The New "Empty Bucket"

Donovan moved centrally when the ball was on the opposite side as did Jones. Dempsey coming back helped releive defensive pressure and helped us gain possession. In a more possesive style of play, there is nothing wrong with Dempsey coming back to help regain possesion and moving the ball forward with numbrs. In the 451 system, that works fine and the US did a good job of that off and on throughout the game.

I would like someone with more creative instincts and abilities than Jones to play as that wide central creator.. but he did well within his skillset.

Back to the empty bucket. Teams are going to attack our CB's. This is no mystery. Everyone has identified them as the weak link. THey will happily go over the top or play the long ball on the ground for a foot race.

It remains to be seen if we can adequately defend this.

ha, that's hilarious, the little known, seldom played Franz Liszt formation.

Spursfan1 must mean total shots. Of those on goal, we had 3 and the Guats had 4.

http://www.ussoccer.com/News/Mens-N...temala-in-2014-FIFA-World-Cup-Qualifying.aspx

I hate to say it but Bob Bradley/Bruce Arena may have taught CONCACAF how to beat Klinsmann's US team.

Hell of a legacy that.

Its not particularly new though. Its how you beat teams that are better than you. Its how the US has punched up at opponents. Other teams will do the same to attempt to punch up at the US. Its actually a rather neat step toward better US soccer.

YES!

1000 times yes. And more often than not you will beat the other team. Especially as we continue down this path and work to make all of our players develope with this style in mind.

The issue is that it neither helped us keep possession nor relieve pressure. Instead, it just meant that we were pushed further back and we had a guy who absolutely doesn't need to be out wide out there. Dempsey is not a central midfielder. He is a not a great passer, he doesn't have excellent vision, and he is not able to dance through a midfield. There is absolutely zero reason he should ever be spending more than half the match near the center circle.

Dempsey needs to either stay out wide, up top, or we need to find someone who will and can do those things. It is completely self-defeating to have a guy who is only useful in and around the 18 taking up space in the midfield. He needs to learn when to cut in and when to stay wide, if that is the role that he is given on the team sheet. He is not Cristiano Ronaldo or Messi. I know he probably likes to think he is, but that is not his game. He is not going to be beating very many DMs or defenders in the middle of the park.

I simply disagree with all the above.

That is fine. I like Dempsey. I think he is a good player to have in our lineup. I do not think he should be given the freedom to roam the park if it is going to be to the detriment of the rest of the team. We do not have a strong enough lineup to coddle a player's (or manager's, whatever the case may be) delusions of grandeur. We have to be organized and positionally sound.

I dont see them as delusions but would agree if that were the case. Its all good. I think this is one of the rare cases where its pretty easy for us to agree to disagree.

Well, there is some interesting back and forth but not much direct commentary on OP.

I can recall about 12 or so minutes in saying out loud (even though I was watching on laptop alone) "holy crap: it's Bob's 4-2-2-2!"

Who knew we'd see that again? Speaking for myself, this was the first time I actually started to believe that Klinsmann was starting to have a positive effect on the team. Not because he was "right" to go back to Bradley's system, but because this was the first time under his directorship that I felt I saw all our guys* playing to their strengths (except for Dolo; swan song can't be far off. What a great international career).

It wasn't perfect but I for one thought it was a step in the right direction overall.

*on reflection, I guess I mean all our starters

At Fulham Dempsey is by far their free-est to roam player, either when playing up front, behind a striker or as a left attacking mid constantly cutting in. Also as far as Dempsey dancing through players goes, what exactly do you think happened on the goal?

In the formation/system we had last night, as compared to what we've seen out of the 4-3-2-1, Donovan was much less free to roam and switch sides and had more defensive duties. It also shifted the attacking/defending balance of Jones and Bradley towards allowing Jones to attack more and the opposite for Mike.

Looking at the chalkboards of distribution for the Guatemala game vs. A&B you notice:
1. Many fewer passes completed or attempted.
2. More, long, direct passes and the resulting lower pass completion %.
3. A huge hole in passes attempted in the right-center attacking channel
4. Fewer passes attempted from the most dangerous area on the field, between the six and the 18 wide of the box and, in general, passes from inside the box.

If you look at where our shots came from they were clustered very centrally and came from further out than ideal. It's great we took those shots but it showed that we couldn't create in the left or right center channels.

My take: If you are going to play 3 true CMs, play them as 3 CMs. As a defensive option maybe it works to play a player like Jones or Williams wide but it hurts the attack by forcing Donovan to stick to the opposite side of the field and by playing a player who can't create in a position where danger should come from. If it's Holden or Torres or Feilhaber or Corona they bring something different, if it's Johnson in that spot there will be no attacking drop-off, but Jones represents a big lost opportunity cost.

FWIW, as much as it pains me to admit it, Bob ran a more common sense scheme than the current staff.

JK and MV either think they're exceptionally smart to see something that the ordinary folks can't or that they see some immense potential in familiar players and that unrealized potential will, at some point, be good enough to fit into the various roles they envision for them.

The previous regime may have played down the players abilities; the current is playing it up.

And this speaks more of Klinsmann's personality and psyche than his knowledge of the tactics and other schemes.

I found the Guatemala match "Empty Bucket" to be competently designed but far exceeding the talent of the available players. Bob would have just played Altidore-Gomez-Dempsey-Donovan-Mikey-JJ and called it a day.

PS. The reason for Guats' long balls was because it's one of the ways of overcoming the dual-central mids that the US has featured. They just didn't always have the quality to complete these bombs but the turnover usually didn't cost them much either.

This is right. Guatamala always had 7 or 8 behind the ball. us was marking 2 with 4. and still messed up a few times but overall guatamala didnt threaten much. they always had 6 back. tough to break down. but we did. we scored. and we could have scored more.

stuff happens.

I would like to see howard play better in the next two years. he has degraded a bit.

he should be entering his prime.

I really don't understand (maybe I'm just stupid) what the "Empty Bucket" is. What I saw when my brother was coaching was (when he had his A team) two central midfielders who were asked to be very bold, very mobile, in their approach to the game, to run hard, work hard, get forward at the right times, but also to try and free up Clint and Landon to get the ball and run at defenses, either from wide or central channels...behind two strikers. Not saying it always worked, but I hardly found this approach to be "boring" or "conservative" or "reactive."

As always, ready acknowledge my bias here.

Well, I have no idea what his instructions were but the way they were executed often left a large gap between the attackers and the central midfield, at least during the early reign, and Doyle was clever enough at that point to claim a credit for calling it an "Empty Bucket".

And that's not how a "Flat 4" midfield should look. If you saw English midfield vs. France last week, it was the definition of "Flat-4".

Now, maybe he wasn't asking them to play a Flat-4 but telling people to be "bold and mobile" is far too generic in the grand scheme of things.

PS. Since some are privy to more inside info than others - did Bob run actual dribbling drills with Donovan and, if he did, how often and successful were they?

Crazy as it is for many to believe, I don't talk soccer with my brother. I leave him alone. It makes our rare get-togethers more enjoyable. I stepped down as a soccer writer for ESPN because of the obvious conflicts, and just wanting to free myself up to be a fan. And fans don't know squat.

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I believe the empty bucket term was given when the US was playing a 4-4-2 with two DM's. The bucket being the 4 midfielders and the "empty" the hole between the DM's and strikers. Of course, this presumes that there isn't a forward checking back into the hole, or a wide midfielder checking inside, etc.

But, to me, the bucket didn't stay empty all that long. I agree that the US seemed to have gotten the best out of their players when Donovan and Dempsey pinched in more and it was played more like a 4-2-2-2 and the US looked to get those two running at the defenses whether centrally or wide. There was that brief time that Charlie Davies was healthy and in-form and really seemed to help make that formation work. I'm not sure if that formation will work as well with an older Donovan and Dempsey. Getting two competent strikers working together seems to be a challenge as well.

It was actually a term coined very early in Bradley's tenure when he was playing a 4-4-2 with Mastroeni and Clark as his central midfielders, neither of whom pushed forward very much, thus leaving a large gap in the middle of the field.

It became far less apt a metaphor as Bradley's term progressed, and by the time the Hex rolled around it was mostly tossed around out of habit by people who had forgotten how the term ever came about in the first place.

Flat-4, as played by Roy Hodgson vs. France.

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x-------x------------x-------x

4-4-2 Y, as often played by ManU

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x---------------------------------x

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4-5-1/4-4-2, with a withdrawn striker

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in the above, the forwards are usually offset to opposite sides.

The US tended to go Y in the WC.

Very bold? Very mobile? It seemed too often that the right time to get forward was never. Hell, even Panama figured out how to unlock us.

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Drills? Is that a serious question? Certainly you train with the NT to maintain sharpness and execute tactics but how much time can a NT coach possibly spend on an individuals skills and how likely is it to make a significant improvement in that skill with a 28 yr old, professional player?

You're probably going to get a lot of drivel here on this. To my observation, early in Coach Bradley's tenure, the two CMs played very defensively (or, perhaps, our team was being pushed back a lot) and left a bubble behind the strikers. To my recollection, this was before Landon and Clint found their happy homes as LM and RM (to me, Bob's decision to move Landon to LM was the key decision he made as a coach- Landon was a frequent forward or RM before that).

The USA didn't score a lot of goals (except on set pieces) and didn't concede many goals. 6 on defense will do that for you.

By mid/late 2008, your description above becomes accurate. Someone earlier described the CMs as dual pulleys, which makes sense. That's the "bold and mobile" part. We probably should have called it the "full bucket" or something similarly silly. The "bubble" moved from behind the forwards to in front of the CBs, which CBs were already becoming the weakest link on the team. By 2010, it was pretty obvious- most of the time we were OK, but teams were learning how to look for opportunities when our CMs were both forward and attack our CBs. We had 6 in the attack a lot more often and scored a lot more goals (which was great) but we gave up a lot more goals (which was not so great). We also tended to give up goals early in the game, which I now put down to excellent scouting by our opponents who were looking for this situation before their players got tired.

Yep, a tough loss that certainly cost my brother his job.

Maybe you have seven minutes to kill.