USA World Cup warm-ups: team seems mellow without Donovan

A convincing performance in Jacksonville on Saturday settled most of the outstanding issues going into the World Cup

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Jozy Altidore scores past Nigeria defender Joseph Yobo. Photograph: Kim Klement/USA Today Sports

Amid all the comparisons between Landon Donovan and Julian Green, or Landon Donovan and Brad Davis, or even Landon Donovan in 2014 and Landon Donovan in 2010, most of the conversation tended to focus on the player’s omission from the World Cup purely regarding what it took away from the side.
There was not much consideration of what a positive, post-Donovan vision of the USA team might look like.
On Saturday, we began to see what such a team – one built round Michael Bradley’s ongoing evolution from a No6 to a No8 – would look like against the kind of sides they’ll face in Brazil.
It involved bringing in Kyle Beckerman alongside Jermaine Jones in the base of midfield and asking Jones to pinch in when necessary and get forward when possible. It involved pushing Clint Dempsey and Alejandro Bedoya to either side of a forward three in midfield, and asking them to work both sides of the ball. And it gave Bradley the license to act as playmaker, while doing his share of dropping back when needed.
Crucially, though, with Jones and Beckerman both in the side Bradley didn’t need to drop back as deep as he had done alongside Beckerman in the second half against Turkey, in which the USA ended up on the ropes.
Now, you could argue that there is a place in that side for Donovan, though with Altidore the obvious spearhead up front and the side balanced around Bradley, it would basically be a case of putting him in on either side in the areas patrolled by Dempsey and Bedoya. Bedoya’s willingness and ability to circulate back into defensive positions and Dempsey’s spark and form make it a little more easy to accept Jürgen Klinsmann’s face-value claim that other players were a “little bit ahead” of Donovan in camp.
So if it still seems perverse that there’s no place for Donovan to provide depth in the squad, it’s at least becoming clearer that part of the reasoning behind Klinsmann’s big decision was, as he has claimed, based on his vision for the team and picking the right players to serve it, rather than squeezing all the top-ranked handful of US outfield players into one team.