Each player brings something special to the proverbial table.
Veteran forward Brian McBride is fearless, especially when it comes to battling for air balls near the opponents' goal.
Eighteen-year-old striker Jozy Altidore has tons of potential. He has shown some of it and was awarded for it by receiving the highest transfer fee for a U.S. soccer player.
And everybody knows about Freddy Adu, a former child prodigy who is just coming into his own as the team's leader with a lethal free kick to boot.
Yet, the U.S. men's Olympic team has experienced major problems finding the back of the net -- most recently in the ING Cup in Hong Kong in preparation for the Beijing Games. The USA meet Japan in their first Group B match in Tianjin at 5 p.m. local time Thursday (5 a.m. ET).
It is a must-win situation for the U.S., which plays the favored Netherlands in Tianjin Sunday before finishing its first-round schedule against Nigeria in Beijing Aug. 13.
The ING Cup only continued a tradition that began in March, when the U.S. scored but six goals in five games -- half of them in the 3-0 victory against Canada that clinched a berth -- at the CONCACAF qualifying tournament.
U.S. coach Peter Nowak has become weary of hearing about what his charges can't do. Yet, it is difficult to ignore the truth.
"Everybody is trying to point out the negatives, but I look at the positive side," he said. "As a coach you're always concerned about the team not creating chances, but during the qualifiers they did create a lot of chances. We had the opportunities to score goals, and we did that in the game that mattered the most. Against Canada in the semifinal we scored three goals and as far as I know it doesn't really matter how many goals you score if you win.
"In today's football it's not possible to run up a score because the games are so tight. In every situation, every free kick and corner kick is very valuable. If you look at Euro 2008, Germany played Portugal. Portugal was very fluid, but the Germans scored goals on free kicks and nobody really complained about that."
Adu, the standout U.S. player during qualifying, said everyone must be patient and that the goals will come.
"The ING Cup was a chance for us all to figure each other out on the field and work on some things," he said. "Obviously we would have loved to score a goal but I think we created enough chances. The goal-scoring part is going to come. We've been doing some finishing at training and hopefully it translates into the games."
Creating chances is one thing. Scoring goals is another, especially in a three-game opening round in which the result of the first game could go a long way determining a team's fate.
"I wouldn't say we're concerned about it," Altidore said of goal scoring. "It's going to be very difficult and it's going to take a lot of work from all of us to control our destiny. We have a lot of firepower on this team and a bunch of players who have the ability to score. There are no concerns with our scoring, I think we're going to be fine."
The partnership of the 18-year-old Altidore and the wily old veteran McBride, however, failed to produce any goals in the tournament.
Altidore said, "it's been a little bit of a learning curve. But at the same time I've definitely become comfortable with him and the way he plays and how he likes to play. I think we're doing well as of late and I think whoever ends up playing up there alongside him is going to be successful because he's a very easy player to play with."
The last time the U.S. took on Japan in the Olympics, the two teams played in an epic battle at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney. The U.S. managed to survive in a penalty-kick tiebreaker, winning 5-4 after a 2-2 tie.
The Japanese, who are playing in their fourth consecutive Olympics, traditionally field technically strong teams in whatever age-group competition in which they are entered. Nowak scouted Japan in the Toulon tournament in May.
"I think the strength of the Japanese team is their whole team, the way they work together and understand each other very well," he said. "They collectively are very strong and never give up. They know the game and the discipline it takes and at any given time they can hurt you."
Adu watched Japan's 2-1 victory against Australia in Kobe, Japan on TV July 24 and was impressed.
"They looked pretty good," he said. "We know we have our work cut out for us. ... We have to go out there and do what we know how to do, play our game. We've got the players and the talent on this team to do well here."
Slowly, but surely, the U.S. has learned about its foes. As a member of Heerenveen in the Dutch Eredivisie, former MetroStars midfielder Michael Bradley played against Japanese midfielder Keisuke Honda.
"He's a very mobile guy," he said. "He likes to move around a lot. Certainly he's a good player that we'll have to keep an eye on. I've only played against him once and on that day we beat his team so I don't think I saw everything he has in that game."
Both teams will face several common opponents -- the heat, humidity and extremely bad air pollution (some studies rank it worse than Beijing) of this city of 10 million, whose population ranks it third in China and 20th in the world.
"Unfortunately, every team doesn't have a recipe or quick answer to how his preparations are going to go," Nowak said. "We don't know how the players will react to the heat, how they're going to recover."
Nowak cited the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Korea and Japan. He spoke to former U.S. national coach Bruce Arena, who directed the Americans into a surprising quarterfinal finish, and to some friends in Germany and Poland.
"There was a significant difference in the preparations there and we tried to find answers based on their experience," said Nowak, adding that his friends "said that the conditions are very extreme for the players. We just want to make sure that our fitness is there. We have some players who are playing in very hot conditions in the U.S., and we also have European players who just starting preseason. We want to get them on the same page."
Getting a couple of goals wouldn't be a bad idea either.
Michael Lewis covers soccer for the New York Daily News and is editor of BigAppleSoccer.com. He can be reached at SoccerWriter516@aol.com. Views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's, and not necessarily those of Major League Soccer or MLSnet.com.
