When the U.S. men’s national team rolled into Washington last October for its final 2010 World Cup qualifying match, it had already clinched a place in South Africa. The match against Costa Rica at RFK Stadium was intended to be part rally, part exclamation point for a squad that had achieved what it had sought but wanted to end qualification on a high note and on top of its qualifying group.
Instead, the events of those fateful days in the nation’s capital helped shape the U.S. team’s World Cup fragile fortunes in ways that were immediately feared afterward and have been difficult to admit ever since.
Two days after the Americans were eliminated by Ghana in the round of 16, U.S. soccer president Sunil Gulati didn’t reference it directly but brought to mind exactly what was lost.
“We’ve gone two World Cups without a forward scoring a goal,” Gulati said Monday in South Africa. “That’s not a good thing.”
It’s an argument that forward Charlie Davies would’ve had something to say about had he not broken curfew and eventually ended up in a one-car accident on George Washington Parkway that killed passenger Ashley Roberta in the early hours of Oct. 13.
A day and a half later, defender Oguchi Onyewu ruptured his patellar tendon in the match against the Costa Ricans, an injury that prevented him from playing another 90-minute match until the U.S. faced England on June 12.
“It would be impossible for Gooch to be at 100 percent given the time that he was out,” U.S. head coach Bob Bradley said on Sunday after Onyewu’s lack of sharpness and fitness, and the role he played in early goals allowed to both England and Slovenia, cost him his place in the U.S. lineup.
Neither Davies nor Onyewu are to blame for the U.S. exit from the World Cup. But it will be impossible to forget the Washington setting last fall where their destinies were determined, and the influence they would have eight months later and half a world away.
