Speaking of coaches, watching Canada get spanked yesterday made me briefly pause to appreciate not being eliminated after 2 games. Obviously, Canada had a really tough schedule, but, the "F Croatia" comment seemed to backfire as did the halftime substitutions.
Semi-related, I get very strong Jordan Peterson vibes from John Herdman.
So, there's my backhanded compliment to Berhalter.
Yes, it's easy to underrate good defense, much like it is in the NBA, when so much attention is put on the scoring and there's a bit of a fatalistic "what can ya do?" about giving up scores. Which is what makes this team's defensive cohesion and consistency that much more important. Berhalter has gotten a lot of crap from a lot of corners, even among the USMNT-fan intelligentsia, for his lack of inventiveness and flexibility on our offense. But he has correspondingly not gotten nearly enough credit for having our defense be an iron vise relative to previous iterations of our modern team.
Just looking at CONCACAF World Cup qualifying in the "Hex era", 1998-present, so a consistent level of competition where all teams are trying their hardest, here are our goals-allowed per game:
1998: 0.88
2002: 0.69
2006: 0.61 (so no, it's not super predictive of World Cup performance, but little is)
2010: 0.89
2014: 0.88
2018: 1.00
2022: 0.71
This qualification cycle, a team only put up 2 goals on us when we were trying our hardest (so excluding the last match where we were basically already qualified) once, which was Canada away. And in past cycles our stats were often padded by 6 (or even 8) games against inferior competition in a semifinal stage, with only 10 games of the Hex (as opposed to 14 in the Ocho this time).
Or take the Gold Cup, here's goals allowed in the competition, which was across 6 games since 2005: (bold = champions)
2002: 1
2003: 4
2005: 3
2007: 3
2009: 8
2011: 6
2013: 4
2015: 5
2017: 4
2019: 2
2021: 1
I'm sure there are some advanced metrics which look at xG allowed and then adjust for opponent quality and competition context, but I can't find any easily. Japan did put 2 in on us in the september friendly, but they also just went on to beat Germany a few days ago, and in that friendly, Aaron Long played himself off of starting and Sam Vines played himself off of the roster, so our defense was more suspect than usual. The point is, Berhalter has made this team
really really hard to score on, even when we don't have our first-choice defenders in there, even including Tyler Adams (absent for 2021 Gold Cup). It won't be much comfort if we again fail to score tomorrow, but it's something we need to remember before critiquing his choices, because it's a massive and easily-overlooked asset this team has.
At least two of the Croatian goals against Canada yesterday (The 2nd and the 4th) looked to me as if they were eminently avoidable by better defense or better defensive tactics. I'd like to think that we lose that game 1-2 in the absolute worst, and have way more of a chance of getting a result against them than Canada did. Which we will need desperately if we beat Iran tomorrow and go on to play the Netherlands in R16.