U.S. men’s national team head coach Gregg Berhalter didn’t hold back when describing his team’s display against Japan, admitting: “We got our butts kicked and we’re not proud of it.”
The USMNT struggled badly in a 2-0 defeat in Düsseldorf, failing to muster a single shot on target while falling victim repeatedly to a well-coordinated Japanese press.
The result and nature of the performance has left the U.S. in dire need of improvement in Tuesday’s match against Saudi Arabia, the final game it will play before the World Cup kicks off in November.
Speaking to the media on Monday ahead of the Saudi Arabia match, Berhalter admitted that just about everything went wrong in his team’s penultimate match before Qatar.
“I think it was a poor performance from us,” he said. “We got our butts kicked and we’re not proud of it. We think we should have played much better, we could have played much better but we didn’t. So we want to play better this game.”
The USMNT turned the ball over consistently against Japan, but Berhalter was quick to point out that he felt the problems were more of his own side’s making.
“It wasn’t something that like we’re carelessly trying to play through seven or eight guys of pressure and we’re not successful and they’re coming down our throat. It was just making some bad decisions.
“And having said that, we’re not happy with that. But we had an off game. Again, I can’t say it clearly enough: We played poorly. The coaching staff takes responsibility for that. And we move on to the next game.”
Given his team’s struggles with the press, Berhalter can expect to see more of it in the future. Asked how the USMNT can better deal with high pressure, the coach responded: “Decision making, identifying who the free man is, identifying where the pressure is coming from and then exploiting it. That’s something we didn’t do a great job of [against Japan].”
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