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Commentary

Gold Cup is Klinsmann's Chance to Show Progress

In his nearly four years leading the U.S. national team, Jurgen Klinsmann hasn't achieved anything beyond what his predecessors achieved. But that could all change with the 2015 Gold Cup. 
BY Brooke Tunstall Posted
July 07, 2015
1:10 PM

IT IS STATEMENT TIME for Jurgen Klinsmann, a chance for the U.S. boss to show how far the United States has come in the almost four years since he took the helm of the national team in August of 2011.

As the 2015 Gold Cup, the championship for CONCACAF, kicks off tonight (9:30pm ET, Fox Sports 1) the reality is that for the U.S. national team advancing to the knockout stage is all but a foregone conclusion and based on precedent the team should make it to the final.

Group play, therefore, represents a chance for Klinsmann to tweak his lineup and find out what combinations work best as he tries to become the first coach of a U.S. team to win back-to-back Gold Cups.

If he does so, he’ll finally have a chance to claim he’s done something no other U.S. coach has done and can show it as evidence that he’s finally advanced the national team to a higher ground that it was under his predecessors.

For now, Klinsmann can claim little more with the U.S. than Bob Bradley and Bruce Arena did before him. Yes, Klinsmann guided the U.S. to the Gold Cup championship two years ago. But Arena won it in twice (2002 and 2005) and Bradley won it in 2007. 

Yes, Klinsmann can claim to have advanced to the knockout stage of the World Cup, where the U.S. fell in overtime to Belgium, but Arena famously got the U.S. to the quarterfinals in 2002 and Bradley lost in overtime of the knockout stage in 2010.

And while Klinsmann can claim his share of scalps over big teams—like the recent wins over the Netherlands and Germany and previously over Italy—Bradley guided the U.S. to the famous win over Spain while Arena led the U.S. to a pair of wins over Germany and a win over Argentina. Heck, even Steve Sampson had wins over Argentina and Brazil in his national team tenure.  

Bradley’s win over Spain came in the 2009 Confederations’ Cup and Klinsmann desperately wants the U.S. participating in the 2017 edition. He has said repeatedly that doing so is a huge priority. If the U.S. repeats as Gold Cup champions, the team will earn CONCACAF’s spot in the tournament in Russia.

But a slip-up will force a two-game playoff this fall amid an already-crowded calendar that includes—hard as it is it to believe—the beginning of World Cup qualifying for 2018; Olympic qualifying for the U-23 team (several of whom are already regulars with Klinsmann); and the stretch run in Major League Soccer, when coaches are reluctant to release their top players for national team games.

So dominant has the U.S. historically been in the group stage of this event that it would take a series of upsets of historic proportions for the U.S. to not advance, let alone not win its group. And given that the U.S. comes into tonight’s game with Honduras riding a five-game unbeaten streak that includes a thorough domination of Mexico and the aforementioned road upsets of world powers Germany and the Netherlands, there is little to indicate they won’t advance with minimal difficulty. 

The U.S. is 30-1-2 (including two wins over guest teams) in Gold Cup group play. It has outscored the opposition 69-15 with 20 clean sheets. Only four times has it allowed two goals in a Gold Cup group stage game. 

One of those was the 2-1 loss to Panama in 2011 and while the U.S. avenged that loss with a 1-0 win in the semifinals that year, Bradley lost his job after the tournament. (Blowing a 2-0 lead in the final and falling to Mexico 4-2 didn’t help, either.)

The only other Gold Cup group stage games the U.S. hasn’t won were a scoreless draw in 2005 with Costa Rica and a 2-2 tie with Haiti in 2009. 

Of course, Panama and Haiti just happen to be in the U.S. group this year, so Klinsmann and his players would do well to heed history’s lesson and not look past any of these teams.  

But assuming the Americans advance out of the group stage, they will be favorites to reach the Gold Cup final. In the 12 previous tournaments, the U.S. has made the final nine times and the only times they didn’t they were eliminated by guest teams from South America (Brazil in 1996 and 2003, Colombia on penalty kicks in 2000). And since CONCACAF no longer includes guest teams in the Gold Cup, reaching the final is expected.

If all goes according to seed, the U.S. should meet Mexico in the final. But that’s the case every Gold Cup yet the two CONCACAF powers have only played in this tournament six times, with Mexico winning four. (That’s mostly because Mexico has missed the final five times.) This is another area where a win could let Klinsmann lay claim to improvement as Arena never faced Mexico in the Gold Cup and Bradley lost to El Tri in two of the three finals in which he faced them.

That’s not to say that other CONCACAF teams besides Mexico can’t bite the U.S. in the ass. Under Klinsmann the U.S. has lost qualifiers to Jamaica, Honduras, and Costa Rica. But those were all on the road, with all the hostilities and inconveniences that make winning on the road in this region so challenging. The U.S. lost a friendly to Costa Rica in California early in Klinsmann’s tenure in 2011 but that’s the last time the U.S. has fallen at home to a team from CONCACAF, a nearly four-year run.

That’s the burden the Gold Cup provides for the U.S., where anything but a trip to the finals is a bad tournament. (Heck, Bradley guided the team to the final in 2009 using a largely experimental roster that featured the likes of Jay Heaps, Sam Cronin, and Luis Robles.)

But this year the Gold Cup means more than just being the King of CONCACAF.

It also serves as a chance for Klinsmann to claim tangible progress, the kind that’s earned on the scoreboard and with trophies. But only if the U.S. can win in consecutive tournaments. If Klinsmann does this, then he can talk about actual gains and improvements the U.S. has made under his watch.

As much as the trophy and the bragging rights and the trip to Russia in two summers, that is what this Gold up is about.

Brooke Tunstall is an American Soccer Now contributing editor and ASN 100 panelist. Follow him on Twitter.

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