What is the point of a national team? Let's think about that for a minute.
On Tuesday evening, there was ... [Billy Idol voice] ... mud, mud, mud. The USMNT tied El Salvador in what was officially a CONCACAF Nations League game -- it was purportedly a warm-up match for the 2022 World Cup but actually served as a mud-wrestling royal rumble that happened to occasionally feature someone kicking a soccer ball.
From a tactical perspective, there is nothing to analyze from this game from either side. The sport's basic act -- passing along the ground -- was so corrupted by the mud that the patterns of play only vaguely resembled what we now recognize as soccer. Frankly, the patterns were a lot like what soccer first was, back when the fields were crater-marked and no one knew you could pass, so you just tried to plow your way through the opposition defense to score a goal and, in doing so, confirm the superiority of your manliness.
While Yunus Musah proved on Tuesday that he would've been the best soccer player in the world in 1930, there's also very little that Gregg Berhalter can take from Tuesday's 1-1 draw as he assesses his squad. Unless Qatar somehow acquires a Central American climate before November, the way each individual player performed on Tuesday might have a better predictive capacity for their ability to play fullback for the University of Nebraska than their preparedness for the world's biggest soccer tournament.
And so, is the point of the national team just to try to win the World Cup? That seems kind of sad and pathetic; only eight different countries have ever won the tournament. If you probably aren't going to win it, should all your other games just be viewed as minor calibration exercises, with the end goal of optimizing your miniscule chances of winning the World Cup? Or is it also to provide some consistency, both for fans and players -- to recognize what they're watching and whom they're playing with? To make it so the fans and players can both enjoy a Tuesday evening spent rolling around in the mud?
With that idea in mind, let's take a look at what the national team actually has been under its current manager -- and of course, what it might mean for the team when it eventually heads to Qatar.