I’m going to call this the Jason Kreis Syndrome.
United States national team strikers who don’t strike
You may choose to call it the Taylor Twellman Syndrome. But since this is my blog, I get to name the syndromes around here.
Kreis was King Kong in 1999. He scored 18 goals and had 15 assists and beat out the heralded likes of Marco Etcheverry and Jaime Moreno for the league’s Most Valuable Player award. That wasn’t long after Steve Sampson had called in the young attacker to a national team camp. But Sampson asked Kreis to be a right midfielder. Kreis looked unsure and wasn’t fast enough on the flanks for the international game and his national team career became a tiny footmark on an otherwise fine Wiki page.
Kreis was a striker (well, a midfielder first, then a striker … but let’s not bog down) whose abilities seemed to be capped at domestic league level. It’s nothing extraordinary, honestly. Happens all over the world.
But it does seem to happen a lot with MLS strikers.
Twellman’s strike rate (101 goals in 174 appearances) is nothing short of fierce. Show me the man who can hit for better than a goal every other match and I’ll show you a man who will make a damn good living for a long time.
But like Kreis before him and a growing list since, Twellman’s ability to ring the goal bell in the U.S. shirt seemed far less assured.
Lately, the list is long and …uh … distinguished. Or notorious. Depending on how you want to see it. Edson Buddle, Herculez Gomez and Robbie Findley spring to mind.
I thought about this as I wrote an SI.com piece on the U.S. depth chart at the moment. (I'll link to it when it goes up later today.) The situation at forward remains stubbornly unyielding. I actually have 11 names in the SI.com piece listed at forward. Eleven! Two of them (Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan) are only there because the “real” strikers just don’t. Strike, that is. Not at the international level.
But we’ve seen that before, haven’t we? It’s the Jason Kreis Syndrome.
See More:
