DUBLIN — As much as he seems to always be optimistic, even U.S. national team head coach Jurgen Klinsmann couldn’t put a happy face on his team’s 4-1 drubbing at the hands of Ireland.
Klinsmann trotted out a team with what seemed to be a good foundation of experience sprinkled with some newcomers, and watched it sputter in the first 30 minutes and implode in the final 30.
Making the beating even more frustrating was the fact that Ireland was also experimenting with younger players. Only the Irish newcomers stepped up while the Americans fell short.
Klinsmann stuck to his suggestions that the team is enduring necessary growing pains, but on Tuesday night he made it clear he thinks his team is too soft and needs grow up if it is going to find success in the important years ahead.
“We have to make it clear that they have to go through pain, get tougher,” Klinsmann said. “And when I used that word two or three years ago where I said we have to get nastier, some people were very critical of me. ‘How can you say that,' you know?
“I’ll say it again: We have to get nastier. It’s just normal. It’s not a negative word,” Klinsmann said, referring to comments he made about the team back in 2012. “We have to become more physical. We have to hold our ground more, dominate. We have to send signals out all over the field and it took until the 70th minute until Jozy (Altidore) got the yellow card for a foul he did because he was fouled before that. This is just part of the game. It’s normal.
“All this stuff that they have to follow through with in their lives is automatic when you play for a top team in the world,” Klinsmann added. “It’s automatic, you live that way, and our players need to learn to live that way. To be accountable, responsible for what they do every day in training and in the games, but we are not there yet. Quite a way to go.”
Despite the team’s fourth straight match without a victory and second straight defeat, Klinsmann still considers 2014 a positive year, even though it ended on a losing note.
U.S. captain Altidore agreed with Klinsmann’s assessment of the year, but he was more concerned about making sure his teammates learned from the mistakes that have caused the team to drop second-half results in each of the past four matches.
"It was a good year, but as we look towards the new cycle now. We have to make sure these games don't go without learning because it's clear what we missed here,” Altidore said. “We missed a lot of bite. It was just too easy for Ireland over the course of the 90 minutes. At the international level, you can't play like that.
"When you look at the team that's now having a lot of different faces, you have to always take what worked for us in the past and that was being tough to beat,” he added. “When you look at the past three or four games, maybe that's not there. Maybe that bite, that mentality, that will isn't there, and the more games a lot of these guys get, the more it will come. A team like Ireland, we knew what to expect, (but) we weren't up to task today in terms of physically fighting and just being tough to beat. We missed that in the middle of the park, and defensively.”
As much talk as there was about the U.S. being a young team and having new faces, the reality is that nine of the 11 players who started against Ireland were members of the World Cup team. Whether it was veterans Matt Besler and Geoff Cameron struggling to deal with Ireland’s attackers or Mix Diskerud and Kyle Beckerman failing to win the battle in midfield, the U.S. team’s worst loss since a 4-1 defeat against Brazil in 2012 was as much a product of veterans failing as it was about newcomers struggling.
"We had some guys who were at the World Cup today, but we weren't there,” Altidore said. “We weren’t there in a lot of places on the field there. Like I said, it is growing pains, but for some of the older guys, it's unacceptable, including myself.
"We just didn't come to play today and it's been a trend the past few games. You can't expect guys like Jordan (Morris), Rubio (Rubin) to come in and kind of dictate things. It has to come from the guys that have been here and that have helped build this team.”