As one might expect, US National Team players were not in high spirits coming off the field after Wednesday's 2-0 loss to England at Wembley.

About 76,000 fans had just enjoyed an English renaissance, leaving 1,300 travelling Americans to rue a sub-par showing.

"It was not our best performance at all tonight," Steve Cherundolo told American Soccer Daily. "I don't think we found our rhythm in the game from the beginning at all, so we struggled. We didn't cope with the pace of the game so we were playing catch-up."

"England played well and we had an off night. We had high hopes like we do in every game, but we struggled to find the pace of the game. They fit well together as a team and moved together well."

"We just gave them too much respect, especially in the first half," agreed DaMarcus Beasley. "They are a great team, but we didn't impose ourselves enough on them."

"It was not a great performance, but at the same time, we stuck in there and we are a team. One team often loses, so we have to take this in our stride, look at the tape and see what we did wrong."

"We know what our final goal is and that is to qualify, but at the same time, we don't like to lose. You know, we're Americans - we want to be the best at everything. We don't like to lose whether we are playing England, Brazil, France, it does not matter."

Josh Wolff echoed his teammates: "Obviously, playing England is a massive task, but you want to go in with the mindset that you can compete."

"I don't think we did that collectively enough over the 90 minutes well enough. Everyone of the players is disappointed as we didn't create enough as a group and they did a good job of holding us down."

The watching Jay DeMerit put it simply. "We let them dictate the game and we never really made them work really hard," he told American Soccer Daily.

Freddy Adu was more buoyant than most postgame, excited at having made his Wembley debut. "It was unbelievable," he told reporters. "These are the guys I looked up to for so long so it was unbelievable being on the same field as them. It was definitely for me a great learning experience because I want to be at their level one day."

Of his late goal scoring chance, he added: "I would have loved for that ball to have been on my left, but at that moment it was on my right, but I still got a shot on goal and it was a good save."

Eddie Johnson also took some positives from an otherwise melancholic experience. "These are the games that we need," he said, "And we could not ask for a better opponent than the one we played tonight."

"England is one of the best teams in the world and we knew it was going to be difficult especially here on their home turf with the players they put out. I think they continued the same pace for 90 minutes, while for the first 20, we did a good job of moving as a team and they found it difficult to break us down."

"But once we started to get tired legs, they were still playing at the same pace and that was the difference. They work well as a team, they play keep-ball really well and they do a good job of closing down, which made it difficult for us."

"In training this week, we felt confident. Playing in the big stadiums against the big teams in Europe is tough for us. It is still a whole learning experience. It does not happen overnight that we can compete with world class national teams like England. We just need to take what we learned tonight and build on it."

Speaking to BBC Radio, MLS Commissioner Don Garber blamed the defeat on the absence of a certain individual.

"I think we were struggling in a lot of areas," he said, "But we were missing that Wayne Rooney type of player who is dangerous up front, and Landon Donovan is that player for the United States."