Berhalter announces 23 player squad for the 2019 Gold Cup

Morales had 26 games and over 1700 minutes for a mid B1 team.

The other two are returned from injury just like Morris, Jozy etc. but their teams are much more competitive so it's harder to get back into the rotation.

Treat them the same is all one can ask.

 

Is he? I was saying the same thing until this roster. I thought GB came up with this ridiculous system last year and then when Adams showed he was a world class DM, he would change. It has been 6 months, he hasn't changed. He has doubled down, if anything. Not even looking for other DMs. If Trapp or Bradley get hurt, there is no replacement on the 40 man roster. He has literally built everything on Trapp for 2022 as MB will be too old. If he is building it on MB, that is a whole another level of insanity.

Maybe he will get Jill Ellis lucky and have Bradley get hurt. Then T&T beats us again by pushing Trapp around like he was pushed around on Wednesday. Then GB puts Adams in at the 6 and we win the tournament.

I've seen zero evidence that he would even put Adams there at that point. Zero.

 

My real worry is that he is trying to build around his core players and those core players are Trapp/Bradley. If you view all the rosters and lineup from that prism, it kinda makes sense (except for the build around those two part)

 

Freezing Nagbe and Guzan out after their comments that the USMNT is a "burden" is the only good thing Gregg has done to build the program to date.

 

C'mon. Robinson was an unmitigated disaster. Maybe he was played out of position but no way was Trapp, Roldan, Arriola and Djorde worse. They were not good but Robinson was really really bad.

 

Based on what?

 

Morales isn't very good though?

I can see feeling like Johnson (who I don't personally care for but if Bradley's getting call ups then whatever) deserves to be brought in, but anyone clamoring for Morales is really reaching, imo.

 

Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt
(Their places of birth)

Unless you are such an obvious upgrade to someone else in the pool not born outside the USA, you have no chance. It's been that way since JK was shown the door.

 

My deal is there were people a few weeks ago -- before the Jamaica egg laying -- saying how this few weeks goes didn't matter because there is a process that has to be trusted, and we're not far enough in.

 

Sigh.

Yep - someone who has earned 1700 minutes at a mid-table B1 team and has a lengthy history of being a minimum very good B2 players isn't very good. I'd point out that we just started Trapp and Yueill in a midfield that got run over by lower-end MLS/USL players.

Morales wasn't as good as Bradley when Bradley was good and Alfredo had one mediocre but not terrible game in a USMNT jersey (2016 Gold Cup tie vs. Panama). Even in that game, he was nowhere near as bad as Trapp was in Jamaica. Bradley is also a shell of the person that he was when he was good.

He also plays better defense and is a ball distributor for his club.

 

That is an incredibly ridiculous assertion to make with zero evidence to back it up. There are tangible reasons those three haven't been called in for a while, from mediocrity, to past flakiness, to injury, to indifference, and to form.

I get being upset about the direction things have gone since 2017 but this is just deep end nonsense.

 

Morales has been just a guy every time he's put on a US shirt. I'm not saying he's not better than Trapp and Yueill-those guys suck-but he's not some answer. He's just a guy.

 

What I would say is that meaningless early cycle friendlies against Jamaica are exactly the time to experiment. It was horrific, but I don't really care. I might care if I paid for a ticket, though.............

The Gold Cup roster disturbs me because its really the point where preparations for WCQing start. We're now with an official roster seeing a worrying trend with Berhalter. And that is the "status quo" from a failed cycle. We could have a spine in the Gold Cup on Altidore, Bradley, and Omar Gonzalez. That was already a failed spine. More than anything else the USSF and USMNT needed to "turn the page." What we got instead was a disaster of a coaching search, and a seemingly unimaginative player selection.

I'm kinda to the point of feeling sorry for Altidore and Bradley. They've sacrificed a lot for the USMNT, and have worked really hard for the program. They've, I think, been made the scapegoats for a program wide failure last cycle. But they needed to be put out to pasture in favor of the "next generation." Enough of this.

Who do fans want to see? Jozy Altidore or Josh Sargent? If I told people that we could win the Gold Cup with the experienced Jozy or lose the Gold Cup with the inexperienced Josh Sargent.....................folks would still pick Josh Sargent. [That's just a hypothetical. Don't overanalyze that. We all get the point.] The answers are obvious. The fans want the new blood. Something different.............

 

The guy that the MLS MVP award is named after, the women's all-time leading scorer, the guy who has been USMNT manager for parts of three cycles, and many, many others would disagree that this is a ridiculous reason to exclude certain players. Is it really such a stretch to believe Berhalter feels the same way?

 

i'll repeat what i said before - just treat everyone the same and since we've taken every conceivable MLS "guy", there's a reason why he wasn't included.

Apparently, I am coming across as pining for B1 players as if they are the solution to what ails the USMNT.

That's not my point at all. If Morales, Johnson and Chandler were deemed surplus because they're either 1) too old or 2) too much of a health risk that would be fine if that perspective was taken across the whole pool.

More specifically, if we're going to 1) take older players or 2) take players returning from injury or with an injury history, you should at least consider the ones who have shown that they can play at a high level and not only the ones who are run-of-the-mill minor leaguers.

I simply want there to be a level playing field and ignoring higher ceiling players for reasons that are ignored for lower ceiling ones means that GGG's structural preferences are harming the USMNT IMO.


BTW - when was the last time Bradley was better than "just a guy" for the USMNT? I think he gets a bit too much shit for being awful but he's hasn't been an elite player for us in a long long time. Morales is far better than Trapp, whom I think is better than Bradley but I can see how some think Bradley>Trapp. Neither of those two would get a sniff of a B1 team.

 

I love Frankie, but that's pretty disrespectful to some of the guys on this roster.

 

Did you not see Pulisic carrying the team last Hex? The wave of young players brought under Sarachan showed a lot of heart too.

Old-timers like you're-dead-to-the-USSF-Fredo Bedoya also would give an arm and a leg for the shirt.

 

I think I see where the temptation lies. Standard procedure for a new cycle is you pasture the old farts who will be over 30, build around the prime age players who will be 24-28 who are proven stars, and focus on which kids and noobs can fill in the open slots. O-30s come back after 2-3 years if the team has a hole it can't sort.

Our prime age core is non existent. The sheer extent to which we need to rely on young players scares people. So the implied proposal is treat the O-30 (or soon to be so) crowd as the temporary? this cycle? core that is usually supplied by players roughly Steffen and Trapp's age (of which there are very few worth a crap). That is even worse incumbency politics than usual, and without the normal justification of a string of qualifications.

To me this needs to play by the same rules as usual and the kids and prospects need to step up. Since so many players retired or are ageing out it is what it is and what we need is the cold blooded willingness to run a ton of people in and out of the shirt until we find the ones who can play. If they are currently over 28 they are a waste of this time period.

We have already done the thing with the O-30 core. We know how the movie ends. Move on. This is the time to find your new Mike Bradley, not hold onto the old one. We base this on holding onto the old ones it's going to be 2 whiffs and not 1. I cannot believe we are re-hashing the same names as last cycle. I want the next Holmes. I cannot be bothered trying to revive Morales.

 

I don't and won't disagree with your Bradley take.

 

I guess that's kind of the point, they are making. We have seen Trapp suck a lot recently, so why doesnt Morales get the same chance to suck too? Even if just for a game. My guess is familiarity with Gregg, but what about Sarachan? Not saying he is the answer either, in fact I think he is about on par with the others, but we should at least get a chance to see it on the field with an A-Team roster a couple of times a year to see how the player is progressing. I get we dont see the camp but that should give the coach even more reason to get them on the field in a meaningless game.

To quick sum, I dont think its necessarily just Gregg but the overall lack of progress from 2018 and its bubbling and just getting worse, so every eh decision is going to meet with a lot of complaining especially when it turns out to be wrong. His honeymoon period never started. Short of a final and a close game, Gregg (and the USSF as a whole) is going to have to worry more and more about a fan base asked to overpay for crap tickets against poor teams, watch poor soccer and asked to keep supporting. Maybe if the USA didnt get the WC bid, we would have seen change.

 

Yeah, I've been defending Berhalter somewhat and will keep trying to refrain from being overly critical until we see poor performance and losses in games that matter, but it's mind-boggling how he and the USSF apparently misread the state of the fan base.

Gonzalez scored an absolutely horrific own goal to keep us out of the WC, and while he clearly feels very bad about it, I don't need to see him in a US jersey ever again, especially when he's a marginal upgrade at best over younger players like CCV and EPB. I'm not super bullish on either of the latter guys now, but they still have higher ceilings than Gonzalez, are much younger, and don't have the stink of the failed qualifying campaign attached to them. Why wouldn't you "roll the dice" and pick one of them as your 4th CB?

 

The worst part about what Berhalter is doing is that Bradley is almost definitely in my top 10 USMNT players whom I'd like to drink a six-pack with. That doesn't mean that I think he should be a spine player for the team now but he has many (but not all) of the characteristics of what I'd like my sons to become.

All that being said, I have posters telling me that I hate Bradley. Sigh.

 

Does that same standard apply to our other DM options? If so, the answer to all 3 could be yes and he'd still have an argument.

 

So you're saying there's a chance Lovitz is on the roster in 2022 (if we make it). And Omar??????? Heaven help us. Where's the rugby channel, US soccer is screwed.

 

I don't agree with it but I suppose you can point to past Bradley performances and say "he's been good for us" regardless of whether or not those performances were like 6 years ago or not.

Trapp certainly has no such excuse.