Ahead of the U.S. men’s national team’s first camp since being humbled by Belgium at the World Cup, the consensus was that only a complete reset would be enough to wash away the stench of the USMNT’s nadir since losing to Trinidad and Tobago and missing the 2018 tournament entirely.
Perhaps no one understood that message better than head coach Mauricio Pochettino. Pochettino saw the new cycle, the first in which he will have full control from the beginning, as an opportunity to inject new blood into a national team that, by most accounts, failed to live up to its lofty expectations at a home World Cup. His first roster of 28 players included 12 mostly MLS-based players getting their first call-ups and omitted most of the USMNT’s established players who’ve already hit their primes, like Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie.
The new-look Stars and Stripes made a near-perfect first impression in their 4-1 dismantling of Peru in Orlando on Saturday. The new era got off to a dream start when Orlando City homegrown Justin Ellis, one of three newcomers to start the match alongside the Philadelphia Union’s Cavan Sullivan and New England Revolution’s Peyton Miller, headed home Gio Reyna’s free kick in his home stadium just four minutes in.
But Peru’s experience initially proved effective against the U.S.’s youth, as 36-year-old Gianluca Lapadula brought La Bicolor level in the 15th minute, and both teams traded spells of possession to remain at 1-1 headed into the break.
The match completely flipped on its head around the hour mark, and fresh faces once again provided the spark. Pochettino brought on teenagers Mathis Albert, Zavier Gozo, and Julian Hall, along with World Cup holdovers Sebastian Berhalter and Antonee Robinson. Just a few minutes later, Albert won a penalty, which Malik Tillman calmly converted to get on the scoresheet for the third straight game dating back to the World Cup to give the U.S. another lead.
From there, the U.S. never looked back and, aside from one dangerous ball that debutant and halftime introduction Diego Kochen had to come out to collect, offered Peru basically nothing. Pochettino’s substitutions once again bore fruit when Hall turned in Berhalter’s cross in the 72nd minute for the USMNT’s second debut goal of the afternoon. Berhalter added the exclamation point all by himself with a stunner from outside the box in the 90th minute.
The U.S. may have only played a Peruvian side that’s aging and in poor form, but a win this dominant, mostly using inexperienced players who’ve had almost no time to develop chemistry, is an encouraging sign for both the immediate and long-term future of the program. It’s an especially welcome development following concerns that a major factor behind the USMNT’s humiliating World Cup exit was that the team’s established stars had become complacent because there were very few other players of anywhere near similar quality to challenge for their roster spots.
11 players in total earned their first caps in the match, and Pochettino heaped praise upon the new recruits for almost instantly changing the atmosphere around the team.
“From the Monday that we started training, we started to feel the good energy and good quality that all the players that arrived for the first time were showing us,” Pochettino said.
The fact that a squad in which almost half the players had never even been called into a camp before is developing this much cohesion this quickly is a morale boost everyone associated with the USMNT desperately needed after laying that egg in Seattle in July. What’s even more startling is that this is the first of four matches this window, so this young and untested squad will have three more chances to gel even further over the next few days: against Chile in St. Louis on Tuesday, Mexico in Arizona on Oct. 3, and Canada in St. Paul on Oct. 6.