And the "Arab Spring". I doubt he'll get as much PT as some here expect. Spartak is pretty deep in strikers - a Russian international Artem Dzyuba, a Nigerian international Emmanuel Emenike, Brazilians Welliton and Ari. Yura will just have to be happy with his $3M/Y and shared time on the field.
Movsisyan scores a hat trick in his Spartak debut. They win 3-1. http://sports.yahoo.com/news/soccer...powers-spartak-over-terek-171819060--sow.html
who would have thought someone with Chad Barrett like tendencies in front of the net can score a hat trick in Russian league?
The goals: That second one, OMG If he keeps this up we're going to have to change this thread's name to Yura Movsisyan to Real Madrid and we're all gonna feel really quite stupid.
I'm not too surprised. Movsisyan's career goals/min in MLS was significantly better than Barrett's, and he left the league at age 22. If he seemed to be missing a lot of scoring chances, that's probably because he created a lot of chances.
Kinda, but he had this awful habit of hitting it 10 yards high. Most at RSL thought Findley was more promising, but not by the time Yura left. He was just starting to get really good the year he left. Everyone was amazed by him in preseason, and then he got injured, and then he committed to leave to Europe, and it was weird. Amazing drive and almost never fell down, to his detriment. He probably got lots of PK no-calls by staying on his feet. All that being said, he's f***ing amazing and we're lucky to have had him.
All credit goes to MLS. He is arguably the league's greatest striker. Success in Denmark and so far a success in the much bigger Russian league.
Not sure how stupid "we" are going to feel. RSL offered him a salary that would have made him the highest-paid player on the team, but he was set on going to Europe, so he went to Europe. There wasn't anything MLS could do to keep him.
I was speaking more from a national team standpoint. I know hindsight is always 20/20, but surely we could use a guy like him right now. Also, I know that at the time he got capped for Armenia he wasn't quite crushing it yet. Just saying, it feels shitty to miss out on guys who we certainly could have had playing for us.
In the RSL days all three of those shots would have been 30 yards over the crossbar... I'm glad he's learned to shoot on frame!
But we did. He was committed to representing us and was close to getting his citizenship if I'm not mistaken. Maybe he was going to play for Armenia anyway...maybe he wasn't, but I have a feeling we didn't show any interest of integrating him into our system. Anyway, just pointing out that we had a chance, if we had shown interest and waited a little longer.
Agreed. That 2nd shot was something we almost never saw at RSL. The ball would've just kept climbing at RioT.
Last I heard we were about a year or two away from it, maybe more. Really, all this speaks a lot more to the US citizenship process than US Soccer, we shouldn't expect players with relatively short careers and options to wait years upon years to be eligible. I mean, it's nice and certainly possible but it's not going to be routine. Getting citizenship wasn't a walk in the park even back in the day during the late 90s when I got mine, and I was a kid back then with a family that fell under the immediate relative clause. The process has only gotten much more difficult since then. I guess you could make sure it never happens again by playing around with the immigration process, but if someone can pull that off then they might as well be POTUS tomorrow: Much, much larger entities and interests than American Soccer as an institution have tried and so far failed to make a great deal of leeway on the issue.
Pretty much exactly like I remember it, but more on the two years. He was likely going to miss 2012 WC waiting for US citizenship, and by 2016 a lot of things could possibly happen where he wouldn't ever play for the USMNT.