Revenge will not be on the menu for the U.S. national team when it takes the field against Trinidad and Tobago in Gold Cup action on Saturday in Cleveland.
No number of goals, and no margin of victory, will erase the memory of the USMNT's devastating World Cup qualifying loss to the Soca Warriors in 2017. What Saturday's Gold Cup group match will be able to provide isn’t revenge, but catharsis.
The United States needs a win, and not just a win, but a convincing win, against Trinidad and Tobago on Saturday, not to settle some score, but to give the team and its fans a performance and result that feels like progress from that painful day 20 months ago. A showing that screams, “We are no longer that team that broke your hearts".
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U.S. fans haven’t fully healed from the painful disappointment of watching their team fail to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. Nothing has healed that wound. Not a year’s worth of watching young prospects tease signs of a brighter future in 2018. Not Gregg Berhalter’s arrival as new coach, nor the early victories that kicked off his tenure.
The reality is beating Trinidad and Tobago on Saturday won’t fully heal the wound either, but it will feel like the first real step toward moving on from the lowest moment in American soccer history.
There will be no revenge to gain because winning, and even winning big, won’t change history. Trinidad and Tobago has that sweet upset tucked away in its own memory banks, and if we want to talk about true revenge, we could look at the USMNT loss in 2017 as a long-owed dose of revenge for the same Trinidad & Tobago side the Americans upset and eliminated from World Cup qualifying in 1989.
That victory helped transform the USMNT program, paving the way for the United States hosting the 1994 World Cup — which led to the launch of Major League Soccer — and began a run of seven consecutive World Cups.
It was during that run when American fans went from hoping to one day see their team at a World Cup to being so accustomed to qualifying that they fell into a hysterical panic when the United States failed to make it.
During that same time, the USMNT became complacent, and paved the way for a missed World Cup well before Trinidad and Tobago finished the job. The Americans wound up becoming a victim of their own arrogance and ineptitude both as a team and a program.
It is for that very reason that we shouldn’t downplay the connection between Saturday’s match and the World Cup qualifying debacle. Players can talk about how little that 2017 loss matters now, but the reality is it will matter until fans are able to experience the type of catharsis that convincingly beating Trinidad and Tobago, and ultimately performing well at the Gold Cup can provide.
Will some people see a win on Saturday as revenge? Of course. Even Christian Pulisic said as much, but you can understand the sentiment considering the images of him shedding tears on the field in Trinidad are still fresh in the memory. That is easily the most painful moment of Pulisic’s career, so for him, being able to go out and torch the Soca Warriors is going to feel like revenge because it will help lift a weight off his shoulders.
It isn’t revenge though, because a win on Saturday wouldn’t be as meaningful as the result in 2017, not to the Americans, and certainly not for Trinidad and Tobago. A loss, on the other hand, would be devastating, and would reopen the wound of 2017.
It’s tough to see the Americans letting that happen though, and as much as you can say that the same was believed 20 months ago, things now are very different. Back then, the Americans really couldn’t envision losing to Trinidad and Tobago. They know better now, and you can rest assured that the players who were in Trinidad in 2017, like Pulisic, Michael Bradley and Jozy Altidore, will remind their teammates.
A win on Saturday won’t erase the Nightmare in Couva, but what it can do is give the USMNT a chance to provide some closure on that historic failure, while giving its fans a moment of catharsis that is long overdue.
