I think my frustrations are heading towards the comments I've seen the past couple of weeks that he put in no effort at all the entire season. Hyperbole to help your point I guess is what that is.
I think it was Nowak during the Beijing Olympics - and come on, it's Nowak. He was an auto-selection under Bradley and was often first sub off the bench, a privilege I don't think he'd enjoy if Bradley wasn't a fan. The Klinsmann thing is a mystery, beyond like every coach he has his favorites and guys he doesn't like. Regarding his team history - he'd probably still be with Aarhus if they weren't relegated and had to shed salary (I believe he was injured during most of the relegation year as well). I personally think it'll be night and day under Vermes - a guy with 67 NT caps and so far a proven record of coaching success in MLS. This is where Heaps might not work as a "former player" hiring - Olsen, Kreis and Vermes are all far more accomplished than Heaps was as players. Would you listen to a guy as a coach who accomplished far less than you have as a player? I'd be willing to guess Shalrie felt the same way, despite being a longtime teammate.
you could also view this as there were several other players on the field with less experience and less ability but put forth more of an effort. You could also say that he was a veteran player on this team of misfits an instead of making the best of it and try and help heaps and the younger players he took a different route and decided to coast the remainder of the season.... This was not the ideal situation for anyone to be in whether it was Diego, Benny or Alston. From my perception watching the games and from their body language is that guys like Alston, Soares, Nguyen and Guy gave everything they had even if it was crap and they were all in the same situation as Benny and would love to swap paychecks. I did not see that from Benny
And yet, even with Benny's "poor effort" he was still better than Alston, Diego, Soares, Guy and most of the other players on this team. I suppose it normal and fair to judge Benny because expectations on him were higher, but just because some people seemed to think he gave a poor effort, doesn't mean that he will "start with 'THE attitude'". This team sucked on the whole, and sure Benny was looked on to be a leader and star contributor, and he wasn't. Unfortunately for the Revs, he was still one of their better players, no matter how poor he played at times, or how he may have been perceived to not care by fans. Also, isn't it the manager/coaches job to motivate players? Benny didn't "seem" as disinterested last year under a different manager. It's all about context.
Exactly. Guys with 1/10 of his salary (Nguyen) and 1/1000 of his talent (Guy, even Tierney, many others) were also coached by first-year Heaps and moved around yet put that effort in game in and game out. If you value someone who makes it obvious he's half-assing it, Benny's fine. If you don't like that from the team you support, he's not.
That's just it - he IS better than all those guys, but didn't play that way. It's the same reason people get pissed off about Bob Kraft as an owner - the perception (real or imagined) of not caring about something that we care deeply about. It does fall on Heaps, you're right. He never figured out how to best motivate Benny and that's the job of a manager. However, Benny didn't make it hard for us as fans, from 60 yards away, to get pissed off at Heaps's decisions to bench him. If he ran hard every game, showed that he really cared game in and game out (you know it when you see it), I wouldn't have a problem with him. If I'm managing, my only expectation of the most talented guy on my team with the biggest salary is that he'd commit himself to the cause and make the best of his situation, even if it's shitty in the short term. Set an example for the younger guys.
One correction: SKC has several owners, and at least one of them--Neal Patterson--is a billionaire ($1.12 billion per Forbes). Each of the others is probably not terribly far behind. Combined they are probably worth as much as, or even more than, Kraft by himself ($2.3 billion). Disagree. SKC indeed created lots of "chances" this year, but the issue was the quality of those chances. Yes, a clinical finisher is needed--it looks like Claudio Bieler will be signed for that purpose--but their approach was all about pressure and speed, presumably to make up for a slight deficit in talent and technique. Replacing Espinoza with Feilhaber should allow them to take the foot off the gas a little, circulate the ball more purposefully, and create better chances so that all of their forwards are able to convert more of them. That is the hope, anyway. Klinsmann seems to have a good relationship with Vermes and has said that he likes SKC's style of play. Feilhaber probably sees this as an opportunity to show JK what he can do in that system--alongside Zusi--which may then lead to some future opportunities with the USMNT.
I also think the attitude thing is b.s., but while Benny did a lot of nice looking things, what he lacked was results. It wasn't all (or mostly) about guys not being clever enough to hook up with his passes or finish golden opportunities. Heck, Benny himself was one of the team leaders in near misses over last season. I can see Benny having little respect for Heaps. And not wanting to listen to him. But, he didn't really have to. Heaps didn't bench him for not listening, he benched him because he didn't get results on a regular basis. It's actually similar to the end of Cancela's time here - you can tolerate a player who doesn't defend very effectively IF he produces on the offensive end. If not, you can't afford that luxury.
Some discussion recently along these line re: Benny, but in the "Revs Re-Sign Andy Dorman" thread: It will be interesting to see where this all falls. Benny, either through "attitude", or lack of focus/effort, or of not being used in a way that leveraged him best, or possibly some other factor(s) unknown to us, didn't get results. Let's see if that changes at SKC. That will, next year, give us a nice fresh topic to dissect -- we can analyze the crap out of what were the real underlying causes of his performance, both here up until now, and in the upcoming season at SKC.
I can almost guarantee Benny will have more than 1 goal and 2 assists with SKC next year. I wouldn't be surprised if he had more than 5 goals and 9 assists (his 2-year total in NE). Having said that, Benny did not play in only 5 games this season. The Revs were 4-1-0 in those 5 games.
I'll defer to your knowledge of the team. I don't watch them much, nor with intense interest. And I may be poisoned in my view of SKC by the playoff series with Houston wherein your boys would have advanced with just a little finishing. That and the relatively few goals scored over the course of the season.
Is that Benny's game, though? My sense is that part of the Feilhaber-Heaps disagreement was because Jay wanted to simultaneously attack and possess the ball. I almost got the sense that Benny wanted to press the attack too much, to the point where he was giving away possession too easily. (i.e. trying through balls that weren't there, attempting passes that needed great deal of accuracy, etc.) He actually started off fairly possession-oriented, but when the offense sputtered a bit, I thought Benny tried a little too hard to create offense when he'd have been better off "circulating the ball more purposefully".
Benny is a talented soccer player who isn't a leader, and who needs other talented players to make runs for his passes, etc. He doesn't have a good attitude all the time and he can be a diva, but so can plenty of other players. Just as Bengtson isn't going to create his own goals, Benny couldn't be THE guy like a DeRo or something who can literally drag a team up and down the field to victory. He'll fit in nicely at SKC, although without Espinoza, their midfield is going to suffer defensively. The Revs are still trying to find a style of play--first, Heaps was all about overlapping wingbacks. Then, the midfield got crowded with a lot of tiki-taka guys. Finally, we hung back more trying to protect our vulnerable defense and thus had athletic forwards we were trying to feed the ball and let them do all the work. The truth is that developing a style of play is difficult with such a glaringly deficient backline that has to be protected all the time. The Cisse acquisition says, "we're going to protect the backline centrally", which to me means more wingback play and less attacking play in the middle of the field. Another reason Benny would be--stylistically--surplus to requirements.
Benny is worth more on grass than turf. The Revs are worth less than the allocation money they haven't spent through the years.
The Revs have spent every penny of their allocation money over the years. You can't not spend allocation money. Allocation money is like a second salary budget, except it carry's over every year. The Revs have primarily spent their allocation money paying down salaries because we were over the cap, or on transfer fees (mostly for players that didn't work out).
This is basically what i saw, I'll add that when things where not going his way he got frustrate, try to force things too much and then just gave up. You can argue mis-coaching if you want, but to me this is a serious sign that Benny is lacking some real intangibles at this level. It can be said that Benny was a bad fit here, but i think about 80%-90% of MLS teams would have done the same things the Revs did with him and pretty gotten the same results. I suspect he will do pretty well with SKC in large part because of what was learned about his limitations here.
I will go on record right now as saying this is maybe one of the worst moves, if not the worst move EVER. Was Burns behind this masterpiece? We gave up a good player for useless draft picks and money we will never use. That is to say, for nothing. I don't blame Benny for being happy to get off this sinking ship The test will be what Benny does in Kansas city? When surrounded by real players , I have faith that he will once again shine and show us what he can do when with a professional team (not us), with a real coach (not Heaps), and good management. We will sink even lower as we look at this years crop of draft picks on the bench that can't help us. You get what you pay for and this team is not willing to pay the money to be competitive in this league. It's sad there are people out there (me included) that want to support a good team but it just isn't going to happen with this administration.
You do realize you contradicted yourself here? If you can carry it over, then you can, in fact, "not spend it".
FWIW, I'm not sure I agree or disagree, but you have absolutely no proof on this, and you've made a pretty flat-out statement ... and then you contradicted yourself. So ...? To me, this is the key. Not in terms of whether or not this was a good trade, but whether this organization as it's currently run (New England) has any idea how to use a game-changing type of player.
Worse than trading Larentowicz for a sack of marbles? I doubt that but we'll have to see how he does in KC.