In this column, I take a look at a couple of different Americans who have shown well in MLS as we near the All-Star Game, and who is making a case for themselves to earn a USMNT call-up this winter based on the team’s needs.
***
We’re a little over halfway through Major League Soccer’s regular season, and the MVP race is heating up. Just over a week from the All-Star Game, there’s at least one American who has solidly placed himself on the MLS MVP shortlist and his name is Benny Feilhaber.
While the USMNT trudged their way through the group stage of the CONCACAF Gold Cup, Feilhaber was making the kind of incisive passes that could have helped the Yanks win for a reason besides being tall (and Clint Dempsey’s surprisingly resurgent form, of course).
This season, Benny has racked up six goals and ten assists, and is in the form of his life after becoming more of a box-to-box central midfielder for Sporting Kansas City. Interestingly enough, his added defensive responsibilities have made him a more dynamic attacking presence. Part of the reason for this is that his new role changes the position from which he starts attacks. Beginning from deeper in midfield, he gets the chance to charge at the opponent’s back four with the ball at pace. With dynamic runners like Krisztian Nemeth and the league’s hardest-working center forward Dom Dwyer supporting the attack, defenders have a lot more to process at once. When defenders have to think, they get stretched, and when a defense gets stretched, Benny Feilhaber is an assassin when it comes to finding the final pass that punishes any sort of defensive lapse.
At this stage of his career, Feilhaber is no stranger to the US National Team set-up. He played in a World Cup in 2010, and was a fixture throughout Bob Bradley’s tenure as head coach. Since the regime change in 2011, Feilhaber has been a rarity in the USMNT, with his last action coming against South Korea in February 2014, a game in which DeAndre Yedlin made his US debut.
Over the last few months, Feilhaber’s form has raised many questions regarding how long he can continue to be overlooked by Jurgen Klinsmann when he possesses such a singular skill set among American players.
In the past, the argument could be made that his game wasn’t complete enough and that he didn’t possess the defensive work rate necessary to help the US succeed at the international stage. However, this year he’s averaging 1.5 interceptions and three tackles per ninety minutes, while putting up career-highs in goals and assists.
Jurgen’s response to reporters when asked about Feilhaber before a Gold Cup game in Kansas City was that “there are others ahead of him.”
That response is concerning for more a couple of reasons. First of all, no there aren’t. There aren’t any American attacking midfielders in any league on the planet who are ahead of him in the most important statistical categories, nor are there any who possess the mixture of vision, technical quality, and passing range that he does. It’s evident every weekend, and it’s becoming increasingly evident that the USMNT doesn’t have a player on the Gold Cup roster who is capable of unlocking a bunkering defense with a killer pass.
No, the Cuba game doesn’t count.
The second reason why that response is concerning is because Jurgen offered no details whatsoever to back it up. Now, I don’t want to go in on Jurgen’s maturity level based on this comment, but it’s important to remember that he has a spotty track record when it comes to leaving players out of USMNT camps when those players just so happen to have the exact skill set that the team is missing. When it’s not backed up by any sort of evidence, a comment like that sounds spiteful, and the ad hominem route is never a good look when you’re criticizing a guy who is one of the central pillars of his club team.
So please, Jurgen Klinsmann, just humor us. Call up Benny Feilhaber. Don’t even wait until January. There are plenty of friendlies in which to experiment between now and then. You know what to do.
***
The second player who I’ll talk about today is somebody who has come into MLS and absolutely taken the league by storm. In a season during which they’ve signed the likes of Steven Gerrard and Giovani Dos Santos, Sebastian Lletget might be the LA Galaxy’s most important acquisition of 2015.
Also, they stole him from West Ham. The Galaxy stole Sebastian Lletget. Not only did the 22 year-old American come over on a free transfer, but he’s also only making about $100,000 per season. With five goals in less than 500 minutes of MLS action, that Sebastian is so hot right now.
He’s also a guy with a versatile skill set. Bruce Arena has deployed him as a winger, a forward, and a central midfielder, and the results have been pretty much the same. He has impressed with his physical strength and defensive work rate, but has also displayed a serious amount of technical prowess and smart movement. If you caught any of Friday night’s 5-2 whipping of San Jose, you saw Sebastian Lletget make a case for himself as man of the match, arguably outshining Steven Gerrard’s stellar debut as well as Robbie Keane’s hat trick.
One of the coolest things to watch about Lletget’s game is that he plays with flare. He’ll go for back heel flicks on his first touch, he’ll hold off defenders along the sideline and then look to torch them on the dribble, and he’ll do stuff like this in the box:
That was Lletget’s first goal in MLS. He receives the ball in a tight area, freezes the defender with a creative little move, and fires a shot near post with no hesitation. That’s a play not many in the national team pool can make. It’s a little bit Dempsey-esque, and that guy has a pretty good scoring record.
The one drawback with hopping aboard the Lletget-for-USMNT train is that his success, though consistent and eye-catching, has occurred over a small sample size. Drawing conclusions about young American players from small sample sizes is… dangerous. It’s gotten us in trouble before.
However, Lletget brings more of a well-rounded game to the table than a lot of his peers. His movement and attacking runs are smart, he tracks back on defense, he’s an effective distributor, and he’s shown the ability to finish in multiple ways in tight spaces. It’s exciting. What’s more exciting is the amount of high quality on-the-job training he’ll receive from people like Bruce Arena, Robbie Keane, Steven Gerrard, and Giovani dos Santos throughout the rest of this season. There’s no doubt that he’ll soak up everything he can from guys like that, and he’ll benefit from having a coach who definitely wants him around and has shown fearlessness in playing his young guys.
Jurgen raves over dynamic attackers, praising the “surprising qualities” of forwards like Gyasi Zardes, while continually throwing his support behind workhorses like Alejandro Bedoya and the physical strength of Jozy Altidore. Whether or not he’s noticed the presence of all of those qualities in Lletget remains to be seen, but if Lletget keeps up anything comparable to his current form throughout the second half of the 2015 MLS season, it seems inevitable that he’ll earn a spot on the January camp roster.
