Of Swedes and Things

Saturday night marks the first match of the new year for the US MNT as they take on Sweden (minus Zlatan Ibrahimov) at the Home Depot Center. Since this is just a friendly and right in the midst of regularly scheduled European league matches, we won’t be seeing the same full strength US squad we will in a few weeks when World Cup Qualifying resumes against Mexico. Instead, we get another look at some of the young guys and fringe players and that will be fun until it’s not.

Personally, I’m most looking forward to seeing Kenny Cooper and Charlie Davies back in action. Both have shown flashes of becoming valuable members of this time in the little time they’ve had on the pitch and if they perform well again on Saturday that could go a long way toward proving to Captain Bob that they deserve regular spots on the squad once the matches become more meaningful.

Another guy who is back with the MNT is Sacha Kljestan, who just returned from a week’s spell training with Celtic in Glasgow. The original rumor was that the Scottish giants would make a decision by today (Friday) as to whether they would offer him a contract or not. But, as the BBC reports, they’ve set the deadline at 24 hours from today, but manager Gordon Strachan isn’t exactly chomping at the bit to add fresh blood:

“If we don’t bring anybody in between now and next week, I don’t have a problem.

“Because, although it will be hard, I feel that I can deal with the players here to win another championship.”

“It’s been shown over the years that the signings at this time have been beneficial to the club,” he said.

“But you usually find that most of the action happens in the last three or four days.”

Said Sacha:

“I had really good experience at Celtic, and now I’m excited to back and getting ready to play against Sweden.The only future I’m focusing on right now is trying to put in a good performance tomorrow night.”

Meanwhile, Landon Donovan has continued to beast it on Bayern Munich’s midseason friendly tour, scoring two more goals in his team’s 5-0 drubbing of Mainz. That gives him a total of four goals now for Bayern, which should be enough to earn him some solid playing time once the Bundesliga season resumes. Here are both his goals from that last match:

And if you want to find out the real story behind his European Adventure of Epic Broportions, check out Dirty Tackle for the inside scoop right from Carter’s Landon’s own emails to his bros back home.

Oh and one final programming note: Carter and I won’t be liveblogging the Sweden match. We need to save up all our liveblogging juices for the showdown against Mexico next month. So…prepare yourselves. And maybe buy yourself a raincoat.