USMNT needs to “change mentality” following Colombia loss

The U.S. men’s national team played its worst match under Gregg Berhalter on Saturday against Colombia and admitted that changes are needed to avoid another potential lopsided result against Brazil.

Several defensive mistakes and turnovers hampered the USMNT in an eventual 5-1 defeat, their worst in Berhalter’s two spells as head coach. Errors from Antonee Robinson, Tim Weah, and Cameron Carter-Vickers all led to goals for Colombia while several other errant passes easily could’ve led to a much larger scoreline.

No. 5 ranked Brazil awaits the USMNT on Wednesday in Orlando and they will be confident fresh off a 3-2 victory over Mexico.

“From being on the field you learn how much these games mean to other teams,” veteran defender Tim Ream said Monday. “I know we talk about these being friendlies and you’re not playing for three points or moving on in a knockout stage, but you understand and start to get a feel for what those games are going to be like.

“We’re moving into tournament play after this week,” he added. “So knowing what it means to them, I think it needs to mean as much if not more to us and that goes back to the intangibles, the fight and the will to try to get a result.”

Ream and fellow centerback Chris Richards started the match on Saturday while Carter-Vickers replaced the Fulham defender after the hour mark. However, all three had their share of mistakes in the match, one that the USMNT will want to forget in due time.

With the USMNT’s Copa America group stage beginning just 11 days after the Brazil match, Berhalter will hope for a bounce-back performance to get confidence sky high in his squad. Mostly all of their mistakes that occurred against Colombia are doable to fix against Brazil and that will be the goal in the match, not the overall scoreline after 90 minutes.

“I think a few things will need to change, not just structurally but also I think mentality, like Tim spoke about,” Richards said. “When you play these types of teams, even if it’s a friendly, you can tell the spirit, the fight that they have. And so I think for me, the one thing that we really need to change is our mentality.

“Some of the positives that we can take from the game is that we did play with one of the Copa favorites [Colombia] for 65, 70 minutes,” Richards added. We watched the tape back, I think almost all of their goals were goals that we gave to them rather than completely being broken down.”