US World Cup Roster Announced

United States National Team Manager Bob Bradley announced his 23-man roster for the upcoming World Cup today.

No big surprises, really, except he left Brian Ching out. I'm fine with that because Ching is a forward who doesn't score goals. But Bradley has relied on him a lot during the last 3 and a half years. It's probably his nagging hamstring injury that kept him off the list. The chosen forwards are Jozy Altidore, probably the biggest threat to score we have. He scored a beauty against Spain the Confederations Cup semi-final last summer, taking a pass just outside the box while holding off the defender behind him with his left arm, he took the ball in a few paces and rocketed it past Iker Casillas.

Unfortunately Charlie Davies, who created a monstrous partnership up front with Altidore, was severely injured in a fatal car accident last October. Although he started training with his French club Sochaux a couple months ago, he still isn't game ready and didn't even make Bradley's 30-man preliminary roster.


So the other 3 forwards will be Edson Buddle, who earned only his second cap in a 2-4 loss to Czech Republic in East Hartford yesterday and has been on fire recently for the L.A. Galaxy; Herculez Gomez, earning his third cap yesterday scoring a nice goal and winner of the Golden Boot award in the Mexican League playing for Puebla; and Robbie Findley, who has only 4 caps and hasn't really shown much of anything. He's a likely substitute to come on and change the pace of the game, but more likely he won't see any playing time in the tournament.

Eddie Johnson, who has been somewhat impressive of late for his Greek club Thessalonikki, didn't show much of anything in yesterday's match and will consequently stay home. Freddy Adu, his teammate in Greece, wasn't even called in to training camp. Such a waste of talent that kid. Bradley might have done well to at least ave tested him out a bit more.

Our biggest area of concern is our back line. Oguchi Onyewu made his first game appearance yesterday since tearing a ligament in his knee in October. He cost the US one goal and looked shaky from what I saw of the highlights. We need his height back there, but not if he's a liability. Remember Jeff "own goal" Agoos in 2002 who came along because of his vast experience? Carlos Bocanegra is the only reliable defender we've got on the squad. Wayne Rooney and England are gonna tear us apart back there.

We've got a pretty solid midfield with Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan both threats to score goals. Michael Bradley is good and he scores occasionally, but he tends to draw lots of cautions. DaMarcus Beasley has shown some improvement after not doing much of anything in the Confederations Cup. He used to have great speed and good instincts on the ball. Not sure he's going to be much of a factor in this tournament.

Here's the full squad list.

We've got a match against Turkey in Philadelphia on Saturday which I expect we'll win. I didn't expect a win against the Czechs, especially knowing that Bradley would be starting the least experienced guys in order to make his final cut decisions, but the back line was atrocious.

Then the guys head to South Africa where they'll have a final friendly match against Australia on 5 June. I'd say we're pretty evenly matched there. Then it's on to our opening match against England on 12 June. After that Slovakia and Algeria.