American coach Bruce Arena was all smiles and bonhomie after Saturday’s USA-England game in Chicago.

“I thought it was a good game,” he said. “I was pleased with our team’s effort for the second half … over all, a good experience … it was positive for the game in this country.”

That sounds like the winner speaking, but Arena’s team lost, 2-1.The positive side to the defeat, it seems, was that it will serve as a wake-up call before the upcoming games against Costa Rica and Panama. Those are important World Cup qualifiers, and this was only an exhibition – “just a game to sharpen us up for the qualifiers,” said midfielder Clint Dempsey.

Anyway, captain Landon Donovan felt that the U.S. should have won: “A few of us gave them too much respect; that is a team we should have beaten, in my opinion.”

Donovan has a point. England was well below full strength, missing David Beckham, Michael Owen, Rio Ferdinand, Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, and Frank Lampard; realistically only two of the starting 11 in this game could expect to be regulars for England. True, the U.S. was not at full strength either, but its absentees were of less significance. Neither the missing players nor the closeness of the score line can excuse the glaring fact that the U.S. played very poorly, indeed.

Even a cursory look at the praise Arena gave his team reveals that all of it has to do with the team’s fighting spirit, its determination, its refusal to buckle even though it was outplayed in the first half and went to the locker room two goals down. All of which is true and highly commendable. But where was the soccer?

Anyone hoping to see the Americans stringing together passing movements, or playing with the sort of rhythm and flow that could exercise any sort of control over the game, or showing any evidence of subtlety or creativity, even doing anything out of the ordinary, was totally out of luck. Banality ruled. But it was worse than that, for this was a particularly brainless variety of banality. Arena, a man with a largely warranted reputation as a canny tactician, seems to have slept through this one.

It is common knowledge in soccer that English defenders are “good in the air.” The English domestic game bristles with a constant barrage of high crosses into the penalty area, and English defenders have a lifetime of practice in dealing with them.

So what form did the American offense assume? Why, a cannonade of long balls aimed at the English penalty area. A blitz of random missiles launched in the hope that the England defenders would make a mistake, that in a general scramble around the goal, the ball would drop and allow a shot, or that a forward would be able to head the ball down for a teammate to run on to.

The English have come up with a name for these plays; they call them “knock-downs,” and the ugliness of the term perfectly mirrors the crudeness of the action. On rare occasions, though, they work, and that very rarity can even give a successful knock-down an unexpected beauty. Fittingly, it was Josh Wolff – the standout American in this game – who came up with the Americans’ most sparkling play, stooping to take Steve Ralston’s long ball and head it softly and superbly into the stride of Donovan … who whacked the ball wide of the goal.

Ralston’s long ball was one of 17 that I counted in the first half. None resulted in a goal. A change of tactics in the second half, maybe? Not a bit of it: Eighteen more long balls made their way into the area. From one of them – a free kick – the English defense made the hoped-for error and Dempsey got the lone American goal.

Maybe that goal justifies the other 34 fruitless attempts. But can it justify the obvious fact that if a team’s dominant attacking thought is to repeatedly hoof the ball 30 or 40 yards downfield, that team can pay little attention to other, more varied, more intelligent, methods of attack?

Such as passing or working the ball into the opposing penalty area on the ground. How many times did the Americans try that? By my count, three times in the first half, twice in the second. Such plays usually require the ball to be worked through midfield on the ground. How many times did the USA do that, how many times did we see the exciting sweep of on-the-move wall-passes, a pretty good yardstick of creative midfield play? Not once. That’s my count again, but I defy anyone to show me evidence of clever, or even straightforward, passing combinations leading into the England penalty area.

Admittedly, the USA was without Claudio Reyna, the team’s usual captain and midfield brain. But this is a role that Donovan is surely capable of filling if called upon to do so. Constructive midfield play also needs a group of midfielders with vision, touch, and accurate passing skills; it requires an elastic imagination to see Ralston, Dempsey, and Kerry Zavagnin as that group. What’s more, midfield play usually starts with the ball being fed forward from the defense, and all four U.S. defenders – Eddie Pope, Cory Gibbs, Steve Cherundolo, and Greg Vanney – spent the afternoon hammering the ball over the heads of their own midfielders.

There is an explanation for Arena’s primitive tactics: that he is being as canny as ever, because this is the way he wants his team (still lacking Reyna) to play against Costa Rica. Costa Rican coach Alexandre Guimaraes is in no doubt: He recently scheduled a warm-up game for his squad against Norway “to get used to the high crosses.”

It is a sad comment on the state of U.S. soccer if Arena believes his team can beat Costa Rica only by regressing to the thud-and-blunder coarseness of the long-ball game.

The wake-up call sounded by the game against the England reserves is not the one heard by Arena, who wants everyone to be sharper, or the one identified by Donovan, who emphasized speed of play – “I can’t imagine the Costa Ricans are going to play at the same tempo, so I have no doubt we’ll be able to deal with them more easily.”

That’s probably true. The lesson to be learned, however, does not hinge on the Americans’ mental or athletic qualities, which are never in doubt. What’s needed is a more sophisticated version of soccer, one that will enable the Americans to compete above the level of England’s B team, one that will not make a mockery of the USA’s current FIFA world ranking, where it shares 10th place with Italy. On the basis of this performance, I would say the USA is overvalued by about 25 places. It belongs down with the unimaginative likes of Norway and Finland.