Sports: Will Bob Bradley's Team USA Coaching Contract be renewed?

The LAT has this item recapping Coach Bradley's thoughts on Team USA's run at the World Cup.

Excerpt:

A couple of errors led to the round-of-16 loss to Ghana, which scored on its first shot in the game and on its first shot in overtime, but there were two factors, above all, that characterized the Americans in South Africa.

The first was the inability of the forwards to score goals. The U.S. netted five in total, all of them by midfielders, including three by Landon Donovan.

Forwards Jozy Altidore, Robbie Findley, Edson Buddle and Herculez Gomez did not find the back of the net.

The second identifying characteristic of the team was its habit of yielding early goals. In two of its four games, the U.S. was scored upon within five minutes of the start and in another it was scored upon within 15 minutes. In a rather startling statistic, over the course of four games, the U.S. held a lead for a total of barely three minutes.

On Sunday, Bradley talked about both issues.

"Goals decide matches," he said, "and I think anyone who follows the game around the world knows that that's still the greatest challenge in the game -- to be someone who can consistently score goals. So it's an area where we do need to improve."

As for the early defensive miscues, Bradley said it was a matter of experience and maturity in knowing how to manage a game.

"The second part is that that's just how the game works sometimes," he said. "I can watch the game at the highest level and see the same things happen, whether it's Barcelona or Manchester United or Brazil or Spain. That's the way the game works."

Yup, sums it up. Pretty much in any sport what separates the top level championship teams from the teams that fall short is capitalizing on opportunities on offense and minimizing mistakes on defense.

Every goal the USA gave up this tournament happened on a defensive miscue.

But even with the opening blunder against Ghana putting themselves down 1-0, Team USA could have won if they capitalized on their offensive chances. One can question Coach Bradley's choice to start Clark who made the mistake leading to the goal and hesitancy to give more minutes to Feilhaber, but in the end, the team had its chances and the talent level to capitalize on those chances simply wasn't there.

Here is an ESPN summary of the USA effort.

Will Coach Bradley be kept? ESPN dissects the situation.