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Pressing World Cup Question for U.S.: Who’ll Score the Goals?

An American team that cycled through strikers during the qualifying period needs to settle on one before heading to Qatar. The good news is some of the options are hitting their stride.

Weston McKennie, left, and Christian Pulisic are not high on the U.S. coaching staff’s list of concerns ahead of Friday’s friendly match against Japan.Credit...Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

COLOGNE, Germany — Evaluating any soccer player, with all the multifaceted layers of performance, all the twists and turns of action on the field, poses a complicated challenge. Yet the game’s strikers are so frequently reduced to a kind of rudimentary binary:

Are they scoring goals or not?