Wow. 3-0 beatdown. The only players who can hold their heads high after this ass whipping are Hector Jimenez and Pedro Santos. Everyone else was disappointing. Defense - Other than Jimenez, everyone could’ve done better on all the goals. Simple as. Midfield - IMO Artur has really regressed from 2017. Clark was ok, but as a team we just couldn’t control the ball for extended periods of time. Attack - Pipa was trash. Complete and total trash. Robinho was invisible, except his clown-act bicycle kick clearance attempt on the third goal. Mullins isn’t good enough period. Our only decent attacking player was Santos. He offered pace and a willingness to try things. He had zero help though. Coach - Porter was shit. Terrible tactics, and changed NOTHING second half. Shocking. Commentators - neil was ok. Dwight sucks, kept talking about possession like its the only thing that matters.
For Atlanta next week, I’m going radical, I want Santos and Jimenez on the wings. Hector played right wing for LA, and even a bit when he first came here. He’s never gone beat people off the dribble, but he has composure and can pass and hold the ball. Can’t change much else really. The usual starting lineups with the internationals back, and Jimenez on the wing with Santos. Pipa was terrible tonight. Have no idea why he played 90 mins. He needs to get his shit together, been a slow start so far. Porter needs to show something as well, our attack is terrible, and it seems there is no Plan B. Looking like Berhalter 2.0
Jiminez was beaten a lot 1v1 and wasn't great in attack. I wouldn't count him as our bright spot. He looked the best because everyone else was awful. Honestly, MOTM goes to the training staff for making sure our players didn't get hurt on their field. Seemed a bit loose. No one was good. No one.
This team lacked athletic ability tonight. Ultra slow and uninspired. Bendik is not good. The internationals coming back will help but we need an infusion of talent soon.
Considering the first two goals were scored on the opposite side of the field from him, the third is 100% on Robinho, and that he actually looked composed when on the ball, i thought Jimenez was ok. Santos was ok as well, by miles our best attacker. They get like 5/10 though, compared to everyone else 2/10, I agree with your ideal there.
Did we watch the same game? I only saw one guy for us trying to score. I’m not saying he was good, I’m saying he was the only one that wasn’t total shit. Just looked at some stats. Robinho attempted 30 passes, only 3 forward. In two games, he has 56 attempted passes, only 4 of which were forward. Ugh. In comparison, the player who tried the most forward passes (percentage wise) was Jimenez and Mensah, both just under 40%. Yes, our two player who tried to pass forward the most often were defenders. Jesus. As a team we also had about 100 more attempted passes than Philly, though they were literally all sideways (326 v 232).
Welp this will be easy... Good: Absolutely nothing. Bad: also nothing. Nothing reached the level of Bad tonight. Ugly: Absolutely everything. Mullins was invisible. Robinho was somehow out of control and timid all at the same time. Santos was himself which just isn’t good enough when the rest of the team is so brutal. Higuain misplaced passes all over the pitch. Artur and Clark brought nothing to the attack and spent their defensive shifts ball watching. Our back line was clownshoes, all 4 of them. Bendik probably should have done better on goals 2 & 3 but the back line did him absolutely no favors. I liked what I saw from JJ and Sosa and Argudo is serviceable as a DM sub but generally our bench doesn’t have the dynamics to change the game. Porter was let down by players not executing but I think there could have been some tactic changes that would have led to better results with the roster he had to work with. Nothing was working in the first half and they trotted out the same nothing in the second half. Ugly everywhere you looked tonight. Table Finish based on Week 4 Performance: 5th - 8th. If this was just based on Week 4 performance, bottom of the table for sure. But it’s more season cumulative adjusted for the current week performance so I’m just knocking it back down to likely making the playoffs with a slight chance to miss altogether. I’m willing to write off this result as a night that just wasn’t the Crew’s night. But next week becomes important and another performance like tonight not only shows some cracks in the dam but may blow it wide open. Back to Tiny demon Fortress and time to take points from Atlanta while they are driving the struggle bus. We don’t need to be their slump busters too.
Tonight showed exactly how shallow we are as a team. There was no “next man up” anywhere. I understand our new leadership needs time to make changes. I’m ok with that. I hope today was a big data point. It showed a lot. Not much of it was very good.
Small disagreement. The team is shallow, sure. We had 3/4 of our back 4. We were only missing Trapp in midfield. Every once in a while Gyasi might not start a game. We had enough of a team to pull us through. Our senators, our veterans were disgustingly poor tonight. Pipa and Afful specifically were terrible. It’s up to Porter to hold these idiots accountable. We’ll see if he does.
In four games I think we have 2 goals from open play? And one was that 94th minute Zardes goal off two long balls? Is this the fulfillment of the ruthless Porter system we have been promised? Or do we just have a bunch of shitty players who aren’t good enough? It’s a bit of both. Only 30 more games of this steaming garbage and maybe we can reboot.
A little antecdote from the game. About 10 minutes into the game last night Porter was yelling something at the players and motioning with his hands. A Philly fan one row behind and a few seats to the left shouts, “They can’t hear you, you wanker! Hey Columbus fan, your coach is wanker! Caleb Porter is a wanker.” I turned around and just replied, “Well yeah, duh.” Laughter ensued from everyone around us and obnoxious Philly fan had no idea how to react or what to do. The rest of the evening I received sympathy, and 3 free drinks from Philly fans, including from one guy who insisted on walking to the stadium club with me at halftime to buy me a gin and tonic, “because you are gonna need something stronger to make it through the second half.” #SunshineBrigade
I don't mean any of the following to come across as an excuse for a horrible performance. I just want to point out that, for all the justified exultation we felt related to the club being saved, in reality, the club went into 2019 facing some pretty serious headwinds. We got a good sense last night of what that might mean for us this season. 1. We had no off season to prepare for 2019. New ownership only took over the club on Jan. 2. And they inherited a huge mess (see below). In a handful of weeks they needed to hire a coach; replace a decimate FO staff; launch a season ticket drive; recreate a corporate partnership program; negotiate TV and radio deals; generate marketing for the upcoming season; repair a poorly maintained stadium; and make progress on huge and hugely important new stadium and training facility projects that must kick off this summer. 2. We lost our entire coaching staff in that off season. New ownership often brings in its own people, over time. But our new owners stepped into a situation wherein the previous, reasonably successful coaching staff had left to take over the USMNT program. Porter's been coach for, what, two months? Once hired, he needed to build out his own staff, most of whom needed to relocate to Columbus to start their new jobs. It was a wholesale flip of the coaching and technical staff that started 1-2 months later than otherwise would have been the case. 3. We're losing our starting goalkeeper, and lost for the season one of the best left backs in the league. Not only haven't there been opportunities to bring in new talent, but some of our existing best talent is out for the season, or very shortly will be departing. We recall the playoff runs from the past two seasons, but we lose in Atlanta and D.C. without Steffen in goal. In fact, I don't think we even make the playoffs last season without him. I consider him to be an irreplaceable player, and the team hasn't had the opportunity to explore replacing him yet. 4. Previous ownership left the FO in a sorry state. We don't know all of the details, but the info that's leaked out implies that the FO was an understaffed, underresouced, demoralized skeleton crew when Dee and Pete were handed the keys to Mapfre in early January. People were commuting daily from Cleveland to try and right the ship and prepare for the home opener. It was that bad. Thing is, all of the above simply had to happen. We needed new ownership. Needed a new coaching staff. Needed a new FO. Needed to repair the stadium. Needed to sell tickets. Needed TV and radio deals. Rumor has it that the club has barely made progress on corporate sponsorships, but I just assume that they simply didn't have the time to do everything in order to prep for the earliest home opener in club history. Sucks, but it is what it is. Sucks, too, that all of the above, in my opinion, had to happen before an even marginal transformation of the existing roster could commence. And that likely means it'll be a frustrating season on the pitch. The last time the Crew sat on its hands during an off season was after our MLS Cup run, and Berhalter later admitted that it was a huge mistake. Of course, after that season, we faced none of the headwinds we're dealing with this year. Sure, we had PSV as an owner. But there were no structural reasons why we couldn't have tweaked the roster that off season. Gregg just chose not to. Anyway, I'm sure we all remember the glories of that following season, the only one during the time Gregg ran the club where we failed to make the playoffs. Bez and Porter are saying what they need to. You don't just throw money at a roster in MLS. You need to be smart about the players you sign. There's real talent on the existing roster. That's true, all fine and good. But these guys have their work cut out for them and, off the record and over a few beers, I assume they'd admit to as much. It'll be painful at times to watch this club this season, but I still have faith that new ownership didn't buy the club in order to run it like it's been run previously. That Bez didn't leave a great gig in Toronto so that he could experience first hand how thrilling it would be to run an MLS club on a shoestring budget. That Porter didn't sign a five year contract here because he looked forward to knocking off early each fall, not having to worry about all that extra time coaches whose teams make the playoffs have to work.
One match but that was brutal. Thing was, before the first goal, there were a lot of good things going on. Good possession, high press getting results and some pretty linkages. Once that first goal that occurred against the run of play, the entire team collapsed and forgot to play even the most basic and fundamental way. That is where leadership comes in and which was in dire short supply. Love Pipa, but he was just awful. A huge culprit. The spine, a strength all season, came up really small. I will not quite come to Hang’s conclusion quite yet until a few more matches come in. Remember set piece goals were created due to attacking pressure.
Depth is a problem in MLS. Rosters are built as starting lineups and a few filler players but by the time you are at player 16 the drop off is severe for every team.
Eh, I don't think Porter inherited a bad roster. Losing Valenzuela hurts but the trade for Francis was a good recovery. One good thing about last night is that it clarified that Bendik really is terrible by MLS standards. Last year in Orlando was not an illusion. So nobody in the Crew front office should be under any delusions that he's an adequate replacement for Steffen. The problem is that it will be hard to find a good keeper during the current window and we might be out of contention by the time the summer window opens. We probably won't replace Pipa this season but he sure does slow down our attack. Given that we'll usually be trying to score against an organized defense, maybe we should play with 2 strikers?
Philly was missing so many players they didn't even have a full 18 man squad, only 16. Both teams was missing 4 or 5 starters. Not an acceptable excuse.
I’m 42 years old. I’m more interested in seeing my team play well and win than pissing off random strangers. In the event that my team is a complete dumpster fire with a wanker head coach looking at the fire, clueless, like a deer in the headlight I go another route. I’ll shrug my shoulders, I’ll admit my team is shit, and I’ll take the home fans money and beers.