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Los Angeles Galaxy midfielder David Beckham — yes, he’s still on the team — hopes to make his very belated 2010 MLS debut on Sept. 11 when the Columbus Crew visit Home Depot Center in a match that will have heavy Supporters Shield implications.

Beckham, 35, has not played since tearing his Achilles tendon in March while on loan to AC Milan. The injury cost him a spot on England’s World Cup team (but not on the bench) and the vast majority of his fourth season with the Galaxy.

“The doctors’ original date was Oct. 1, but I always kind of said I want to be ready before then. I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hopefully will play in part of the game here against Columbus. I’ll be on the bench, and hopefully I’ll get on the field for 15-20 minutes. That’s what I’m looking at,” Beckham told the Galaxy’s Web site.

The midfielder trained with L.A. for the first time on Aug. 11 and has gradually been increasing his workload. “You have good days and you have bad days,” he said. “It’s a bit difficult because when you don’t play in games. That’s where you get the real fitness from. But I’m doing what I can in the gym and what I can on the field, just trying to get strength back in my leg.”

The road back has been a long one. In addition to the disappointment of missing out on what would have been his fourth World Cup, Beckham said he has been “kick(ed) up the backside” by the difficulty of overcoming such a damaging injury. He was on crutches for six weeks, and then it was another month before he could put any weight on his left leg. He couldn’t jog without a limp until early August, and lately has had to endure additional intrigue surrounding his relationship with England coach Fabio Capello and his future with the national team

“The rehab has been tough. Being motivated to do the same thing over and over again, twice a day for the last four months has been difficult, but I’m getting there,” he said. “I always set a target of when I first did it I was trying to get back before the six months was up. Hopefully I can do that.”

Los Angeles will be hoping he can do that as well. Despite Beckham’s absence, the club shot out to what looked like an unassailable lead in the standings in April and May. But since the World Cup, the Galaxy has fallen to Earth, enduring a 3-6-1 slump that’s included elimination from both the CONCACAF Champions League and U.S. Open Cup. Its lead atop the MLS table has been trimmed to two points. The Galaxy is 13-5-4. The trailing team? Columbus (12-5-5), of course.

“I don’t think it’s a huge problem,” Beckham said of the slide. “We had such a great start to the season, and in the middle of the season there’s always going to be a point where you have a dip in form. We’re going through that at the moment. We have to realize as individuals and as a team that to win the MLS Cup you have to go through the difficult moments. We enjoyed the first part of the season, and we have to find a way of getting ourselves out of this. It’s not going to be hard because we’ve got the ability, we’ve got the players and we’ve definitely got the unity within the team.”

Beckham has played in just 45 games in his MLS career, which began in the summer of 2007, tallying seven goals and 16 assists. The numbers certainly don’t match his $6.5 million annual salary. Not even close. But if he can return and help the Galaxy capture their third MLS Cup, the infuriating fits and starts over the past three years certainly will be largely forgotten.

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It wasn’t just the stadiums in South Africa where you were subjected to the hideous drone of the vuvuzela. While Bafana Bafana was still in the tournament, the racket would begin at sunrise.

There was never a need to set the alarm — someone walking outside the hotel would take care of your wake-up call for you. Fans brought them to shopping malls. You’d hear them while sitting in a restaurant eating a meal.

Tens of thousands of vuvuzelas, when united in the rhythmic blowing that would occur about once each half at the World Cup, ravaged the ear drums. Talking to the person sitting next to you could be impossible. Escaping onto the stadium concourse, or even to the bathroom, didn’t always solve the problem.

For example, the toilets set up behind the media seating at Green Point Stadium in Cape Town were housed in trailers in areas accessible to fans, and several poked the plastic horns in through the little windows and sounded off, right in someone’s ear, while they were using the urinal.

The buzzing was the soundtrack of the World Cup, and for most it was tolerable because it was temporary and, we were told, part of South Africa’s unique soccer culture. But there were several signs of trouble — most notably that many foreign fans seemed to delight in taking up the custom and that many were buying boxes of the things to bring home from South Africa. Would the plague spread?

A few days after I returned from the World Cup, a D.C. United fan unleashed his vuvuzela a few feet from my right ear as we were walking toward RFK Stadium. I jumped like one of the recently-returned soldiers in a movie who hears a car backfire.

Enough is enough, it seems. On Wednesday, UEFA put its collective foot down and outlawed the vuvuzela at its matches, and American soccer may be close behind.

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Nobody who hires a coach is going to be too concerned about his fashion sense or grim public persona. Wins matter, and by that metric, Bob Bradley really had only one mark against him during his four year tenure — his team failed to defeat Ghana in the second round of the World Cup.

Should the U.S. have won that game? Ghana was ranked 32nd in the world heading into the tournament, compared to the Americans’ 14th. But nobody takes those positions too seriously. The Black Stars boasted players who were regulars in the English, Italian, French and Spanish leagues, among others, along with a core of youngsters who won the 2009 Under-20 World Cup. They were the best African team in the competition.

The real issue, it seems, was that expectations soared when the U.S. won its group and when Ghana, Uruguay and South Korea emerged as the obstacles on the road to the semifinals. U.S. Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati admitted that immediately after the loss to Ghana and again on Wednesday, when he spoke to reporters following the announcement that Bradley will coach the national team through 2014.

“If we had finished second in the group and played Germany (in the round-of-16) and lost in overtime, 2-1, my guess is that we all would have felt differently, even though the final outcome would ahve been the same,” Gulati said. “With a little time to reflect, and you look back, it was a good World Cup experience. It hasn’t’ changed my view that we all would have wanted another game or two.”

Sure, but only the most myopic of American soccer fans would insist that the U.S. is among the best eight teams in the world. It’s really difficult to make the World Cup quarterfinals, and no coach on the planet would be expected to take the U.S. there without a good dose of luck. The Ghana game was a 50/50 proposition, and the Americans took it to overtime and got beat. Beside that, Bradley won the 2007 CONCACAF Gold Cup, finished first in the region’s World Cup qualifying competition and beat Spain on the way to the 2009 Confederations Cup final.

Yet fans across the country seem apoplectic that Bradley’s contract was renewed. His team gave up early goals too often in South Africa, but there’s no real evidence that it came down to coaching. He played Ricardo Clark and Robbie Findley against Ghana, yes. Hindsight suggests those were bad moves, but there aren’t necessarily players who would have performed better. Plenty of other decisions worked out (Benny Feilhaber, Jonathan Bornstein, etc.), and all coaches have players who screw up. As Gulati said Wednesday, there were 31 teams wishing something had gone differently at the World Cup, not to mention the 170 or so that didn’t even qualify.

So what, exactly, were the biggest arguments against retaining Bradley, other than the fact that he’s a bit aloof, rambles a lot and not foreign enough to satisfy the legions of self-hating American soccer snobs? Bradley can’t develop teenage players, nor can he spur more people to by tickets to MLS games, thereby boosting the revenue/salary cap for a league that needs to continue to improve. He has to work with what’s available, and what’s available is a team good enough to make the second round of the World Cup. Which isn’t bad for a country that’s been taking soccer seriously for only 25 years.

On Wednesday, FanHouse asked Bradley to reveal what he thought he should have done differently during his tenure as a whole or in South Africa. Where were the mistakes? What should he have improved upon?

“It’s always the ability to be more successful in the hardest games,” he said. “For example, we had stretches in the last four years where our defending as a team wasn’t very good. We worked a lot to make sure that there’s a good understanding on the field in terms of how we move, where we pressure, how we cover each other, and yet when you get to the most difficult games that doesn’t always mean that you do it as well in those games as you need to in order to win. Things get put to the test. It may be at one point that things are quite good. A little while later it shows as much as we’ve improved, it must continue.

“We have really tried to make sure that our players, through this entire cycle, understand what the levels are, understand what the best teams do well. We’ve played in games that have tested us to perform at that level and to give players a real first-hand experience of how we need to continue improve, and when I talk about the work continuing, it’s with all that in mind.”

So his biggest regret is that there were moments where the U.S. simply couldn’t match the best teams in the world, whether it was team defending, finishing or handling an untimely turnover. Lots of other coaches have those same regrets. And other, far more famous, accomplished and European coaches, have more. Fabio Capello’s England was a petulant disaster, from John Terry’s press conference mutiny to Wayne Rooney’s post-game temper tantrum. Its second-round elimination was far more disturbing than the U.S.’s.

Raymond Domenech presided over the most embarrassing World Cup meltdown in history, and ended his tenure with France by refusing to shake the hand of South Africa coach Carlos Alberto Parreira. Marcelo Lippi selected an aging Italian side that was nowhere near good enough to handle the rigors of a World Cup, Sven-Göran Eriksson suffered a first-round elimination and Carlos Queiroz’ Portugal played well in one of its four games. These are the types of coaches that angry American fans want to replace Bob Bradley. Did they all suddenly become morons after crossing the equator in June, or does soccer really come down to which players perform best at a given moment (or lousy referees)?

There are more accomplished coaches than Bob Bradley. But they all have strikes against them as well, and to his credit, Bradley runs a program that represents the United States with dignity and honor. And isn’t that what it’s all about? There are no strikes, player mutinies or scandals. His players work hard and enjoy playing with each other, and his team doesn’t turn every big-game handshake into a fistfight like the Mexicans. Bradley didn’t turn every press conference into an antagonistic battle like Diego Maradona and Dunga, and he’s not a mercenary who will jump ship at the first sign of hardship. He fields a team that real American soccer fans can be proud of, for the most part, and with which they can identify.

Gulati said that he and Bradley were stopped three times Monday on the way to Starbucks to get coffee following their negotiation, and fans “thanked him for the World Cup performance.”

There’s that, and the on-field accomplishments outlined above. All of those, it seems, should outweigh the loss to Ghana. If Bradley continues putting Findley and Clark in positions they can’t handle, then there’s cause for consternation. But in the meantime, it’s hard to figure out how Gulati could have gone in a different direction.

Jürgen Klinsmann is an almost allegorical representation of what we wish the national team coach to be. His record isn’t that spectacular. Third place at the World Cup is great, but few traditional soccer powers hosting the tournament have done worse, and the Germans needed Argentina to shoot itself in the foot to get to the semifinals. Joachim Löw’s work with the team in 2006 and 2010 may have had more to do with the performance, anyway. Klinsmann didn’t last a full season at Bayern Munich in 2008-09.

Bradley isn’t the perfect coach. But that doesn’t mean that at this time and in this place, he wasn’t the right man for the job. It’s hard to find tangible evidence to the contrary. It would have been nice to have beaten Ghana. But if anyone is driven to improve, it’s Bradley himself.

“I’m not easily satisfied,” he said Wednesday. “There are always two sides to this. There is a side in terms of what the team is all about, how it competes, what are the performances like. We look back at this cycle and in those ways we felt good about those things. In those ways, the response around the world and at home was positive.

“At the same time, we recognize that at every tournament you want to go as far as you can. You want to win and you want to make the final. We feel good about what we have accomplished, but that doesn’t mean that we think it’s all perfect. That’s what motivates us and our players so we’ll continue to work at it.”

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Bob Bradley will remain the coach of the U.S. national team through the 2014 World Cup, the U.S. Soccer Federation announced late Monday afternoon. In recent days, there were indications that momentum was building against the 52-year-old New Jersey native. Instead, Bradley will guide the national team and continue to shape American soccer at its highest level for four more years.

U.S. Soccer provided no additional details or quotes from either Bradley or president Sunil Gulati, who met late last week in Los Angeles. Reports then surfaced that Gulati had resumed his pursuit of former German national team coach Jürgen Klinsmann, who had rebuffed him in 2006. There was never any confirmation of that rumor, and no other names surfaced as potential candidates. Meanwhile, Bradley expressed interest in a possible move to England, but nothing materialized.

The decision likely seems rest on the fact that each represented the best option for the other. U.S. Soccer was not going to be able to entice or afford a coach with a better resume that Bradley, and Bradley was never going to be considered a viable candidate for a high-profile job in Europe. It was either the national team or a vacation, followed by a return to Major League Soccer. That isn’t a very difficult choice.

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