At least we don't suck as bad as Costa Rica

My Post-World Cup thoughts (of course, now that the US is out, I'm just a spectator hoping for an exciting tournament):

We CLEARLY are not as good as we think. We CLEARLY do not play with the same joy and passion and effort as the top teams (Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Ghana) do. So we, as American soccer fans, need to change our outlook - as Tilam says "if you want into a bar and no one meets your standards, lower your standards". We must do this with the US soccer team. Based on this showing, we need to consider ourselves a lower tier team - face the reality, we have a BUTTLOAD of work to do here. Where to go from this point? I will leave that to Tilam in his post, I'm sure he has ideas. :)

We cannot score because we cannot finish. Good teams finish. Top teams finish. We didn't/don't. I don't know how many good chances inside the penalty box (or close to it) we had in the second half, only to muck it up time and again. You win because you put balls in the net, not off the crossbar and into the stands. Quality chances come so seldom, you need to bury them. And what is with this reluctance to shoot from outside the box?!

Eddie Pope, Landon Donovan, DeMarcus Beasley; all these guys have seen their soccer value/stock go down like a $3 whore. Anyone who thinks that Reyna was captain because of his stellar play is blind - he was (and potentially is) the most useless player on the field, next to the "no defense playing" Pope. Gooch barely kept his status. Dempsey and Mastreoni went up. Johnson, well, maybe. But the so-called big 4 didn't play like it.

All that being said, NEVER in my life have I seen such a stream of poor decisions by referees affect the outcome of a game - and I mean POOR decisions. I don't know how you can call a PK based on what happened in the game, can it be a significant anti-US stance? The Italy game was despicable refereeing, and I thought that nothing could top those assinine calls - except the PK that ultimately doomed the US. It is unconscionable to me to make a call like that, except if you really want a team to lose a game and, in our case, not advance. " Let's put the Americans back in their place." Of course, we had several opportunities to tie the game in the second half, but see my paragraph above about "finishing".

Ultimately, this wil drive many fringe soccer fans in the US away from the game of soccer. And that's a shame...