Timmy and the Gold Cup

By: DJR | June 25th, 2007

Gold Cup

The Toffees goal keeper extraordinaire, Tim Howard, help the Americans win this years Gold Cup. Howard just might have won the game with his incredible save in the closing minutes of the final match against Mexico. The States ended up beating Mexico 2-1 in the Gold Cup final. Howard stone-walled Adolfo Bautista from point blank range to send the ball over the crossbar and make one of the best saves of the tournament. I’m still wondering why Bob Bradley, US coach, decided to go with Kasey Keller in their semi-final match against Canada. Timmy had this to say after the match

“I’m still in shock you know. It’s just one of those things where you practice all the time, and sometimes it comes off for you.

“I saw the ball break through and I tried my best and today it was good enough. It’s one I’ll remember forever. Sometimes the team needs you to come up with a big save, and you know you can make a difference. I was elated.”

Team USA had to come from a goal behind to beat the Mexican side. With Mexico up 1-0 at the half the Americans got two second half goals from Landon Donovan and Benny Feilhaber to win the game. Howard also had this to say after the game:

“We felt like they were on top of us a lot, but they only scored the one goal, and thankfully it came late in the first half so we could regroup. We knew we only needed a goal to get ourselves back in it, so we were really calm and composed and we came out and did the job.

“We’ve been talking for about a month about how we need to become a band of brothers, and today we talked about not getting divided. So when that goal went in, we thought ‘if a goal is going to divide us, we’re cooked’ so we talked about sticking together, showed a lot of character and a lot of heart. A lot of that has to go to Bob Bradley for the way he prepares us.”

The US squad will be headed to Venezuela to take part in Copa America. They will be without Howard’s services however. He will be headed back to Merseyside to start pre-season training with the team.