Final Thoughts on USA-Chile

In our piece the other day I talked about three things that I wanted to watch for during the USA-Chile match last night. Here's what I observed:

1) A strong start and a strong finish. I want to see these guys avoid giving up goals early and late in matches. This requires mental toughness in addition to physical stamina which really should be our calling card.

So we certainly started strong jumping out to an early lead inside the opening ten minutes. But we didn't finish strong. Yeah, we didn't give up a LATE goal, but we were scored on twice in the later portions of the match. I read on mlssoccer.com that we've been outscored 9-0 in the second half of matches since the World Cup. Yes, some of that is due to substitutions, but no matter how you look at it, it's not a good number. At some point, we're going to have to figure out how to finish matches.