Should the Deuce be Cut Loose?

The lone Amer­i­can goal scorer from World Cup 2006 now has con­sis­tently played so poorly for the national team if the oppo­nent is not Bar­ba­dos, that his pres­ence seems to actu­ally help stag­nate the side. Dempsey’s last good per­for­mance for the National Team against a decent oppo­nent was last Octo­ber in Switzer­land. At the time “the Deuce” was on a nice run for Ful­ham, his club side and was play­ing with lots of confidence.

A com­bi­na­tion of a man­age­r­ial change at Ful­ham (A switch from Lawrie Sanchez who had a lot of faith in Dempsey to the old school Roy Hodg­son) the rel­e­ga­tion fight the Cot­tagers found them­selves in and the need to help carry the US woe­ful run of play attack seemed to be too much for Dempsey to han­dle. He has now looked tired and dis­in­ter­ested on con­sis­tent basis in the last sev­eral months.

Bruce Arena seemed to have a phi­los­o­phy as national team man­ager that if you were play­ing well with your club you would at the very least be called into national team camp. Bob Bradley on the other hand has proven to value the con­ti­nu­ity of his squad selec­tion above all, essen­tially nar­row­ing his player pool down to 25–28 play­ers and pick­ing about 20 for each match from that group. Is this a good phi­los­o­phy and is it smart to con­tinue to pick out of play­ers like Dempsey and Eddie John­son over play­ers in form? Or is it wise to keep as many famil­iar faces on the team, given the lim­ited train­ing time the national team has together? One thing is for sure: Dempsey’s play would have earned him a bench­ing by now under Arena. But Bradley seems to man­age his play­ers dif­fer­ently even if his tac­tics are some­what similar.