It wasn’t right. It wasn’t smart.

But anyone who says they didn’t see this coming had not been paying attention.

Landon Donovan, booted from the U.S. national team.

He will not play in the 2014 World Cup … and the average American fan is aghast.

Yes, this is the Landon Donovan who is the leading scorer in U.S. national team history (57 goals), the country’s leader in both World Cup matches (11) and World Cup goals (5), key figure at three World Cups … but relentlessly decent, remarkably non-egocentric … but also not good enough for coach Jurgen Klinsmann.

What happened?

Let’s try to cut to the heart of this, reconstructing it from afar. Knowing one man more than a little, and the other mostly by observation.

Klinsmann never liked Landon. Not from Day 1. I am convinced of it. He was jerking him around from the start.

He certainly would have been uncomfortable with the notion of a player being more popular than he, the coach, was. That was where it began. American fans seemed to like the American player, face of American football, more than they did the hired gun from Germany. Landon shouldn’t have let himself become so popular.

But it was wider than that. Klinsmann knew of Landon’s rejection of German football. Twice. Each time pushing Bayer Leverkusen to let go back to the U.S. to play in Major League Soccer. Klinsmann would have considered that a failure and a sign of weakness, giving up the clearly superior German game for the underdeveloped American game.

He also would soon have grasped that Landon is not a guy who instinctively kowtows to coaches. American athletes often are like that. In much of the world, the coach says “run” and the players run. Americans like Landon often ask, “Why?” And coaches hate that, too. Blind obedience is what is required.

So, Landon was a guy who made Klinsmann (a product and purveyor of the jawohl! German system of player relations) uncomfortable. And then came “the break”.

That was the other turning point. Landon stepped away from the game at the end of the 2012 MLS season. He said he needed a break or he would be no good to anyone. Those of us who know him even a little know he wouldn’t kid around about that. He went to Cambodia. He did charity work. He decompressed.

He said he would be back in March — after missing a national team training camp in January and the first of the year’s World Cup qualifiers.

That was too much for Klinsmann to bear. Landon said he knew he had to work his way back, and Klinsmann made it unpleasant, sending him to the Gold Cup with the rest of the B Team, where Landon played well and without complaint as the U.S. won the tournament.

Only then was he allowed to return to the national team’s World Cup qualifying campaign, where he played well.

Still … still … Klinsmann had a problem with Landon. He didn’t quite get him. What did he want? How could he motivate him? Landon was a guy who pretty much dictated how his career would go, and that was downright unnatural. He even took time off and Bruce Arena and the Galaxy were OK with that.

Klinsmann was not.

Now we get to 2014. Landon is nicked up. A knee. An ankle. Something. And he is not playing well.

Even the most avid Landon supporter had to concede he has had a rough spring. The dreadful game in Tijuana that he spent mostly walking as the Galaxy was knocked out of the Concacaf Champions League. His failure to score two-plus months into the MLS season. He needed one goal to set the MLS record; he still needs that one goal.

I think he has been dealing with an injury, and was trying to avoid exacerbating that injury, trying to get to Brazil in good enough condition to make a difference. But in the meantime he looked a lot like a player who had lost his energy and his fitness and his edge and, in the soccer world, a 32-year-old forward is old.

And if you are Jurgen Klinsmann, already inclined to find Landon Donovan a distraction and an annoyance, that sort of Landon Donovan is easy to exile from your team.

In Klinsmann’s defense, it is fair to dissect Landon’s game and try to be unbiased about it.

His game was always based on speed. He scored on counters and on breakaways. The way speedy guys score. He is 5-foot-8, so he doesn’t score in the air from crosses. He is not a target man. He is not likely to score from distance on a free kick.

So if he suddenly can’t run like he did a few years ago … and you see it in the first week of practice … and you never liked the guy in the first place … then you want him gone, and you don’t wait for the June 2 Fifa deadline. You want him gone now, to be sure his free-thinking ways don’t infect some of the others.

To be a bit unfair to Klinsmann, Landon also didn’t grow up in Germany, which apparently is a disadvantage on a Klinsmann team. No fewer than five guys on the U.S. 23-man squad are German-Americans, with the emphasis on “German”. The five guys grew up in Germany, they came up with German clubs and played for Germany’s youth teams and their first language is German. Klinsmann “gets” those guys. He speaks their language. Yes, he has created a clique within his team, but it’s his clique.

So, Landon is gone, and Julian Green, John Brooks, Tim Chandler, Fabian Johnson and Jermaine Jones … Deutsche fussball spielers … are going to Brazil.

(In a way, that is a blunt repudiation of American soccer players. It’s like it’s 1994 all over again and the U.S. coach feels like he needs to scour the world — or in Klinsmann’s case, Germany — to scrape up a team. Thomas Dooley, Earnie Stewart, Fernando Clavijo, Roy Wegerle then … Julian Green et al now.)

What should have happened?

Klinsmann should have taken Landon to Brazil.

If he wasn’t fit enough to play 90 minutes, he could have provided an attacking presence off the bench. Landon, for 30 minutes when behind 1-0? (Remember the final minutes of the Tunisia game, 2010?) Even without his 2002 wheels, he would have been a help. As opposed to the children like Green and Brooks, who have little experience with senior sides, let alone national teams, let alone World Cups.

It is a bad business, but I had a bad feeling about this. A month ago. I thought Klinsmann would take Landon, knowing he would behave (his comment after being cut was quite mild) and avoided the inevitable backlash from American fans.

Because if this team gets to Brazil and the kids look scared and are mostly useless, and the U.S. is out after three games … U.S. fans will be ticked but, then, Jurgen Klinsmann doesn’t really care what American fans think. He proved that by getting rid of Landon Donovan.