The U.S. men’s national soccer team is becoming a regular visitor to CityPark as the team makes its third visit to St. Louis in 18 months on Monday, and with them will be a regular face returning to the lineup.
Forward Tim Weah, who hasn’t played with the national team since getting a red card for hitting a player during a match with Panama in the Copa America in June, will see action as the United States faces Jamaica at 7 p.m. in the quarterfinals of the CONCACAF Nations League. As of Sunday afternoon, more than 19,000 tickets had been sold for the game, which will be broadcast on TNT.
The CONCACAF Nations League doesn’t have much of a history — this is just the fourth time the tournament has been contested — but it does count, which gives it a little something more than the friendlies that mostly populate the U.S. schedule as it avoids the cauldron of qualifying and prepares to host the 2026 World Cup.
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With the United States winning the first leg of the two-game series 1-0 on Thursday in Jamaica, a tie is enough to send the United States through to the semifinals in March. A 1-0 win for Jamaica would send the match to 30 minutes of overtime and, if that doesn’t settle matters, penalty kicks. Any other win by Jamaica would send it through to the next round and eliminate the U.S. (Road goals is the first tiebreaker.)
It’s the fourth game for new U.S. coach Maurico Pochettino, who was hired on Sept. 10, and his first domestic match in an official competition. And while his main responsibility is getting the U.S. team ready for 2026, one of the ways to do that is to play in games where more is at stake.
“I think we need to increase the pressure over us because I see that is going to be important,” he said, “because I see we are USA and we need to perform and we need to win games. That is our culture. I understood after a few days, a few weeks, a few months, that the culture here is about to win and to increase that pressure, and that expectation is going to put us in a very uncomfortable zone that is to not only go and to play, it’s the goal is to compete and win.”
Weah got a two-game suspension for the red card and missed the first game with Jamaica. That red card cost the U.S. in the Copa America; it lost 2-1 to Panama in a match it really needed to win to get out of group play. The United States lost its third match and was eliminated, an early exit that led to the firing of Gregg Berhalter as coach.
“It was hard because it played a pretty negative role on how the rest of the tournament went,” Weah said Sunday morning prior to practice. “Obviously, no player wants that to happen. No player wants to be the reason why his team gets knocked out. Not exactly the reason, but it played a huge factor in why we didn’t go on. It was a moment, and I think I’ve kind of accepted it and matured in a way that it will never happen again. Just have to move on and focus on the positives and what you can do leading up to our next big major tournament.”
His return to camp with the team has been uneventful.
“I got to be honest,” said U.S captain and center back Tim Ream, “most of it was said straight after that Panama game. I don’t think there’s been too much discussion in this camp at all regarding that situation. And obviously emotions run high and situations happen in games, but I think everything that needed to be said was said straight after that Panama game.
“And that’s not even dressing him down and yelling at him or telling him that he messed up. He knew that himself. That’s the sign of somebody who understands their role. It’s the sign of a good group, of a good team that we didn’t have to. You could see it on his face from the minute we walked inside from that game. So it’s easy for us to have him back.”
Weah’s early exit from Copa America left him with a long, idle summer as he waited for play to resume for his Italian club, Juventus.
“It was tough,” he said. “Having the summer off kind of just put a lot of things in perspective and kind of just focused on all the positives, just being there for the rest of the guys and soaking in all the love that I can for family. Obviously, the negative comments on the internet, I really didn’t look at it much, so that kind of helped. But leading to Copa, we had this big dream of doing something amazing, and it didn’t happen, and that was just the reality of it. And now we can focus on something else, focus on something bigger, and now it’s just time to work on that and be positive and go in that positive direction.”
“It’s a great opportunity for him for us to see him,” Pochettino said, “and then until March, we have the possibility to have another opportunity to see all the players that compete there and I see tomorrow, for sure, he’s going to have minutes, and he’s going to be on the pitch. I think he’s a very good player, very aggressive with the ball, fast, good legs, and I think he’s young but it’s normal.
“He made a mistake. Now we need to help him to evolve and learn, but I think a very clever player, always smiling. He brought very good energy to the group, but the most important is the performance and how he’s going to perform tomorrow and hope that he can add his quality and help the team to achieve a very good result.”
Weah, who scored in the U.S. team’s most recent game here, against Uzbekistan, has four goals in eight Serie A games with Juventus, where he has started the team’s past four games. Because Weah wasn’t eligible for the first game, when the team headed from its camp in Orlando to Jamaica, Weah flew to St. Louis. On Thursday, he made a visit to Children’s Hospital, which had a little extra meaning for him.
“It was amazing,” Weah said. “Growing up in the hospital, because my mother was (a registered nurse), was a huge moment for me. It was just lovely seeing all the kids and being able to share that moment with them.”
St. Louis City SC announced on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024, at CityPark, that Clayton based battery-maker Energizer Holdings bought the naming rights to the soccer stadium. The stadium was renamed to Energizer Park.
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Publish date : 2024-11-17 22:01:00
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