4 things we learned from the USMNT’s loss to Colombia

The United States men’s national team had some great moments on Thursday night, but more negative ones in a 4-2 loss to Colombia. If you missed any of the highlights, you can find all of them here. Below, a deeper dive into four things that really stuck out from the match.

World class left backs with World Cup experience wouldn’t have envied the position that Antonee Robinson was put in on Thursday night. He was matched up against James Rodriguez, who loves to cut inside from the right wing. Colombia’s right back, Santiago Arias, got forward and overlapped constantly. And whenever Colombia wanted to give Robinson something different to look at, they’d switch traditional winger Juan Cuadrado over to that side. All three of these players pulled Robinson out of position or beat him one-on-one on multiple occasions.

Colombia’s go-ahead goal came off an individual error by Robinson against yet another great attacking player, Carlos Bacca. Once Robinson lost his battle, his teammates couldn’t recover.

“You’ve got to make that play,” USMNT head coach Dave Sarachan said of Robinson’s mistake after the game. “Look, I credit them for making a play, but I think in those instances, we would expect that we would make that play.”

Robinson’s struggles were the big topic of discussion in the post-game press conference, and Sarachan was very honest about his left back’s performance.

“We did not do a good job in terms of passing guys along and staying in what I would say, a better zone position,” Sarachan said. “So Antonee got pulled in at times, which allowed the right back Arias to get forward. And I didn’t think the coordination was very good.”

It was the second time in three games that Robinson was badly exposed against a superior opponent, following his shaky performance against Brazil. But Robinson is also a 21-year-old who was making just his fifth national team appearance, and he’s yet to play at a club level higher than the English Championship. Sarachan was expecting growing pains, and seems willing to let Robinson play through them.

“These games are ideal for everyone, but for a guy like Antonee, these are critical in terms of his growth,” Sarachan said. “I think he’s intelligent, he’s got qualities where he will learn from all of these games. That’s the investment you make now for the future.”

But competitive games are creeping up quickly. And with the way he’s playing right now, it would be tough to justify giving Robinson the start in a Gold Cup game against Mexico or Costa Rica. He’ll need to improve dramatically with Wigan Athletic over the rest of the club season.

Tim Weah had a spectacular highlight with this assist for Bobby Wood’s goal.

Weah started the game on the right, as he has for his other national team appearances, but him and Kenny Saief switched wings at halftime. Weah was a fan of the change — “it’s always weird for me playing on the right because I prefer playing on the left,” he said after the game.

That’s not to say Weah’s opposed to playing on the right. He’s quick to say that he’ll do whatever the coach tells him, and he mentions that he links up well with DeAndre Yedlin on the right as well. “I really enjoy playing with DeAndre,” Weah says. “He matches my pace. We have a good connection, he’s one of my best friends on the team.”

But the pass like the one he made to Wood isn’t one that he seems to see from the right side. He looks more gifted at cutting in and playing through balls than he does at beating defenders to the endline and playing a cross. Hopefully he gets more opportunities to show that in the future.

Kellyn Acosta scored a goal against Colombia. It was a good goal! It was cool!

But the Acosta-Bradley midfield pivot, as a whole, looked pretty overmatched against Colombia. The pair managed to complete zero central passes into the final third. This is partially because Colombia made that hard and partially because that was Julian Green’s biggest job, but your central midfielders have to give you something in this respect.

There was also... uhhh... whatever this was, from Michael Bradley.

Sarachan singled out Robinson for criticism on this goal, and he certainly made the biggest error, but watch Bradley. He’s a solid 20 yards ahead of Radamel Falcao when the attack starts, but he jogs, doesn’t see Falcao coming, then gets torched. By a guy who’s older than him, and who had his career derailed by serious knee injuries. It’s a bad look for someone who’s ostensibly in the team for the purposes of veteran leadership.

Acosta, to his credit, was self-critical after the match. “I’m just focusing on the little details,” he said. “I definitely could have played a lot better, I could have been cleaner on the ball and helped my team win the ball back a little more often.”

“In midfield we put pressure on but not enough pressure to win the ball and make it more uncomfortable for Colombia,” Acosta added.

Acosta will probably get another game against Peru next week, and he’ll need to improve to keep a spot in the starting XI going forward. His goal was very nice, but his overall performance wasn’t enough to get Sarachan or his successor thinking about dropping the two midfielders who missed out on this camp due to injury, Weston McKennie and Tyler Adams.

A healthy crowd of 38,631 filed into Raymond James Stadium on Thursday night, the largest to ever watch a United States men’s national team game in Tampa, Florida. Not that they particularly came out to see the USMNT — roughly 95 percent of people in attendance were wearing Colombia shirts.

But that doesn’t mean the crowd was hostile. It was full of Colombian-Americans who seemed to like both teams quite a bit. USMNT defender Matt Miazga had some excellent perspective on this phenomenon.

“When you really listen to the crowd, they’re wearing yellow jerseys but they’re supporting us as well,” Miazga said. “When we scored, the whole stadium was supporting us. During the national anthem, the whole stadium was singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ There’s yellow jerseys but that’s the reality of our country. There’s so many different nationalities and we’re very diverse. They weren’t booing us, they were supporting us as well. They were supporting a good football match with two good teams.”

Given the really dumb conversations that we had in the wake of the USMNT’s loss to Costa Rica at Red Bull Arena in front of a pro-Ticos crowd, this was extremely refreshing.