Landon Donovan departs U.S. national team after glittering career
HARTFORD, Conn.
How good was Landon Donovan? That's a question that may not yet be answered for many years to come.
Friday night, the U.S. international will be honored in Connecticut with one more appearance for the national team. Donovan is clearly one of the best Americans ever to play the world's game. His abilities were apparent early, his successes came perhaps too quickly and he will -- quite unfortunately -- also be remembered as the most prominent non-member of the 2014 American World Cup squad.
I prefer to let the dust settle on that latter issue and will remember Donovan as a player who emerged as a teenager, went on to play a key role in the Korea/Japan World Cup of 2002, then accepted the burden of a spotlight that was at times far too bright.
Landon Donovan, you see, arrived at a time when the emerging soccer public in the United States needed a hero, someone who could demonstrate that Americans could play the other kind of football at the very highest level. But he never struck you as the type who enjoyed the adulation; he was thoughtful rather than boastful; sublime, not super-sized. And at times, Donovan's responsibilities seemed to weigh him down.
The business of creating heroes was partly fueled by marketers who were hoping to see the soccer business take off in our country, partly by super-fans who simply couldn't wait for the long, inevitably painstaking growth of the game, and partly by the soccer powers that be. They wanted just about everything from any player who seemed capable of thrusting their sport into the headlines and onto mainstream sports television.
In another country, one where soccer was front and center, Landon Donovan would still have arrived on the scene as a special player. He is that good, that gifted, that visionary. He is a match-winner and very much a brilliant individualist with the ball at his feet and options around him. He was the American the soccer-boosters had been waiting for.
But Donovan was also a different type of player arriving in an age many American players were often long on energy and effort, short on technical skill and match awareness, background performers if you will.
Donovan understood, instinctively I suspect, that you have to be where the ball will be, not where it is, if you intend to take advantage of the attacking opportunities which arise so rarely in the modern game. He appeared like hockey's Wayne Gretzky in that respect, and like Gretzky, he'd make passes to seemingly nobody simply because he saw the chance that others failed to spot.
In fact, I'd dare say that Landon Donovan compares quite nicely with the likes of a Matt Le Tissier and or a Glenn Hoddle, a couple of England internationals who were similarly gifted and, similarly, had a hard time fitting into the style of play their national teams utilized. There was always a segment of the English media and public that believed neither man got enough chance to influence the national team because they were, like Donovan, artists first.
And for Donovan the national team was also something of a mixed blessing. He was outstanding in Korea – and was underwhelming in Germany four years later when he was criticized for his part in a poor American showing. His contributions in South Africa were his very best; he seemed determined to prove that he could be everything Americans wanted from him on the World Cup stage. And then, as we all know, came Brazil when the player everybody expected to make the 23 didn't have a role.
Donovan scored enough goals at all levels to gain plenty of recognition, but it's not his goal-scoring that actually defines him. It is the fact that Donovan was always a player first able to influence matches in ways far beyond the act of putting the ball in the net.
Nobody will ever call Landon Donovan a tough, physical player but I suspect his mental toughness has been vastly undervalued. He grew up in an age when there were very, very few elite American players yet elected to stay in this country to help grow the game through MLS. He's been criticized for that when he probably should be applauded.
Donovan's reputation will stand the test of time. His scoring records may be eclipsed as more American stars turn to full-time soccer and others will surely come to have an equally-lasting impact on MLS as that league gets stronger.
But it's likely that he will not be surpassed in one important category: he was the American male soccer star that U.S. Soccer and the fans needed more than a decade ago. He played that role to perfection.
