Yup, there is NO QUESTION that Sabo has been our most clutch goal scorer since probably Movsysian, he's continually scored big goals for us in big games. Look at his goals in the 2010 CCL, he got both goals in our first game, the first two goals in the away game at Cruz Azul in the monsoon, and the big goal against Saprissa at home. He scored the goals in last year playoffs against Seattle and has had MANY big goals for us during the regular season. Meanwhile Espindola has, what, one goal in CCL action? And he's seemingly choked away every opportunity to score a big goal in MLS action.
Agreed. Steele came in, scored a couple of game winning goals at the beginning of the season, gave the ball away the rest of the season, and then got a standing ovation in the Seattle playoff game. There will always be someone the fans latch onto, and a lot of the time it doesn't make sense. Fan reactions should be one of the last determining actors for keeping someone. And even then it shouldn't hold much weight.
Morales and Espindola are the only two players I've put on my jerseys. I like them both, but I'm realistic in the fact that while I enjoy the way they play, they might be on the way out to make way for better things. I'll take a guy that will score half as many goals during the season if it means he'll produce in big games. Sabo produces when it counts, Espindola sadly doesn't. I love Morales but it seems pretty good at this point that he's not going to be at the level he once was. If we can get him back at a lower pay then I think he might be worth keeping, but certainly not the pay he gets now. It'll be interesting to see who stays and who goes. There's a lot of guys I like on the team, but in order to get better I think we'll need to trade a few people and let a few go. I'm guessing a lot of it will be based on what players teams want, and what we can get in return. The only three guys I see as being safe are Rimando, Beckerman, and Saborio.
I think we'd be crazy to trade or waive Borchers. He's a great leader, and he completely shut down Montero (among many others) despite being much slower. When he can't do that anymore, bring him into the defensive coaching system.
Is Espy even really a fan favorite? He is a guy that is fun to watch, but as Ish has so well pointed out time and time again - he sucks in the big moment. He could have won the CCL for us with some half decent finishing...
Just wanted to give a public shout-out to MOS5 for actually collecting some numbers on injuries. Given what he/she found, it's pretty hard to make the case that RSL suffered more injuries than their opponents. Over the course of 34 games, RSL had a total of 155 injuries reported, plus 10 international absences and 9 suspensions. RSL's opponents in the same 34 games reported a total of 154 injuries, plus 10 international absences and 11 suspensions. RSL's injuries and absences were identical to their opponents on average. What if we count only players that were listed as OUT or DOUBTFUL, plus international absences and suspensions? RSL: 92, Oppenents: 129. So, RSL actually did BETTER than their opponents on average if you only count serious injuries. There is still the possibility that RSL suffered more injuries to their starters than other teams, since these are just the total numbers regardless of whether a player was likely to play or not. I any of you want to take the time to go through and count only starters for both teams, MOS5 kindly provided the link to each game preview so you can do that. I don't know other team's rosters well enough to be able to pick out which of their players are on their first XI. But, given these numbers it's pretty unlikely that you'll find anything there, I think. Given this, I don't think RSL's trainers are sabotaging the team.
I think to really get a feel for it, you'd have to compare starters + length of injury. While that list makes it look like everything was par for the course, I'm guessing it doesn't tell much of the truth of the matter. You'd also have to look at positions as well. One team missing a starting midfielder + defender probably fares better than a team missing 2 starting CB's. Many reps if someone winds up doing it, I don't imagine it'd be an easy task.
You'd have to show your work on this one. The length of injury would average out over the season, and the injury list would sample more starters than others anyway, simply because starters play more. And just because one team is missing a worse combination of players doesn't mean that team's training staff is worse than their counterparts.
Length of injury is taken account of in these numbers, since each game that a player is out gets counted. E.g. a player that is out for 5 games will count as 5 reported injuries, not one. I agree that ideally you've have some measure of important to the team, and would weight the injury by that importance. RSL missing Javi for most of last year was a HUGE blow, for example. Unfortunately there's not really an easy way of doing that--you could look at depth of position, if they are a starter or not, the infamous Castrol index, etc. All are imperfect, and would take a lot of time (that I don't have). And, you'd have to find something large enough that it overcomes the basic fact that RSL didn't have more overall injuries than their opponents. I.e. it would have to be the case that RSL's trainers weren't bad on average (since RSL had the same number of injuries as other teams), but were especially bad at rehabilitating RSL's most important players. Seems unlikely to me.
You can't just look at injuries and say it ends up being the same. Random 3rd string player missing 10 games just isn't the same as a starter missing 10 games. All that list shows is that there was a lot of players injured. How long was Arnoux injured while we had him? He was a complete non-factor for the team yet he'd figure into that chart. Getting injured is one thing, but how many of our players were getting injured again for the same thing? Like I said, it'd be quite the undertaking to compare starters for teams that were injured vs bench and fringe players that had little impact to the squad. IMO you can't really compare trainers just going by number of times someone missed a game due to injury. For all we know half of those teams had a large number of players miss for various injuries and were all back in 1-2 weeks. Some of the teams could've had half their starters out for ~1 month, come back a game and reinjure the same thing they were out for and miss another 3 weeks. The second scenario would seem to be a trainer issue, where the first scenario would lean towards the trainers being able to properly get players healthy and keeping them from missing more time for tweaking the same thing they were out for. I really don't think it's as simple as 'this is how many players had missed a game'
To add: Jake Hustedt of San Jose missed nearly the entire season with a busted leg. He wasn't going to see much, if any, first team minutes this season. So that season long injury counts towards their numbers. Him missing isn't the same as Olave being out for us
Yeah, but if they had the same number of total games missed for injury, it would imply that their players were getting injured more often. The burden of proof for this argument is on those who believe that RSL's training staff is worse than average, and I think they're going to have an uphill battle to find convincing evidence.
But would he have been a factor had he not been injured? It's possible--people were pretty high on him a while ago. Why not? How else are you going to compare them? By how good they look in warm-ups? Isn't it their job to prevent injuries, and to rehabilitate players as effectively and quickly as possible? Sure, it's possible. But what is the likelihood that that is the case? I'm think that it's close to zero. Suppose that RSL's starters have much higher re-injury rates than every other team. That means that a significant portion of RSL's 154 injuries were from RSL's first XI, since chronically injured players get counted for each game they are out. So, what would it take for RSL to also have exactly the same number of total injuries as their opponents? Because RSL's starters are continuously injured, for RSL to not have overall higher injury rates it must be the case that the back-ups for the starters are getting injured at much lower rates than all of the other teams. Otherwise, RSL would have had higher injuries overall for the year. If RSL's trainers are doing a poor job with the starters, why would they be exceptionally good with the back-ups? That story just doesn't make sense. Or, maybe it's not the trainers: maybe RSL's starters just had bad injury luck last year while the back-ups had good injury luck. That's more conceivable, but still unlikely. And, like I said before, if anyone wants to actually compile the numbers on that, please do. The simplest story is usually the correct one. In this case, the simplest story is that RSL had the same number of injuries as their opponents, that RSL's starters probably weren't injured significantly more than other teams, and that we as fans feel like RSL had more injuries because we follow RSL much more closely than their opponents. No, it's not that simple. But @MOS5's numbers make it A LOT harder to tell any other story. Edit: Arggh! Allez RSL said the same thing quicker than I did, and much more succinctly.
Depends on how you want to look at it. We all know injuries happen, but if you have 30 injuries and it's 15 players with two separate injuries missing one game per injury, I'd say the trainers did a good job of getting the players recovered. If there's 30 injuries and its 3 players missing 10 games each, and in each case each player comes back 5-6 games in and immediately picks up the same injury missing 4-5 more games, that seems more like a trainer problem. I know it's a dumb example, but it shows that you can't just look at number of injuries and call it all the same. Heck even going further, in that first scenario, 9 of those players could've been guys that were on the bench or not at all and have no real impact on how their team performs. Second situation could be those 3 guys all being starters and all in the midfield which would impact the team a lot more. You really can't just look at number of injuries per team and call it even. If you wanted to gauge how each training staff did over the season, you'd have to look at more than total injury days missed. Was it more common for a similar type of injury to occur? Was it the same guys getting injured, then coming back and picking up the same injury again? Or was it a bunch of different guys picking up different injuries each time? Considering our injury woes got worse after our staff left for Vancouver, I really don't see how it'd be an uphill battle.
By what metric? Are you factoring in the propensity for older players to be more easily injured? Also, re-injury and nagging injuries are a part of sports -- or life, for that matter. Just because a player recovers to 100% performance ability doesn't mean that their injury rate has returned to what it was pre-injury. To assign blame for recurring injuries to training staff competence seems like a seriously simplified accusation. The researched numbers seem to place RSL well within standard deviation for injury rate. And if the argument is that those injuries are concentrated on a fewer number of players, wouldn't that be cause to praise the staff for the relative superiority of the injury rate amongst the non-chronically injured players?
You could go that way or you could ask "why the hell do all of our good players get hurt while a guy like Jonny Steele is healthy the whole ********ing season" but then you are getting into the realm of luck, batman, and karma
And do we really want to go Batman on this thread? That would derail faster than Abed jumping to conclusions about his landlord breaking his DVD. <I can't find a clip of this Community episode, so the joke may have been wasted>
I literally watched that episode not even 2 hours ago. The joke is not lost, my friend. The joke is not lost. You criticize my bringing up of Batman as a potential derailing topic and then bring up Community? Do I get to play kettle in the next round?
Great. Now I just want to watch some Community. Why did it have to get pushed back to Feb 7th? Stuck at work and it's not on Netflix, so Arrested Development will have to work instead.
8th annual Gravy Bowl moved to Bennion Jr. High (6200 S 2700 W) due to the fields at Cottonwood Rec being torn up for construction.