Real Supporters' Shield Champion? You mean this year's and all other years but the 2010 and 2011 were fake?
Actually, the more I think about it, is it the players or the tactics? Do we really need a DP finisher, or does our system depress scoring? This is the same system that managed to get 1 goal out of Herculez Gomez in 40+ games. And Gomez would be a "DP striker". I keep trying to imagine our team with Wondo up top, but who's to say that he would fair significantly better than CJ and Teal.
San Jose is the Supporters Shield Champion this year. Columbus won it fairly in 2004, and we won it fairly in 2000. And as far as the PK call for the Myers/Clark play last night, I'm not going to get too uppity about it. Partly because I don't think Stoitchkov earned a PK in MLS Cup 2000.
Of course not. "real" is too harsh. What I was trying to say is a Champion based on a balanced schedule.
Define "balanced". Having one set of laundry play different sets of laundry equivalent amounts of times isn't any more particularly "balanced" than the schedule we had this season.
There isnt time for a 40 game season. 34 is probably maxing it out with both the Open Cup and Champions League.
Ditto. It happened right in front of me, and my immediate reaction was that there was no way the referee was going to award a PK for that foul in those circumstances. SKC did not advance because (a) they played very poorly in Houston and (b) way too many of their shots last night were off-target.
It is a fair question, but last year the same team with the same system and largely the same personnel scored 8 more goals during the season, which was 2nd-most in the league. (Of course, it would have only been 6th-most this year, which makes allowing just 27 goals that much more impressive.) The most obvious difference? No Omar Bravo, a DP finisher.
You lost me at laundry. SKC was 6-1-2 against the West. If you add the USOC 8-1-2. Might have been nice to play those teams again. The original point of my first post is I don't like the current playoff format. It comes down to the fact that we end up going out of the playoffs after a win. It just seems wrong to me. That's all I'm saying.
The aggregate system is used all over the world. Not sure how having a balanced schedule impacts the aggregate system. We didnt go out after a win, we lost 2-1.
His point was that you never really face the same team twice, even if they are wearing the same uniforms, because of personnel changes, health issues, weather conditions, etc. Consequently, playing a double round-robin is "balanced" only in a superficial sense, especially when it is spread out over seven or eight months.
Exactly. "Winning" the second leg only softens the blow slightly, just like mounting a big comeback in the second half but falling short at the end.
Ricardo Clark's expression after clattering into Chance in the box, says it all. Id like to see Rosell/Joseph partner in a game where it isn't all one way traffic before I get overly excited. They get credit, but last night's -2 goal diff dictated a decent portion of the cerebral nature of their position. Rosell in particular, was put under the crush on a number of occasions, yet Houston's lack of a break/counter tells me something. With limited exception, Rosell spilled very little -- a cool minded showing for a 20 year old, new to the League, working a new partnership. A radio post game show host referenced Cesar as "expendable" in light of Rosell/Joseph. I couldn't disagree more, especially with CCL on the schedule. I've complained about Chance a couple of times this year, but thought he played a good game last night. I thought everyone played well enough to be +2, though my gut tells me CJ had the hardest time sleeping last night. Lots of local talk/critique about the aggregate format. My unscientific survey says that a decent portion of this comes from those new to the game. I sincerely mean it when I say this is music, all-comers forming an opinion. The situations are different, but I don't recall much discussion about the silliness of the "4-0 aggregate" we took over CO last year. 20,894. On a Nov. school night, 8pm.
I don't think its all the system, but part of it for sure. To many crosses. If you're playing pressure, control oriented 4-3-3 ball, you need to pass to score, not cross. Pass it around until you can just walk the ball into goal. Still too many crosses in MLS and for SKC. Unless you're name is Brad Davis or David Beckham, you should probably be keeping it on the ground if you can.
7-1-3, the final officially goes as a draw. And we avoided 3 rough road games this year in LA, SJ, and RSL playing away results likely would be different.
You're saying that you think taking apart a team which is working well and creating chances, dominating the game even, should be broken up simply for the purpose of putting in fresh legs? Who on our team was showing their exhaustion? Who do you point to and say "that guy's spent"? Because until the final whistle blew and they all collapsed on the ground, they were still flying all over that field. I figure that it was a good part adrenaline and a good part pure determination, but they didn't seem in need of fresh legs to me. Who, exactly, do you replace? The Peterson Joseph off for Jacob Peterson swap is the most common one being mentioned, but while I thought that Peterson Joseph didn't handle the pressure extremely well at first, he worked himself into the game and, after the goal especially, was starting to show some real poise. What exactly did Jacob Peterson do on Sunday that makes you think that he would have made things better? And don't get me wrong, I love the guy, but on the risk/reward scale I just don't see it worth it. Replace one player and move another (from the position he notched the first goal's assist, nonetheless) all so that we can have Jacob Peterson be in with fresh legs? And Convey? Wow, that's a great idea. Let's throw in a guy who has had all of, what, 3 competitive minutes since the beginning of August? Again, I actually like Convey and was very frustrated he was injured so much, but here's what we hear from everyone today should Convey had gone in and done nothing for the 5/10/15 minutes he got: "Peter Vermes was totally outcoached again! Putting Convey in? He should know better - Convey was never going to be able to change the game coming off of such a long break." Should we have made it to extra time, you can be sure that PV would be all up and making subs. But to really answer your question: Why dress players? I don't know, because it's good to have someone on the bench in case one of our starters can't continue? You say that PV got outcoached, and yet I found the move Kinnear made replacing Bruin with Weaver far more suspect. Taking out Bruin, who hasn't had all that much to do the entire game and is only 23 years old and you use your third sub when the game could be going on for another 30 minutes? In such a loosely called, physical game at that. Kinnear is terribly lucky that it didn't go to extra time, because that move could have really caused him problems should a defender have gone down injured and/or we score another goal. Basically, it's really easy to criticize a coach for things he did or didn't do and things don't end up the way we like them - but you gotta give me more than "he just shoulda done something!" And then you have to account for the fact that anything you ask for could very well have just been something that we'd be criticizing him for instead. I'm not saying that I like every move that PV does, that he doesn't make mistakes or whatnot... But I'm just dumbfounded that people could actually criticize him for how this particular game went. Yes, Houston wanted to defend and I'm sure they were never going to be terribly adventurous, but raise your hand if you think that's the gameplan that Dom came up with. If you raised your hand you're stupid - mostly because I can't actually see you raise your hand, but also because I'm pretty sure that he was, at the very least, hoping to get a good, promising counter-attack in before 2nd half stoppage time. I'm pretty sure that he wasn't looking for his defense to give up a number of very decent opportunities. I'm pretty sure he didn't want to come out of Kansas City feeling like they got away with one. PV's job is to set up the team to put players in the position that they can score, but he can't shoot the ball. We had our opportunities last night, we didn't take them, and that's that. Perhaps you can criticize him for not having players that can put away chances, a very fair and appropriate criticism for this season. As much as I love these players, I won't lie and say I wouldn't love to get a big signing of someone who has a knack for finishing. Heck, I think that Teal, CJ, Dwyer and Saad could really use someone to learn from in those respects. Anyway, rant over...
Last night Sarkodie was our right back. This is only his second season and he is still learning. Dom seems to prefer his speed over Haianult, who has not been cracking the starting line up since the second half of the season. Sarkodie's speed helps him make up for his lack of experience. His lack of soccer maturity has put him in some bad spots. Ashe (who was an All Star D last season) and Davis play the left, so if you are going to look for cracks it would be on the right side. I wanted to give you guys some mad props. Your stadium was rocking and your team played lights out. I thought the Dynamo only needed to weather the storm for the first 20min, but SKC was able to keep the tempo up for all 90min. SKC was very unlucky not to get two goals. The Dynamo would have been toast in extra time, they were having trouble keeping up the last 15-20min. Sometimes you beat a team because you are better than them, sometimes you're just lucky. The Dynamo were defiantly lucky.
A couple of thoughts: 1) I like home+away two-legged series. 2) Soccer is still in a forming and building mode in the US. 3) This is the only sport in the US where you can "win" your last game and lose the series. What soccer does would be analogous to carrying over runs/points/goals in a baseball/basketball/hockey series. Said most plainly, it's foreign to the casual US fan. The BCS system and NFL playoff tiebreakers are the only things more convoluted, IMO. 4) MLS already has tweaked the aggregate system used elsewhere - e.g., away goals are not special. NET: I'd like it better if MLS teams played two truly independent 90 minute games. Two ties or opposing wins spawn a tie-breaker immediately following the second leg. It's easier to explain and better follows the playoff paradigms already established in this country.
loved seeing the houston fans being so proud to be from texas that they marched in with their state flag on their flagpole ... upside down. i'm in the camp that thinks no subs is ridiculous. i appreciate the notion that all 11 were still going full tilt, but this was do or die. with about 5-6 minutes left, it's time to let it all hang out, and that means replacing defenders with attackers. yeah, if you get a goal and go to overtime with only 2 defenders... well, you cross that bridge when you come to it. better to deal with it when you get there than to never make it in the first place. i like rosell, not so much peterson joseph. i also agree with the post above about cesar still having a job to do on this team next year with the ccl on tap.
Lol. OK, in that regard, I guess anything short of both teams playing each other simultaneously in each others venues would not be balanced. Perhaps the Fringe team can solve that parallel universe conundrum for us. In the meantime, I like the EPL unbalanced " balanced" model for determining a regular season champion. Another poster suggested 2 home-away games with no aggregate as a better/different model for the playoffs. I like that better.
First off, I did want to say, Andy, that my previous post probably came off a bit more angry/upset than I intended. Just in case you happen to be taken aback by it, sorry - I blame it on the fact that I woke up this morning and my Wizards are no longer in the MLS playoffs and I have to wait far, far too long to watch them again. Makes a guy grumpy. I feel like we can feel hard-done by it a bit... but it isn't why we lost, by any means. I look at it as "damn, that should've been a PK probably, we were so close - if only the ref could get his head out of his ass".
SKC certainly tried to do this at times last night, most notably in the long sequence that led to Joseph's egregious (but completely predictable) miss. The problem seems to be that we do not currently have anyone creative enough to crack open a solid MLS defense like Houston's consistently. I would think that Graham Zusi now deserves to be included in that list, although he has had an annoying habit all season of hitting a lot of crosses, free kicks, and corner kicks too long.
I dunno. I mean, I like Cesar most of the times he's out there, and he's made some really good and important tackles throughout the year too... but I personally blame him for the 1-0 loss to Chicago at home and I also question whether he could've done better on the 2nd goal in Houston (seems like he followed Carr and left Bruin - it may not have mattered anyway, however). While I was happy with Rossell/Joseph and am really excited to watch them develop (20 and 22 and neither with the team a full year*), I do agree that we need more than just them. There's obviously Nagamura, who I never thought I'd like as much as I ended up liking, and also Michael Thomas, who wasn't great but wasn't bad in his opportunities. *Yes, technically Joseph has, but he was missing most of this year do to the death of his mother - and I must say that it would suck a lot to lose your mom at 22. The only reason I'd drop Cesar at this point is his salary, but considering that we don't really need to dump salary (at least at this point, we'll see what changes, right?) then keeping him around is prudent. I do expect to see less of him though. My only, but persistent, complaint about Chance is that he never tries to take the endline. Always seems to try and whip-in corners from 18 yards. Now, he actually did do this one time on Sunday, so perhaps there's hope, but I really want to see him try to do that more often... mostly because the defense seems to give him that space to defend the cross, probably because they know he won't take the space. My biggest problem with it is that the home-and-home series doesn't give enough of an advantage to the higher seeds. On the contrary, it is really good at making the series as even as possible - sure, someone has to have the first and second leg, but that's just logistics. I prefer a format where the conference semis is one game at the higher seed followed by the conference championship as a home-and-away. Give teams a real incentive for finishing in 1st or 2nd... but not giving a significant enough advantage to the top seeded teams in the playoffs really lessens the importance of the regular season. I mean, top seeds in each conference have been bounced in the semis 10 times since 2003 and only 2003 and 2011 did both top seeds advance. So half the top seeds have lost since moving to the aggregate system. Don't get me wrong - I actually like it as a way to do a knockout tournament and if you need 'help' by means of being a high seed to win the MLS Cup then you don't really deserve it. I just wish they made a bigger deal out of conference regular season champions and supporter's shield winners then... Because why play all that many games then? Or, to put it another way, we ended up getting Espinoza injured after we had clinched a playoff berth because we wanted to get the top seed in the East, but if they aren't making a big deal out of the shield and playoff seeding doesn't really matter, perhaps we should've put out the Rangers instead. Anyone here think that we might've done better if Roger was on-his-game in Houston? Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference in the eventual result, but I have to think there would at least be a chance. I know that there are no plans to expand the stadium in the immediate near-term future (2-3 years), but if this team keeps on its trajectory, it may be warranted. If you told me, two years ago, what things would be like for this team and its support from the city, I'd probably have laughed and said "I wish." Well, here's proof that wishes do come true.
Very Disappointing, however the future only looks bright with this team and the fanbase. Who would of thought 3/4 years ago this is where we would be at. People all across the city are discovering the sport of soccer. Much more respect for the sport. Remember Boring sport, or girly sport. Seems like lightyears ago. As for the team, we need a goal scorer. I think we've had more balls in the northeast parking lot than in the back of the net this year.
Exactly. You know they aren't going to be attacking. Pull Besler off for Peterson. Houston were gasping and getting so tired. That's why Myers got fouled in the box at the end -- tired legs on Clark.