Landon Donovan has five goals and seven assists in five games so far in the 2013 Gold Cup.

He has been the best player in the tournament. He has played all but about 20 minutes in five victories ahead of Sunday’s final. And we still are discussing whether he should 1) be recalled for World Cup qualifiers later this year, and 2) whether he should start.

An ESPN blogger, who presumably has been hanging around the U.S. coach Jurgen Klinsmann, makes a point of denigrating Donovan’s performance by referring to the Gold Cup competition as coming against everyone’s “B-side — or worse” and suggests that Donovan in the World Cup qualifying mix “creates a delicate situation in terms of team chemistry”.

Another ESPN blogger, with a greater grasp of what Donovan has meant to U.S. soccer, suggests Donovan certainly is back in the qualifying mix — but wonders if he can get back into the first XI.

Donovan took off four months, remember? Klinsmann certainly does. He apparently took it as a personal affront. Even after Donovan’s two goals and an assist in the Gold Cup semifinal,the German said: “I told him that in our conversations: ‘[How] I measure you, your benchmark is the best Landon Donovan ever.’ I’m not taking anything less than that.”

Five goals and seven assists? Is that enough? Or does he have to score the winner in the final, too?

Maybe the Gold Cup isn’t the toughest international competition around, but it was Donovan’s first chance back in the national team since his sabbatical. And he seized that chance and has crushed it.

That indicates current form, for a man who is still only 31. And then we have more than a decade of history of him proving his worth to the U.S. team.

Let’s revisit.

–He is the most productive scorer in U.S. soccer history, with 56 goals, now, in 150 appearances, since his 2000 debut. Five of those goals came in World Cups; no American has scored more. (To get more of a sense of what Donovan has meant to U.S. soccer, check the federation’s records section.)

–He scored the vital goal in several of the U.S. team’s greatest moments. The killer second goal, after a 70-yard run, against Mexico in the 2002 World Cup, putting the U.S. in the quarterfinals; the ball-through-a-mail-slot goal (go to the 3:00 mark) against Slovenia in the 2010 World Cup, sparking a comeback from a 2-0 deficit to a vital 2-2 draw; the 92nd-minute tap-in to beat Algeria in the 2010 World Cup, the final move of a sequence that began with him taking the ball 30 yards and making the pass that led directly to his goal — which set off wild celebrations among U.S. fans around the world.

–Until the first six games of the final round of 2014 World Cup qualifying, Donovan played a vital role in every U.S. success since 2000. Isn’t that a guy who might be able to help in the big games to come?

It’s so perverse.

After taking that four-month, mind-clearing sabbatical, Klinsmann has made Donovan crawl. Ignoring him for the qualifiers, sending him instead to the Gold Cup (an assignment Donovan never complained about, by the way), letting his minutes pile up — and seeing him score five goals, nonetheless.

And still … and still we have Shaka Hislop, an ESPN analyst, suggesting Donovan’s “international career might have been over” if he had not played well in the Gold Cup. And I assume Shaka has been talking to U.S. soccer people — and his assessment is accurate. Thus, Klinsmann hoped to bury Landon; but he responded with superb play.

This is beyond penance. Sticking with the Roman Catholic theme, this is doing the Stations of the Cross. Again and again.

Brian Phillips of grantland.com produced a very well-written piece today about Donovan’s predicament.

It is not at all clear the author has had any face time with Landon, and his head-shrinking at a remove is a bit presumptive, but he is right about this:

Landon Donovan is not your typical soccer player. In any way. Not in terms of results, career path or how his mind operates.

I have known Landon him since he was 17, and he does, in fact, assess his emotional and intellectual health in making decisions. What is going on inside his head does matter. But petty princelings like Jurgen Klinsmann apparently find that too revolutionary a concept to wrap his own head around.