I was pretty worried about the draw. The US was in a pot with the rest of CONCACAF as well as the Asian teams and New Zealand. Meaning that the seven teams were guaranteed to never be drawn against included five of the weakest ones at the tournament. Not that Japan, New Zealand, Honduras, and North or South Korea are total pushovers. But I’d rather play them than most other teams.
Toss in the possibility of drawing a seeded team, the unseeded France or Portugal, and a team like Ivory Coast or Cameroon and there were a lot of possibilities for a seriously scary group.
However, things turned out about as well as could be hoped. Our seeded draw is England, who will clearly be a favorite against us but is beatable. Plus, it will be a lot of fun to see the two teams square off in the World Cup. And the other teams in the group are Algeria and Slovenia – neither of which is terrifying. Both of them beat very, very good teams a couple weeks ago in playoffs to qualify (Egypt and Russia respectively) but the US also thwomped Egypt pretty badly a few months ago in the Confederations Cup and I don’t think anyone would say that Slovenia would have a good chance of repeating their feat.
There’s still a lot of ways that this could go poorly. But the US really should qualify out of this group. Which could set up a matchup against Germany in the round of 16, by the way – creating the opportunity for some payback over the 2002 quarterfinals.
In other news, Charlie Davies appears to be making good progress recovering from his terrible car accident. If he could be fit in time for South Africa I think it would really make a difference. He’s not one of the *best* players we’ve got, but he’s by far the best option we have for someone to partner with Altidore. Without Davies, the US will be stuck picking among bad options – either trying to play Dempsey or Donovan as forwards when we really need them in the midfield, or putting an inferior player on the pitch and severely weakening the attack.
A fully fit US team – with Onyewu, Demerit, Jermaine Jones (now that he can officially play for us), Edu, Davies – has the potential to do pretty well. They could also go three and out, of course, but right now it’s fun to anticipate.