So says Eric Wynalda. The United States lost to Ghana this morning, 2-1, ending their World Cup hopes. A win would’ve gotten us through to the next round, as Italy did their part and took care of the Czechs. But we just weren’t capable.

And, ultimately… I think we just aren’t talented and skilled enough to play with some of the teams out there. We were in a tough group, with at least two (and evidently three) teams who are clearly a notch ahead of us. And on top of all that, Bruce Arena left himself plenty of room for second-guessing here.

I’m not going to call for him to be fired, and I think he’s done some phenomenal work in building the US Soccer program to this point. But it’s hard to disagree with Wynalda’s contention that he fucked this up. He played the 4-5-1 to death, even when we desperately needed goals. He actually super glued Eddie Johnson’s ass to the bench, even though he proved to be one of the few players on the squad capable of giving us a spark. Tactically, he might just not be a world class coach. Maybe we should hire a Dutch guy or something. Or hope that Germany flames out soon, and fires Jürgen Klinsmann, and see if we can scoop him up.

Unfortunately, there was another highly call, and it turned out to be extremely costly. Oguchi Onyewu was called for a foul in the box, and Dwyane Wade was awarded a penalty kick. Easily the weakest call that I’ve ever seen awarded a penalty kick. But it’s a Mavs-esque situation here. We fucked ourselves… Claudio Reyna absolutely handed them a goal, we wasted a couple of golden chances in the second half, and we just didn’t play that well. No fluidity, passing wasn’t crisp enough, didn’t get to enough 50-50 balls… Fuck.

This has to be considered a failure. Not because we lost to a good Ghana team, and not even because we didn’t advance… but because we played well in just one of three games. Maybe we shouldn’t have won all of these games outright, but we shouldn’t have been outclassed, and we were. And the players have to take some blame for that, but that’s on Bruce Arena, too. For whatever the reason, we just didn’t seem ready.

But hey, congrats to Ghana. Maybe we owe them one, since we kinda, you know… stole some people from there a few hundred years ago. And if you can remove our own failures from the situation, it’s hard not to feel good for Ghana. They drew a “group of death,” just as we did, but the little African nation found a way to get through. I’ll be rooting them while Brazil bends them over and sodomizes them.