USMNT’s World Cup qualifying What’s working, what’s broken and the problem with playing it safe

We’re through two qualification windows for the U.S. men’s national team, and they’ve had two must-win matches to end each one. The USMNT has scraped and stumbled and suffered from a number of self-inflicted wounds. Gregg Berhalter & Co. have wasted points with an overmatched and overthought lineup in Panama. They’ve suffered poor breaks in a draw in El Salvador. They’ve suffered the full weight of CONCACAF, its rough pitches and its occasional rough-and-tumble tactics.

And yet, after two windows that felt in danger of spiraling negatively, the U.S. has 11 points and on pace for 29 over the 16-match qualification, well more than the team will need to qualify. (Up next? A home date with Mexico on Nov. 12 in Cincinnati, live on ESPN2.)

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With things having swayed so dramatically back and forth between good and bad, let’s take a big-picture look at what’s going well, and what isn’t, through six matches.

Jump to: What’s working | What’s not working | And finally…

What’s going well

Well, the U.S. is on pace so far

We’ll start with the most important part. The top three teams from the eight-team group qualify automatically for the 2022 World Cup, with the fourth entering the intercontinental playoff (from which two of four teams qualify). As up-and-down as these first two qualification windows have been, the U.S. sits second in the table, three points ahead of fourth-place Panama and five ahead of fifth-place Costa Rica.

Tim Weah’s 66th-minute shot against Costa Rica on Thursday night in Columbus, which turned into an own goal by Leonel Moreira, gave the U.S. a 2-1 win and flipped what could have been a pretty jumbled table — the U.S. would have been in third place, only two points out of fifth — into one of relative comfort.

They are also clearing the bar, just slightly, from a points-per-game perspective. The goal for…