Lalas slams Adams for 'immature and naive' reaction to USMNT critics

USA Today

3 days ago

Alexi Lalas has hit out at U.S. men's national team midfielder Tyler Adams, who said this week that he didn't understand the volume of recent criticism from USMNT legends.
According to Lalas, Adams is being "immature and naive" when he questions why former USMNT stars have been heavily critical of the current team and its star, Christian Pulisic.
The USMNT entered this summer's Gold Cup on a four-game losing streak, the team's first in 18 years. Much of the focus was on the players who weren't on the Gold Cup roster, especially Pulisic, who opted out of the tournament in a highly controversial decision.
Several former USMNT stars, perhaps most notably Landon Donovan, were highly critical of Pulisic's decision.
Even with several stars absent, the USMNT managed to advance to the Gold Cup final where it fell 2-1 to Mexico.
In an interview with The Athletic this week, Adams defended Pulisic while also questioning why so many former players felt the need to hammer the AC Milan star.
"Everyone wants to throw his name in the gutter because it creates a big story, or it creates noise around [the team]," Adams said. "And that's how big of a player he is and how important of a player he is. But everyone in the team knows how important he is, what an amazing person he is.
'I can't say enough good things about him. He's one of the leaders of our team. The decision that he made was best for him, and it's going to help him in the long run.'
The comments from Adams clearly rankled with Lalas, one of many former USMNT stars who have criticized the team and Pulisic in recent months.
'For a guy that I have a lot of time for when it comes to Tyler Adams, I thought that this was a strangely immature and naive, and weak kind of take," Lalas said on his "State of the Union" podcast.
"Not that he's defending Christian Pulisic because we're all going to do that, but the way he seemed to think that there should be no criticism and we should all be kumbaya."
In the interview, Adams also wondered aloud why so many former USMNT stars felt like it was open season on the current group of players.
'I can't even explain it,' the Bournemouth midfielder said. 'I'm not a social-media guy, so I don't follow anything, but when people bring up some of the things that are being said and some of the stories that are being created, it feels weird, because it feels like not long ago that every single one of those people were on board with, like, the direction that the federation was going and how well the players were doing.
"And it feels like any setback, is [treated] like a disaster is happening."
Lalas opined that Adams' take was "naive and aloof to the reality of the situation" with the USMNT, which is now less than a year from a World Cup on home soil.
"Tyler if you can't explain it and you don't understand it — if I'm being charitable, then you're naive but if I'm not, then you're just being dumb," Lalas charged. "You understand exactly what is going on."
The former USMNT defender added: "In the way that he's painted himself as blindsided by this — for someone that I have a lot of respect for like I said, and I think is very smart, and the way that he has talked over the years is sometimes beyond his years, maybe he showed a little bit of his youthful naïveté in this article here."