There's only one "F" in forward

[Dan Loney]

Padding post to avoid today's spoilers:

Kramer def. Kramer 1-0 (0-0) aet
Godzilla def. Cosmic Monster 4-0 (2-0)
Volcano def. Joe 1-0, match abandoned, pitch covered with lava

[Beakmon FC]

Any news on Spy vs. Spy?

[Dan Loney]

So Sven-Goran Eriksson won with a 4-5-1. How did he do it?

The answer, of course, is that he very nearly didn't.

There are two reasons to play a 4-5-1. England had a forward they considered, rightly, to be vastly superior to anything the Ecuadorean defense had seen previously. So the theory was that Wayne Rooney would single-handedly give the Ecuador defense fits, while five English midfielders would dominate possession.

Which is fine if you have a free kick specialist, or if the breakaway early in the first half is saved at the last second by Ashley Cole. Once you take the lead in a 4-5-1, you're fine. Counter-attack to your little heart's content.

Why, then, did Bruce Arena play a 4-5-1? I'll tell you what I think he was thinking.

We had the opposite problem of Wayne Rooney. Brian McBride is an unstoppable cyborg who does not feel pain, but he's nowhere near as fast as Rooney. His shot isn't as good, either (although it isn't so bad that the United States always had to play Hospital Ball with him, lofting rainbow after rainbow thinking McBride could win a header against a sequoia - but that's probably a rant for later). I think we can all agree that the United States had absolutely no depth at forward. It wasn't realistic to think that Eddie Johnson, Brian Ching, Josh Wolff, Taylor Twellman, or Chris Rolfe were going to be effective this year. The cupboard was bare. What Arena had to do was compensate for our huge weakness up top.

England had enough depth at midfield (although not as much as they think they do - if that's the best England team in decades, someone owes the 1990 team an apology) to justify overloading the middle in the name of getting their best players on the field. The United States was deeper at midfield than they were at forward or defense, but not so much that Arena could sell that he was doing anything except trying to cover for our weaknesses in other areas.

Allow me paraphrase a Bud Grant story at this point. Grant described coaching as accomplishing two contradictory tasks - realizing that our Roscoe can't beat their Charley, and making the required adjustments, while at the same time not letting our Roscoe know that we don't think he can beat their Charley. Because if you do, then our Roscoe probably won't even put up a decent fight against their Charley. And who knows, maybe that one day our Roscoe does beat their Charley, and suddenly everyone's job is a lot easier.

Well, Arena started a 4-5-1, which was correctly seen as a white flag, and our Roscoes had no chance. Sampson took a similar mistake to the extreme, and used six midfielders to cover up our weaknesses at both defender and forward. Arena wasn't that crazy. He also didn't start the right people - in retrospect, Jimmy Conrad was a better choice than the aging Eddie Pope, and Clint Dempsey was the only guy who really had the World Cup fearlessness needed. Even those guys wouldn't have changed the simple math - two central defenders against Brian McBride. Today, we saw that even Wayne Rooney could have used another warm body up top just to keep Ecuador honest. Brian McBride deserved better than the Eric Wynalda 1998 set-up (which might be part of the reason Waldo is to snicked at Arena; he not only saw this movie, he played the villain).

Sampson and Arena both through the years kept McBride from breaking Wynalda's US goal-scoring record by overestimating his skill in the air and underestimating his skill as a forward. As it stands, he's four short of tying Wynalda. Also as it stands, he hasn't followed Reyna into international retirement, but, c'mon. Even Preki and Roger Milla retired eventually.

EDIT - Spy vs. Spy, good one. Wish I'd thought of that. Although those White Spy hooligans are a blight on the game.

[usasoccerhooligan]

So Sven-Goran Eriksson won with a 4-5-1. How did he do it?

The answer, of course, is that he very nearly didn't.

There are two reasons to play a 4-5-1. England had a forward they considered, rightly, to be vastly superior to anything the Ecuadorean defense had seen previously. So the theory was that Wayne Rooney would single-handedly give the Ecuador defense fits, while five English midfielders would dominate possession.

Which is fine if you have a free kick specialist, or if the breakaway early in the first half is saved at the last second by Ashley Cole. Once you take the lead in a 4-5-1, you're fine. Counter-attack to your little heart's content.

Why, then, did Bruce Arena play a 4-5-1? I'll tell you what I think he was thinking.

We had the opposite problem of Wayne Rooney. Brian McBride is an unstoppable cyborg who does not feel pain, but he's nowhere near as fast as Rooney. His shot isn't as good, either (although it isn't so bad that the United States always had to play Hospital Ball with him, lofting rainbow after rainbow thinking McBride could win a header against a sequoia - but that's probably a rant for later). I think we can all agree that the United States had absolutely no depth at forward. It wasn't realistic to think that Eddie Johnson, Brian Ching, Josh Wolff, Taylor Twellman, or Chris Rolfe were going to be effective this year. The cupboard was bare. What Arena had to do was compensate for our huge weakness up top.

England had enough depth at midfield (although not as much as they think they do - if that's the best England team in decades, someone owes the 1990 team an apology) to justify overloading the middle in the name of getting their best players on the field. The United States was deeper at midfield than they were at forward or defense, but not so much that Arena could sell that he was doing anything except trying to cover for our weaknesses in other areas.

Allow me paraphrase a Bud Grant story at this point. Grant described coaching as accomplishing two contradictory tasks - realizing that our Roscoe can't beat their Charley, and making the required adjustments, while at the same time not letting our Roscoe know that we don't think he can beat their Charley. Because if you do, then our Roscoe probably won't even put up a decent fight against their Charley. And who knows, maybe that one day our Roscoe does beat their Charley, and suddenly everyone's job is a lot easier.

Well, Arena started a 4-5-1, which was correctly seen as a white flag, and our Roscoes had no chance. Sampson took a similar mistake to the extreme, and used six midfielders to cover up our weaknesses at both defender and forward. Arena wasn't that crazy. He also didn't start the right people - in retrospect, Jimmy Conrad was a better choice than the aging Eddie Pope, and Clint Dempsey was the only guy who really had the World Cup fearlessness needed. Even those guys wouldn't have changed the simple math - two central defenders against Brian McBride. Today, we saw that even Wayne Rooney could have used another warm body up top just to keep Ecuador honest. Brian McBride deserved better than the Eric Wynalda 1998 set-up (which might be part of the reason Waldo is to snicked at Arena; he not only saw this movie, he played the villain).

Sampson and Arena both through the years kept McBride from breaking Wynalda's US goal-scoring record by overestimating his skill in the air and underestimating his skill as a forward. As it stands, he's four short of tying Wynalda. Also as it stands, he hasn't followed Reyna into international retirement, but, c'mon. Even Preki and Roger Milla retired eventually.

EDIT - Spy vs. Spy, good one. Wish I'd thought of that. Although those White Spy hooligans are a blight on the game.


you completely hit the nail on the head. heck, you hit the nail with a dart from 50 yards away.

[Mason16]

So Sven-Goran Eriksson won with a 4-5-1. How did he do it?

The answer, of course, is that he very nearly didn't.

There are two reasons to play a 4-5-1. England had a forward they considered, rightly, to be vastly superior to anything the Ecuadorean defense had seen previously. So the theory was that Wayne Rooney would single-handedly give the Ecuador defense fits, while five English midfielders would dominate possession.

Which is fine if you have a free kick specialist, or if the breakaway early in the first half is saved at the last second by Ashley Cole. Once you take the lead in a 4-5-1, you're fine. Counter-attack to your little heart's content.

Why, then, did Bruce Arena play a 4-5-1? I'll tell you what I think he was thinking.

We had the opposite problem of Wayne Rooney. Brian McBride is an unstoppable cyborg who does not feel pain, but he's nowhere near as fast as Rooney. His shot isn't as good, either (although it isn't so bad that the United States always had to play Hospital Ball with him, lofting rainbow after rainbow thinking McBride could win a header against a sequoia - but that's probably a rant for later). I think we can all agree that the United States had absolutely no depth at forward. It wasn't realistic to think that Eddie Johnson, Brian Ching, Josh Wolff, Taylor Twellman, or Chris Rolfe were going to be effective this year. The cupboard was bare. What Arena had to do was compensate for our huge weakness up top.

England had enough depth at midfield (although not as much as they think they do - if that's the best England team in decades, someone owes the 1990 team an apology) to justify overloading the middle in the name of getting their best players on the field. The United States was deeper at midfield than they were at forward or defense, but not so much that Arena could sell that he was doing anything except trying to cover for our weaknesses in other areas.

Allow me paraphrase a Bud Grant story at this point. Grant described coaching as accomplishing two contradictory tasks - realizing that our Roscoe can't beat their Charley, and making the required adjustments, while at the same time not letting our Roscoe know that we don't think he can beat their Charley. Because if you do, then our Roscoe probably won't even put up a decent fight against their Charley. And who knows, maybe that one day our Roscoe does beat their Charley, and suddenly everyone's job is a lot easier.

Well, Arena started a 4-5-1, which was correctly seen as a white flag, and our Roscoes had no chance. Sampson took a similar mistake to the extreme, and used six midfielders to cover up our weaknesses at both defender and forward. Arena wasn't that crazy. He also didn't start the right people - in retrospect, Jimmy Conrad was a better choice than the aging Eddie Pope, and Clint Dempsey was the only guy who really had the World Cup fearlessness needed. Even those guys wouldn't have changed the simple math - two central defenders against Brian McBride. Today, we saw that even Wayne Rooney could have used another warm body up top just to keep Ecuador honest. Brian McBride deserved better than the Eric Wynalda 1998 set-up (which might be part of the reason Waldo is to snicked at Arena; he not only saw this movie, he played the villain).

Sampson and Arena both through the years kept McBride from breaking Wynalda's US goal-scoring record by overestimating his skill in the air and underestimating his skill as a forward. As it stands, he's four short of tying Wynalda. Also as it stands, he hasn't followed Reyna into international retirement, but, c'mon. Even Preki and Roger Milla retired eventually.

EDIT - Spy vs. Spy, good one. Wish I'd thought of that. Although those White Spy hooligans are a blight on the game.

Now that's articulate food for thought. But I am slow to acknowledge that the players themselves understood the meaning behind the line-up to such an extent that it took the fight out of them.

[Bill Archer]

So Sven-Goran Eriksson won with a 4-5-1. How did he do it?

The answer, of course, is that he very nearly didn't.

<snippity-snip-snip>

Sampson and Arena both through the years kept McBride from breaking Wynalda's US goal-scoring record by overestimating his skill in the air and underestimating his skill as a forward. As it stands, he's four short of tying Wynalda. Also as it stands, he hasn't followed Reyna into international retirement, but, c'mon. Even Preki and Roger Milla retired eventually.



Young Daniel is basically correct as far as it goes, but he misses the larger McBridehistorical point.

As someone who recalls the odd-looking kid with the horrible haircut and the ridiculous shoestring headband (which adidas even marketed for awhile before realizing that nobody wanted to look THAT stupid) who showed up in CBus in 1996 hailed as a future superstar (as opposed to the guy they assured us was the "Michael Jordan of South Africa" Theophilus "Doctor" Khumalo), how a coach positioned McBride has always been, for me, the simple litmus test separating the amateurs from the real coaches.

Fitzgerald paired him with Stern John and, when John left, he went out and brought in guys like Dante Washington and Jeff Cunningham. He recognized that McBride influences the defense so much that it creates all kinds of space and opportunities for the second man into the box.

And indeed, it was always the SECOND guy into the box who led Columbus in scoring.

Dan is right (and I will have to severly punish my keyboard for having displayed those three words in that order) that there's an overemphasis on McBrides' head. He scores very similar goals with his feet. His scores come from redirected balls, be it with his foot or with his head, which he accomplishes by working at getting to the right spot. What he doesn't do is break defenders down one-v-one.

Conversely, ex-Columbus coach Zippy the Pinhead, in all his moronic convergence, felt that the best thing to do was to send McBride out there all alone. He benched Cunningham, waived Washington and told the whole team to send absurd balls into the box from wherever they were on the field and Brian would score.

Except that he didn't. With no one else anywhere near the box, McBride was guaranteed two, three even four defenders beating his brains out for 90 minutes. Oh sure, you could loft him 30 yard balls, and he was crazy enough to try and get a head on them, but he was always surrounded by opponents and not only didn't it work, but Brian was always the MLS version of the walking wounded of D Day.

With all due respect to Mike Segroves, THAT was the point: he was always beat up not because he was fragile but because Coach Zippy sent the guy out there game in and game out with a bigass target on his back, and MLS defenders - not known for their sublime skills - started hacking the guy during the National Anthem. (I think CJ Brown once got a yellow for going studs up on Bake during an autograph session but I might be remembering it wrong)

And as his goal production dropped, one was tempted to suspect that maybe he just didn't have it any more except for one guy:

Bruce Arena.

Arena never once said "OK Brian, you're our whole offense: get out there and do all our scoring, and maybe you could carry around a few water bottles too, just in case the midfielders get thirsty"

McBride was always paired with someone who presented a different challenge to the defense, like Mathis or Wolff or Donovan. And if you put both your central defenders on full-time McBride duty, then the second guy into the box was going to kill you.

The four quintessential American victories of the 21st century - Mexico 2001, Portugal 2002, Mexico 2002 and Mexico 2005 were all accomplished with McBride on the field paired with a pure hitter. He'll do the dirty work, he'll hold the ball with his back to the goal, he'll take the beatings, he'll do all that, but then to demand that he do all the scoring too - well, like I said, that sort of strategy was the province of "Coaches" like Zippy.

And Arena never asked him to.

The real kicker, for me, was when it became obvious that he was headed for England. The early leader for his services was Everton, whose President was quoted in several sources as sniffing that Columbus "just doesn't understand how to use him".

And in the only recorded instance of Brian McBride professing anything less than total contentment with all that soccer has to offer, in his last interview before leaving for Fulham he tole a reporter that he was "never comfortable" being "put on an island" out in front of ten guys and in the middle of a herd of defenders.

What was somewhat ironic then was that, upon arrival in Fulham, they cleverly put him on an island in front of ten guys trying to loft hims the ball. Unsurprisingly, he failed to score, was benched and had to work his way back into the lineup as one of eleven players involved in an offensive scheme.

And as such, he was named Fulham's 2006 Man of the Year.

So when the US team shows up against the Czechs with McBride as the lone forward, I simply could not believe my eyes. It had been tried and tried and tried, over and over and over, and it has never worked. What's more, Arena knew better, or he always did.

And THAT is the mystery of this tournament to me. How a guy as bright as Arena, who knows McBride's game as well or better than anyone in the world, decided to put him out there in a position he knows good and well has never worked before, ever. Much better to bench the guy and oput a couple pure hitters out there than to send him out all alone against defenders of that caliber.

Arena always used to know better. The real question, to me, is how did he convince himself that it would be different this time?

[bojendyk]

Not being a Columbus supporter, I didn't watch McBride play in the Columbus kit as much as Archer did. It's interesting to read about the various ways in which McBride was played (and misplayed) back then.

Great posts by both Archer and Loney. I feel like I learned something today.

[Dave Han]

I hate Bruce Arena for being a massive jerk, have since 1996, but the guy is a good soccer coach. So I'll defend him a little bit. I don't think that he went into the Cup intending to leave McBride on an island. I think that he really thought Landon Donovan would be able to raise his game up to the level needed to be an effective partner. I don't know why he thought that, but I think he did.

[NMMatt]

And THAT is the mystery of this tournament to me. How a guy as bright as Arena, who knows McBride's game as well or better than anyone in the world, decided to put him out there in a position he knows good and well has never worked before, ever. Much better to bench the guy and oput a couple pure hitters out there than to send him out all alone against defenders of that caliber.


Exactly. Even a Wolff/McBride combo would have netted us more than 4 shots on goal even if all of Wolfies would have been directly at the keeper. My banner for South Africa:

Just say no to 4-5-1

[NMMatt]

I hate Bruce Arena for being a massive jerk, have since 1996, but the guy is a good soccer coach. So I'll defend him a little bit. I don't think that he went into the Cup intending to leave McBride on an island. I think that he really thought Landon Donovan would be able to raise his game up to the level needed to be an effective partner. I don't know why he thought that, but I think he did.

I thought that Donovan was going to be his parter when they announced the line-up vs. the Czech Republic, but he was playing way too deep to be considered forward number 2.

[numerista]

The four quintessential American victories of the 21st century - Mexico 2001, Portugal 2002, Mexico 2002 and Mexico 2005 were all accomplished with McBride on the field paired with a pure hitter.

I enjoyed this post a lot, but this one line doesn't work for me.

Mexico 2001 - After a dismal first half where McBride subbed out early, Mathis and Wolff were gamebreakers in the second. Surely, victory was accomplished with McBride off the field?

Portugal 2002 - The way I remember it, McBride was effectively a solo forward for about half of this game and was nonetheless a very effective outlet. This was only while the US was protecting a multi-goal lead, however.

Mexico 2002 - McBride & Wolff up top, back when Wolff had his zip ... probably your strongest example, as well as a pairing that we should probably have seen more often in Korea.

Mexico 2005 - Not really a victory of the same magnitude, and even in a true forward role, does LD really count as a "pure hitter?"