urgency in these two games and I’m making that clear. I’m working every day, so we must think there’s importance here.
"We’re doing the same preparation as we did for the last camps, we have a little more knowledge of players this time around, but it’s still challenging trying to analyze the roster...Nothing’s changing from the last camp except we have a little more knowledge of our players and perhaps we’re not in as much trouble as we were the last time, but I don’t feel good about sitting with four points after four games, so we’ve got a lot of work to do. We’re not complacent.”
One of the hot button topics coming out of the last game was the partnership in central midfield between Michael Bradley and Jermaine Jones. While the duo has played together on the national team for years, the pairing has come under criticism on the perception that each player's strengths do not mesh well together. Arena was not willing to weigh in on the future of the partnership definitively, but he did note the last game was not an easy environment to show any player's strengths.
"The game [against Panama] had very little flow. I thought the referee did a terrible job – no one walked away from that game and understood what happened. You had a field that's hard to play on, a little bit bumpy. You had a referee that would not issue cards or call a whole lot of fouls and it was just a rough scramble of a game.
"On that day, [the Jones-Bradley partnership] certainly didn't look anything special. And as we move forward, we continue to look at different possibilities. You look at the game against Honduras and the game against Panama, they're two completely different games and have so many different qualities and characteristics to it. It's hard to judge from one game to the other and come out with a perfect answer."
When asked about the kind of roster that might be used for the CONCACAF Gold Cup, which takes place this summer in addition to qualifying, Arena was blunt: "I'm not spending any time right now on the Gold Cup roster."
But he also explained his approach to the Gold Cup will likely be dictated by the state of the qualification campaign.
"I think things that would come into play would be: how do we do in these two [qualifying] games? What position is the US team in going into the Gold Cup, for World Cup qualifying? If we're in a desperate situation, we may need to go with the team we think is the team we're going to play with in September. If we come out of these games in good shape, we may have a little more flexibility to look at some new players."
