Having Sergiño Dest out creates a big potential problem for U.S. men’s national team head coach Gregg Berhalter, but at least he’s got some options.
Dest suffered a torn ACL last month, ruling the USMNT’s starting right back out for the rest of 2024.
On Monday, Berhalter named a 27-player roster for pre-Copa América friendlies against Colombia and Brazil next month. The majority of the 26-man roster for the Copa América will be drawn from the squad Berhalter announced.
In a call with the media following the roster release, the USMNT coach examined some of the options he has at his disposal to replace Dest.
“With Sergiño going down, we have to figure out the right-back situation and there’s a couple of different options we can look at,” he said.
“We have like-for-like with Joe Scally and Shaq Moore. We have a winger that can play there with Timothy Weah, who’s played that for his club.
“We have center midfielders who can play there with Weston [McKennie] and Yunus [Musah], and then we have center backs that we’re looking at — can they play there?”
Outside of Scally and Moore, the player with the most experience at fullback in recent seasons is Weah, who has primarily played there with Lille and Juventus. With the USMNT, though, Weah has featured almost exclusively as a winger.
McKennie and Musah played sporadically at right back for Juventus and AC Milan, respecitvely, this season, but both played more frequently in central midfield.
As he mentioned, Berhalter also has several center backs on his roster he could try out wide, including Mark McKenzie, Cameron Carter-Vickers and Chris Richards.
The picture will likely become more clear for Berhalter after his team’s upcoming training camp and friendlies, which could feature some different looks in terms of a defensive formation.
“We just wanted the ability in this training camp to have options, to have flexibility, some of it that may revolve around a back three,” the coach said. “But the first objective is to see how we’re going to fill that right-back position because we know that we’re going to be missing Sergiño.”
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