CONCACAF<\/a> Gold Cup and pro-visiting team crowds in the U.S. amped up anxiety among fans and the former-player pundit class throughout the summer, but ending the year with a five-game unbeaten streak boosted belief.<\/p>\nThis month’s losses sent skepticism soaring.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019re heading in the right direction. I think obviously it\u2019s hard to say that we\u2019re where we want to be with results like this, but I think that we take a lot of positives away from the games that we played,” McKennie said. \u201cWe see that we can keep up. I think we just need to figure out how to be able to stay in the game if we don\u2019t finish chances that we have early on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pulisic hasn’t scored in a career-high eight straight national team games and also is scoreless in 12 matches for AC Milan since Dec. 28.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe just needs one to go in, get back on that wave,\u201d U.S. career scoring co-leader Clint Dempsey said. \u201cEverybody goes through a little bit of a slump.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pochettino cautioned that U.S. players are not as good as some American fans think they are, pointing to the latest results.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are USA and we are competing against Belgium, Portugal,\u201d he said. “I think for sure Belgium and Portugal have in the top 100 players few or some players playing in that top 100. I think we don\u2019t have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Portugal coach Roberto Mart\u00ednez cautioned not to overanalyze the friendlies.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ve been 10 years now in international football and what you learn is that you should never assess teams in March,\u201d he said. \u201cThe mindset is the players are some of them to try to be in the squad, others just not to get injured because they got important games with the clubs. I think what I\u2019ve seen with the United States is a very well-worked teams.”<\/p>\n
Pochettino pointed out his World Cup roster will have three weeks of training ahead of the Americans\u2019 World Cup opener against Australia on June 12 and can work out issues such as getting caught up field by counters and leaving opponents unmarked on corner kicks.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am more positive now than before, because seeing the team compete, we are not far away,” he said. “Is only details that we need to improve. When we match the opponent in the areas that we need to match, of course we are going to have the possibility to beat them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRoger Bennett previewed his new book \u201cWe Are The World (Cup),\u201d talked about on his favorite World Cup memories and predicted the world champion.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now comes the wait, soccer’s ultimate FOMO. American players across the United States and Europe will count down…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":578808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[21898,49,48,561,82,129571,13009],"class_list":{"0":"post-578807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-2026-world-cup","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-soccer","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-usmnt","14":"tag-world-cup"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/578808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}