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[QUOTE="Forza Azzurri, post: 4471884, member: 1452"]
Great game plan by Van Gaal.  Forcing our center backs to be distributors.  And forcing us to try and play through them.  They certainly have enough skill on their roster to be able to go toe to toe with us but the approach worked.

This might be the first time ever, in a meaningful game, that a real quality side has purposely sat back, forced the US to attack and looked to counter.  England was more 50/50.  Requires a different mentality and a different approach.  US not quite there yet.  To be expected because no US team ever had enough quality to worry a team like the Dutch enough to have them change their approach.  Cannot turn the ball over in bad areas and the coordinated press to win it back is lacking.  To be fair, CONCACAF teams do not have the same quality to punish those mistakes like the Dutch have shown they are able to.  We just don't yet have enough talent across the board to be able to be truly comfortable playing this way.  Pulisic, Dest, McKennie, Musah, Weah, Reyna, Adams are.  The rest really aren't.

Our mainstays also played a lot of very high pressure minutes.  That is very tough, especially mentally, for young players and if you switch off for just an instant, a team like the Dutch will punish you.

Very pleased with what we accomplished in Qatar.  Looking forward to seeing our youth mature, hopefully being able to upgrade the talent, skillwise, to give us some additional quality at certain position as well as quality depth.  Still too many players on this roster just not able to play at this level (meaning with the top ten, or so, teams in the world).

The transformation of this team, in terms of raw ability, from our last knockout round game 8 years ago and even from four years ago is remarkable.
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