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CHICAGO – If the U.S. Men’s National Team’s 2-0 loss to Colombia in the opening game of the Copa America did anything to dampen expectations for fans of the host nation, members of the squad appeared unfazed by losing to a team many considered the favorites in Group A.
Losing to the No. 3 ranked team in the world may have put the USMNT in a nearly must-win situation for it’s Tuesday clash with Costa Rica, but before training in Chicago on Monday the team downplayed the effect of the result on their chances of getting out of the group.
“We’re still going to be going with the same mentality and attitude that we did the other night, now we just have a little more pressure on us,” Geoff Cameron said. “You guys all didn’t expect us to beat Colombia anyway so it doesn’t matter. We lost and we understand that, we were disappointed because we believed we could beat them and yeah we felt that we could have performed better, we could have finished off our chances and done a little better. But nobody really expected to win, or from what you guys wrote before you guys didn’t expect us to win so it’s nothing different.
“Where now we have a little more pressure, back against the wall. We know that Costa Rica is a team they’re in our qualifying, we’ve played against them a bunch of times and we know it’s going to be a difficult game but we believe in ourselves, we believe in the ability that we have and it’s another opportunity for us to get a win.”
After calling the performance against Colombia “totally even” in the postgame aftermath, Jurgen Klinsmann was asked Monday about when getting the right result becomes as important as a good performance.
“The result is always the most important thing at the end of the day, but a tournament has it’s own characteristics in a certain way,” Klinsmann said. “It’s three group games and you have to find the points to get out of the group. We were very disappointed there after the game, absolutely, because we thought we played a really good game. When you read the dry result, a lot of opinions go different ways then, but we have everything to play for.
“They played 0-0 in the first game, so they’re only one point ahead of us. There’s everything to play for in the last two games, and then hopefully you go through, which we are convinced we will and you start a whole new tournament again. The knockout stage is a completely different stage than the group phase. We explained that to the players, we talked to them. A lot of them played in those tournaments before, so they are very hungry to do well in this Copa America, so results matter, absolutely.
Like Cameron, captain Michael Bradley minimized any outside negativity stemming from the loss.
“I don’t spend two seconds worrying about what the reaction is or what the narrative on the outside is,” Bradley said. “You guys are going to write what you’re going to write, people are going to think what they think and ultimately we’ve got much bigger things to worry about than what goes on on the outside.
“I think over the, since I’ve been in this team, one of its strengths has been its ability to you know close the door, know who we are, know what needs to be better, understand what was still good and get ready for whatever comes next. Obviously that’s what we need to do tomorrow.”
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