The USMNT's World Cup hopes rest on an 18 year old's shoulders
San Jose, Calif. — The United States men's soccer team has a must-win game on Friday night.
The teams' veterans like to say that it's not a must-win, and in the literal sense of the phrase, they're right.
But sitting winless and in last place in World Cup qualifying, it's hard to find a scenario where a loss against Honduras won't be a massive, and quite possibly fatal blow — you can't start 0-3 in a six-team, 10-game tournament where only the top three teams automatically qualify for Russia 2018. Especially not when two of those losses come at home.
Manager Bruce Arena — hired in late November after the USMNT's 0-2 start to "The Hex" — has minimal roster flexibility for Friday's critical game against Honduras and next Tuesday's game at Panama.
Fabian Johnson, the dynamic German-American Mr. Everything, is injured. Bobby Wood, the most in-form American striker, is injured. Jordan Morris, who scored in Seattle's 2-1 win over the Red Bulls Sunday, didn't train with the team Thursday at Avaya Stadium and is unlikely to play against Los Catrachos. Clint Dempsey, at age 34, isn't believed to be at 100 percent either, despite playing in MLS this season — he's only six months removed from being diagnosed with a heart condition.
And those are just the issues among possible starters.
Worse yet, Arena doesn't have a reliable offensive game-changer amongst his fully healthy players.
But Arena does have Christian Pulisic.
The Hershey, Pa. native has been, without question or equivocation, the best American soccer player in 2017.
Now a consistent starter as an attacking winger for Borussia Dortmund — one of the best teams in the world — Pulisic has blossomed in the new year, scoring in three of his last four starts for Die Borussen which included two near-perfect performances against Bayer Leverkusen and Champions League foe Benfica at the start of March. This is all coming more than a year after he cracked the BVB team, and established himself as one of the best young players in the Bundesliga, nationality be damned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr3l4fI4xKA
Pulisic has been so good against such good competition that there are calls for Arena to play him, a winger for Dortmund, in the middle of the pitch Friday, with the hope that he will be able to create offense because he can be more involved in the game as a No. 10. After all, Pulisic is in form at the highest level of club play — that should be the guy through whom the game flows Friday.
So what's the problem for Arena and the United States?
Well, let's start with the fact that Pulisic is 18 years old.
Yes, the USMNT's World Cup hopes rest, ostensibly, on a player who became old enough to vote in September.
If you're just catching up with World Cup qualifying (if so, congratulations, it's been painful thus far), you now understand why the USA sits in such a precarious position.
And that isn't to say that Pulisic can't be the USA's talisman Friday and beyond — it's only to say that he shouldn't have to be the main man for his national team at this early juncture in his career.
The post-Landon Donovan era of the USMNT was always going to be tough — Donovan's teams established a new standard of excellence for the nation that would be hard to continue — but as the old guard of the national team expired (or would have, under normal circumstances), it's become apparent that there wasn't a wave behind it.
While the back line has cycled in younger talent, no one has replaced Donovan, or Dempsey, or Jermaine Jones, or Michael Bradley, or even goalie Tim Howard.
Outside of Altidore, the United States does not have a regular midfield or attacking starter on its roster for Friday's game in their theoretical prime years — 24-to-28. (Collectively, they have only one goal from non-Jozy midfield or forward players born between 1988 and 1992 — it belongs to Darlington Nagbe.)
An entire generation of USA soccer has been effectively lost, so it's up to the third wave — the kids — to save it ahead-of-schedule, lest the team miss out on the World Cup and risk losing another generation of players.
And Pulisic, the youngest of young, will have to lead the way.
No pressure, kid.
