Well folks, it's here. The U.S. Men's National Team (USMNT) plays it's first of three friendlies tonight in preparation for the 2010 World Cup that's only 16 days away. Tonight we play the Czech Republic, the country that destroyed us 3-0 at the last World Cup in Germany. Although they didn't qualify for this World Cup, they are still a decent team. In their four matches against the two teams that did qualify from their group, including U.S.A.'s World Cup opponent Slovenia, they won one match, lost one match, and drew two matches. So, it should be a pretty good test for the team tonight in Connecticut.
The past week or two, the USMNT has been practicing together with a provisional 30 man squad. In a few days, coach Bradley will cut seven of those players and trim the roster down to the required 23 players. What I will be watching is the performance of our defensive four. Onyewu should get his first playing time since his injury over seven months ago. In addition, Bocanegra and DeMerit are also questionable with injuries. In my opinion, even if everyone was healthy, our defense is our weak link anyway. We do well when we're able to slow down the rush in midfield, but when teams are free to run at our back line bad things happen.
Our goalie and midfield players are world-class. The only other area of uncertainty is at forward. We have good players but most of our goals will probably be created by our midfield players. We don't have any match winners up top but that can easily be remedied with the right mix of attackers in midfield. We'll see how well we can create scoring opportunities for ourselves tonight. The Czech Republic should have a pretty good defense and it will be difficult to score against them.
I think two important questions that will be answered tonight is who will make the final 23-man squad and how well we're playing together. That's more important then the final score in these games even though it would nice for confidence's sake to win the game.