Mettle round for men
Group play will test soccer team
 US soccer coach Peter Nowak and his squad will have to emerge from a Group B that includes Nigeria, The Netherlands and Japan. (AP Photo) |
BEIJING - They come from the only country on the planet where the women's soccer team gets more attention than the men's. They didn't qualify for Athens last time and have made it past the prelims only once. So the US males understand why they're an afterthought in the Olympic tournament.
"I know a lot of people aren't giving us much of a chance to get out of the group, and we know that," says midfielder Freddy Adu, whose team takes on Japan in its opener tomorrow afternoon (5 a.m. Boston time) in Tianjin. "But people have said that about American teams in the past and we've been able to prove them wrong."
The 2000 squad, which featured the likes of Brad Friedel, Jeff Agoos, John O'Brien, and Frankie Hejduk, made it to the semifinals before losing to silver medalist Spain and ended up a respectable fourth. But after failing to qualify for the first time in 28 years in 2004, the Olympic team fell off the radar.
Now, the Yanks are back with an under-23 squad split between MLSers and Euros and whose youngest players - Adu (19), forward Jozy Altidore (18), and midfielder Michael Bradley (21) - are the most experienced, except for 36-year-old forward Brian McBride, a three-time World Cupper.
"Brian has much more experience than all of us combined," observes Revolution defender Michael Parkhurst, who's making his Olympic debut along with everybody else.
McBride, who has 95 caps with the national team and is out of contract after captaining Fulham in the English Premier League, long has played the game in the fast lane, where most of his five-ringed teammates still are trying to keep from getting sideswiped. Since they qualified for the tournament in March by beating Canada, the Americans haven't won a match (0-5-1) and they're coming off two exhibitions in Hong Kong against Ivory Coast and Cameroon in which they couldn't score a goal.
"Maybe we're still a little bit naive about international football," mused coach Peter Nowak. "Going into games like this, we have to expect that they'll be physical with a lot of contact, so we have to prevail."
The Olympic road will be faster and bumpier. Besides Japan, which they beat on penalty kicks in the 2000 prelims, the Yanks will face the Netherlands, which won the European under-21 crown last year, plus former champion Nigeria.
"I'm not going to say it's a Group of Death, but it really is a difficult group to play," says Nowak. "We know that we have to bring our A game to all three games."
Only the top two from each group advance to the quarterfinals, where the US likely would meet defending champion Argentina, which breezed to the gold medal in Athens without conceding a goal. If the Americans are an afterthought at these Games, that may be why.
Yet the Olympic tournament frequently has been about upstarts who find a way to turn fantasy into gold. The Nigerians came to Atlanta in turmoil and left as champions, the first ever from Africa. Cameroon, playing two men short in overtime, knocked off Brazil in the Sydney quarterfinals and came from two goals down to beat Spain in a shootout for the title.
If they can take 3 points from the Japanese tomorrow and draw with Ivory Coast, as they did in Hong Kong, the Americans could sneak into the final eight.
"It's all focused now on the three games and the opportunity we've been given," says Parkhurst.
What it will take is more of what got the US here - a stingy defense and some oomph from Adu, who scored four of the team's six goals in qualifying. That's why Nowak tapped Parkhurst and Chivas USA goalkeeper Brad Guzan as his other over-age players. This is not a team that can give up goals and survive.
The US women, who open with Norway today, always win medals at Olympus, where their advancement is taken for granted. Not so the men, who went three-and-out five straight times before their historic Sydney run. If they're still alive and kicking a week from tomorrow, it'll be an achievement.
"We want to prove to ourselves, to people back in the US and people around the world, that we can hang," says Parkhurst.
John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com
