When Christian Pulisic, captain of the national soccer team, announced last spring that he would choose rest over representing his country in the CONCACAF Gold Cup — the last major tournament before next summer’s World Cup — the blowback was fierce and frequently personal.
He played a career-high 3,650 minutes for AC Milan last season and appeared in 118 games for club and country in the previous 22 months. He needed a break, he said, to rest mind and body.
Yet the decision to take that break was attacked as selfish, egotistical and an act of betrayal.
“Not wanting to play in the Gold Cup, it’s pissing me off,” Landon Donovan, the national team’s all-time leader in assists and co-leader in goals, said of the timing.
“I just can’t fathom turning down the privilege of representing my country,” added Alexi Lalas, a former national team defender.
Four months later, however, it appears Pulisic made the right decision. Seven weeks into the new season, a rested and reinvigorated Pulisic leads Italy’s Serie A with four goals to go with two assists. He’s scored six times in all competition, the best start to a season in his 11-year career.
That bodes well for the U.S. eight months shy of a World Cup it will host. And the performance has also quieted much of the criticism.
“He’s performing and he’s playing under big pressure,” USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino said in a conference call last week. “He needs to perform every single week and every single game in a place like Milan.”
“Christian is a great player,” he added. “I think we can say he is the most important player now for the national team.”
AC Milan’s Christian Pulisic controls the ball against Napoli on Sept. 28.
(Marco Luzzani / Getty Images)
Actually you could have said that last part long before now since Pulisic leads active national team players in appearances (80), goals (32) and assists (19). If he continues scoring at that pace, he’ll pass both Donovan and Clint Dempsey to become the leading scorer in U.S. history.
And at 27, he’s nearly halfway to Cobi Jones’ record of 164 games played.
So while his commitment to the national team was questioned last summer, he has paid his dues — sometimes with blood and bruises. In the last World Cup, for example, Pulisic wound up in the hospital after scoring a gutsy first-half goal against Iran that sent the U.S. on to the knockout stage.
But it was obvious something was off last spring when he played poorly in lethargic Nations League losses to Canada and Panama. Turns out the pressure of trying to carry the national team and one of Italy’s biggest clubs through an impossibly crowded fixture crunch had left him running on fumes. So after consulting with U.S. Soccer’s technical, medical and high-performance staffs, he choose to rest and recuperate during the final summer before the World Cup.
And while that angered the pundits — and appeared to upset Pochettino too — it’s hard to argue with the results.
Although Pulisic was missed during the Gold Cup, his absence gave other players a chance to shine — and the U.S. made the final without him. Then in the team’s two September friendlies, a revived and renewed Pulisic was brilliant, especially in a 2-0 win over Japan in which Pochettino switched to a 3-4-3 formation.
Pochettino may be the coach of the national team, but there’s little doubt Pulisic is its leader. So he’ll need to repeat those September performances in this month’s friendlies with World Cup qualifiers Ecuador (on Friday) and Australia (Oct. 14) to keep the Americans’ preparations for next summer on track.
“This a player that is performing and is a player that is really important for us. We cannot hide and we cannot lie,” Pochettino said. “He needs to keep this level. It’s the most important thing now.”
Pulisic had the courage to do what was right for himself last summer, just as Donovan did when he took his much-criticized sabbatical from soccer in 2013. That cost Donovan the captain’s armband with the Galaxy and his place on Jurgen Klinsmann’s national team.
Yet he scored eight goals and had eight assists in 10 matches with the national team when he returned in 2013 and set career highs for assists (14) and minutes played (2,716) in MLS the following year.
The rest clearly did him well. It has obviously done the same for Pulisic.
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