USA beat Charleston Battery 5-0 in scrimmage

Charlseston who?

Bidemi, I was about to say the same exact thing.

Are they playing Swaziland, or the Dark Side of the Moon next?

They’re an A-League team:

http://www.charlestonbattery.com/

This is a closed-door scrimmage to get a sense of where the team is at and to give them a chance to go at someone other than themselves. No need to overreact at he nice scoreline, but there is no need to be overly critical, either.

And they’re playing the sendoff series next week: Morrocco, Venezuela, and Latvia.

No one of significance is going to play them leading up to the World Cup. Come on. The match against Charleston was a training match, not open to the public. It was a warm up.

It’s really too bad we couldn’t get a game in the sendoff series against a team that actually qualified for the WC. Last time around, we at least got Uruguay.

I’m actually worried that we just haven’t played enough good teams lately to be prepared for the WC — the only decent team we’ve played since January is Germany. In the run-up to the ‘02 WC, we had friendlies against Germany, Italy, Ireland, and the Netherlands. I think playing those teams and getting beat by those teams really helped us.

Thats worrying! Wonder why USA didnt get better friendlies arranged this time around.

The main reason is that teams qualified for the World Cup don’t want to travel all the way to the US, which is fair enough.

Why not play our punching bag… Mexico! That would have been an awesome send off game.

“Charleston Battery” is an awesome club name. It reminds me of Arsenal.

Personally, I wouldn’t worry about facing lesser opposition before the actual Tournament. Really, it comes down to how we play on that day-regardless of how stellar the friendly opposition is. We’ve proved that time and time again. And we still have the element of surprise, and the underdog stigma to will us through games. I have faith that we will make it to the next round!