Miss USA and Miss Cuba Present: Brooks’ Half-Assed World Cup Qualifier Preview

TOOT, TOOT!

Hear that? What could it be? Look! In the Potomac!

Yes, the Cuban national team has climbed aboard their failboat and held on for dear life all the way to Washington D.C. for Saturday’s World Cup Qualifier against the US (7 pm ET, ESPN Classic). The last time these two faced each other a little over a month ago, the US slogged through a 1-0 win off a Clint Dempsey goal. The pitch was wet, the lights were dim, but Bob’s boys got the job done and made it out of Cuba like Michael Corleone on New Year’s.

With three wins and no goals allowed so far in this World Cup Qualifying campaign, the US is now one win away from guaranteeing their advancement to the next round of qualification. Sitting in such a favorable position with two matches to go, Bob Bradley has already made steps to ensure these remaining fixtures are as interesting as possible, even if the result is a foregone conclusion. And how has he done that? Well, swallow your Adderrall and I’ll eventually get around to telling you…

Since we’ve already been through this once before, here is an abbreviated list of additional fun facts about Cuba:

-Was the site of a CIA covert program called Operation Mongoose. The objective was, essentially, to assassinate beard enthusiast Fidel Castro with the help of the Mafia (which doesn’t exist, by the way…). So how did that end up? Well, the Mob happily took the CIA’s money, weapons, equipment, and information then basically made no attempt to kill Castro and they might have even sold said weapons, equipment, and information to the Cuban government for even more money. In the end, Fidel Castro is still kind of alive and all the top mob guys the CIA teamed with turned up dead in ways similar to how people die in CIA movies. Isn’t it nice when everybody comes out a winner?

-Pelicans:

As for the Cuban national team, well, they’re just a shade under being a complete embarrassment. They have lost all three of their matches and scored only two goals while giving up eight. But being terrible won’t be their biggest problem this weekend. No, their biggest problem will be making sure everyone is on the truck/boat for the ride home. When their U-23 team came to the US for the Gold Cup earlier this year, seven players decided to stay. Seven. So if the team can make it back to Cuba with anything less than a 10-0 loss and half their starting XI in tact, I think they’re going to consider it a moral victory.

On the American side, Bob Bradley has compiled perhaps the most impressive roster we’ve seen under his reign. Freddy Adu, Kenny Cooper, Jozy Altidore, Charlie Davies — just about every talented young player that US fans have been clamoring for is included in this side. We even got the surprise addition of highly touted midfield munchkin Jose Francisco Torres, who chose his birth country over Mexico at the last minute.

Now, the question is whether Bob will send out the kids or opt to start with his veterans like Hejduk, Beasley, Ching, and ohmygodI’malreadybored. The good news is, he almost has to give the new guys significant time, since he called them in from clubs all over the world for this match. And what’s more cruel than making a guy take a nine hour flight just to sit on the bench in a craphole like RFK Stadium?

Prediction: USA 4-0 Cuba
Defections: 6

And if you’d like to read a preview that wasn’t written with one eye on the Phillies/Dodgers game, check out Jeff Carlisle’s on Soccernet.