USA's friendly against Panama will reveal whether team's best attribute still exists; By Steve Davis

Generally speaking, journalists should avoid match predictions. We should report, analyze, interpret and attempt to add context. But if we could truly predict results, well, we’d be gamblers living large in Vegas.

Something else journalists shouldn’t do: assign real weight to the result of any friendly. If supporters want to get their soccer shorts in a big ol’ twist because of a meaningless match, that’s fine. But journalists should know better.

Then again, breaking the rules can be fun. So … here goes anyway!

The United States will beat Panama on Sunday in the second match of its ambitious 2015 schedule. Further, the United States needs to trump its visitors that day, even if the contest outside Los Angeles is just a meaningless, January friendly.

The United States national program, fronted lately by proud and highly professional figures like Clint Dempsey, Michael Bradley and Tim Howard, has typically managed to rise when challenged over the past 8-10 years. Not always, but more often than not. During this period, a U.S. national team feeling good about things was liable to become a tad complacent.

But a U.S. national team with a chip on its shoulder, one backed into a corner, one whose liabilities were being circled and whose abilities are were being questioned – that’s the one most liable to truly bear its sharper teeth. That’s the defiant, determined version that has so often made U.S. Soccer supporters rip into standing applause.

History has taught us that the United States is better as an underdog, or when they hear once too often that they just aren’t up to the job.

Remember how things were getting so hot in Bob Bradley’s kitchen in 2009? Supporters were getting restless after a spring of up-and-down results that reached a bottom in a 3-1 World Cup qualifying loss to Costa Rica. Not long after that came Confederations Cup defeats to Italy (3-1) and Brazil (3-0).  So things were about to completely unravel, right?

Well, not exactly. What happened next was the high point of Bob Bradley’s time in charge. Goals by Charlie Davies, Bradley and Dempsey saw the team bounce back spectacularly in a 3-0 win over Egypt. That was just a warm-up, as it turned out; next came a stunning 2-0 win over mighty Spain. That was Spain at its best, in the middle of its incredible strut through world soccer history, having not lost in 35 previous matches over three years.

The national team next reached a near-nadir in 2013. Everyone remembers the Brian Straus article that exposed the festering wounds in Jurgen Klinsmann’s program. No matter where you stood in that debate – Was the team really so close to mutiny and epic collapse, or were there just a few malcontents kicking about in the margins? – the story and subsequent conversations clearly put Klinsmann’s camp on edge, and certainly under stress. That’s not to mention the stress of the World Cup standings at the time; a loss to Costa Rica could have left the efforts to reach Brazil 2014 on the skids. Oh, my!

As you know, the next few days were program high points under Klinsmann: a pressure-venting win over the Ticos in the unforgettable Snow Clasico and a worthy, historic and oh-so-helpful draw at Mexico. Unified, fortified and focused anew, the United States was off and running toward Brazil.

We seem to be approaching something similar in the early days of 2015. We keep holding our noses at these results, and this is where the math gets tricky.

One result in a friendly doesn’t mean a darn thing. I say it again and again: never assign too much significance to a win, loss or draw in a game that matters diddly-squat. We can pick out a few morsels of knowledge here and there in the evaluations, mostly on individual abilities when the game gets faster and more difficult, but singular results are generally as meaningless as cold coffee left in the pot.

But! String a few results together and clearer pictures can sometimes begin to emerge. A few bad ones bunched together and the inquests can begin to reach critical mass. That’s where we are now after unimpressive draws at home to Ecuador and Honduras, after that loss in London to Colombia, after a black eye in Ireland and, just the other day, a loss to Chile’s “B” team. You may say that Klinsmann’s bunch was at a fitness-level disadvantage due to the vagaries of league calendars, and fair enough. But I might counter with: that was mostly a U.S. first-choice outfit, which more or less mitigates the Chileans’ edge in conditioning, or should have.

The United States didn’t look awful against Chile. (Throw out any assessments of the 3-5-2 debut; we need a larger sample to vote “yay” or “nay” on this one.) There were checkmarks to be found in Mix Diskerud’s tackling and his sweet set-up for Jozy Altidore, in Altidore’s overall effort and smooth finish, in Brek Shea’s first important kick of a ball in two years, in DeAndre Yedlin’s two-way work and in Steve Birnbaum’s mostly admirable first cap.

But the performance by Klinsmann’s team certainly wasn’t tight, either. Stacked on top of those other yucky results, the level of public consternation is understandably mounting. As I wrote last week, Klinsmann is seeing the benefit of the doubt slip away, his team with just one win in nine matches since John Brooks hammered that dramatic game-winner against Ghana last June in Natal. Altidore himself said that most importantly, “… we need to win that game” against Panama.

Altidore desperately needed to score a goal to shake some of the Sunderland funk from his shoes. He did. A nice one, as noted above.

Now, players like himself, Dempsey and Bradley need to remind themselves that they can still walk off the field in a U.S. shirt without feeling badly or indifferent about the team performance. The United States needs to close out a game and not give up yet another late clunker, and every athlete in the StubHub center locker room on Sunday will know all that.

The bet here is that Klinsmann and co. get that badly needed win. Yes, it’s only against Panama, so that may sound like crawling out onto a pretty thick limb as predictions go. Then again, if you bet on the United States to beat Ecuador last fall in Connecticut or wagered on a Yank victory against Honduras a few days later in Florida, well, you are a few dollars poorer.

Gritty resolve has long been a hallmark of the program. Klinsmann is attempting to change some things now. We’ll see Sunday (4 p.m. ET kickoff in Carson, Calif., live on ESPN and UniMas) if his efforts at evolution and revolution have unintentionally cooked away one of the best attributes the U.S. national team had going for it: finding its best self in times of distress.

Editor’s note: Steve Davis writes a weekly column for World Soccer Talk. He’ll continue to share his thoughts and opinions on US and MLS soccer topics every Wednesday, as well as news reports throughout the week. You can follow Steve on Twitter at @stevedavis90. Plus, read Steve’s previous columns on World Soccer Talk. .