"Trinidad"
low ceiling. pop. of approx 1 million. i think that we will start to see them become less successful in the years to come
"Mexico is getting much weaker"
nah. they are just the victim of an uncharacteristically hard third round qualifying group
"influx of youth like Bradley, Edu, Adu, etc."
started long before that. we are starting to see returns from some of our intitial success in international youth tournaments i.e. starting to see some of the talent on those teams come into their own on the senior nats stage. remember that players like landon donovan, damarcus beasley, and oguchi onyewu (from the '99 U17 WC 4th place team and first US residency program) are starting to hit their prime
i've been very impressed with this group's ability to go on the road in qualifying (guatemala and cuba--consistently underrated because no one knows a god damned thing about their team--especially) and take three points. this is not something we have been able to do on a regular basis in the past
unrelated: have a look at this guy in the t&t game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Francisco_Torres