The trouble with trying not to hype up Cavan Sullivan is that he keeps on doing cool stuff. Like this past weekend, when he scampers along on a Philadelphia Union breakaway, loses his man by stopping so suddenly it’s as if he’s pulled a ripcord, back-heels the cutback behind his standing leg, watches it slowly kiss off the far post and in, and celebrated the goal by bowing and doffing an imaginary top hat to the crowd. Like when he doubles the score by setting up an attack and finishing it himself with a left-footed lash through the goalkeeper’s legs form an acute angle.
Like when he fashions yet another goal by holding up the play and then suddenly springs a teammate up the right flank. It’s hard not to get worked up when an American, two weeks and a day before his 17th birthday, almost matches Lionel Messi for goal involvements in Major League Soccer and the Leagues Cup since the World Cup. When he powers an entire team of grown men to a 10-game unbeaten run.
When he breaks Freddy Adu’s record as the youngest Major League Soccer debutant by 13 days, at 14 years and 293 days old. When he has netted six goals and five assists in his last eight matches. When he appears to be on the eve of his first United States men’s national team call-up.
When his swagger and flair are vindicated by the advanced metrics, which suggest that he has already compiled the best MLS season ever by a teenager, outdoing Alphonso Davies. That he is, in fact, the league’s second-best American player right now. What makes Cavan Sullivan so tantalizing is that he isn’t theoretical.
We have been down this road before. That way madness lies, let me shun that – so warned King Lear. As an American soccer community, we have developed a reflexive recoil against the Godding up of yet another prodigy.
Still, it’s hard to resist, even though we know better. From the experience of Bobby Convey, and Jamar Beasley, and John O’Brien, and Jozy Altidore, and Juan Agudelo, and Brek Shea, and Julian Green, and Gedion Zelalem. They had skills and bodies and brains we could dream on, which we never managed to resist.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
