Jurgen Klinsmann on U.S.-Paraguay showdown: 'This is it'
U.S. men's national team coach Jurgen Klinsmann was in a jovial mood as he met the press at Thursday afternoon's practice.
Maybe it was a tacit admission that Tuesday's 4-0 thumping of Costa Rica was a very good thing, not an occasion for lamenting being outplayed at times. Or maybe it was the cloudless, breezy sky above Penn's Rhodes Field soccer facility, wedged neatly between the train tracks south of 30th Street Station and the bustling Schuylkill Expressway.
"I think everybody's looking forward to a special game here on Saturday night, and we hope for a big house," Klinsmann said. "We hope for huge, huge support, because it's going to be a nail-biter. It's going to be where the fans can be really the 12th man on the field, if they understand the situation, to help us when things maybe don't go perfectly."
With over 45,000 tickets sold as of Wednesday afternoon, Klinsmann is likely to get his wish. And he will get his wish in another crucial area as well.
For so much of his tenure in charge, Klinsmann has yearned for big-time games that put big-time pressure on his team. Saturday night's showdown will be one. The U.S. needs a result to advance to the knockout rounds. Officially, a draw might be enough. Unofficially, outsiders and insiders alike will demand a win.
Those insiders may well include U.S. Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati, whose strong words about Klinsmann facing a potentially uncertain future with U.S. Soccer made major headlines.
"Every time you talk about pressure, you talk about expectations that come along with your role with your job, with being on the helm of an amazing program here," Klinsmann said. "Everyone is absolutely entitled to express their own feelings and opinions about it. That comes with the role. I'm enjoying this very, very much because it's a challenging job, but it's also an enjoyable one because you work with players that are hungry to improve, they are listening to you, they want to kind of write their own personal stories in their short careers... You are there to maximize their potential and hopefully get everything out of them, and then, the results, you know, they come along automatically. That's not the problem."
So, about Saturday. I asked Klinsmann: Isn't this exactly what you've wanted for so long?
Klinsmann doesn't always give direct answers to direct questions. This time, he did:
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think this is it. This is already a knockout game on Saturday. This is it, you know?
You need now to get one point. We are not playing one point. We cannot do that. It's not our character to go for one. We go for the win. Because otherwise we might punish ourselves there.
And so, it's a one-off. And then this is our goal: to go through that on Saturday and then play the next one-off, and learn how to win these one-off games. To mature, kind of in our own way, towards a World Cup where we want to go further. Our big dream is to get into a final four of a World Cup, rather sooner than later.
These are the moments where you kind of tell your players, "Listen. Don't be nervous about it. It's no reason to be nervous. But understand that moment. So let's go out there and really just give everything you have. Saturday night is a game where you expect the guys to go out there and really give everything they have.
And I think if they do that, then they bought into this whole process. It's going to be a very exciting game, so you'd better make sure to fill it up.
