News: Bruce Arena disagrees with Jurgen Klinsmann over U.S. World Cup miss

Agree with your first sentence regarding Arena.

Disagree a bit about the players though. Now I don't blame player x for having skill level y, so I'm with you there. A player is as good as he is, that's fine. The issue is when player x plays at level y-5, when a world cup spot is on the line, which is what a bunch of these guys did (in more than just one game too), and it f****d us over. We don't have any world class players, but we didn't need a bunch of world class players to qualify from concacaf. The guys we do have just needed to play at level y and care a little bit more.

 

Having opposing views is a troll? What is it in that statement that you disagree with? He doesn’t make excuses? I think he has caused more harm than the positive from his run in 2002. If that event was so good for us, why have we stayed flat or declined since then?

My complaints about Arena are much more founded in facts than what has been continuously spewed about Klinsmann since May of 2014. People may not like Klinsmann, but things changed during his tenure, which by itself is an accomplishment. Arena is one of the ones trying to get it back to the way it used to be.

 

Sympathy for that clown? Really? Little room for error? Why were we so close then after giving up so many points?

He only needed to find players because he got rid of ones he shouldn’t have. Yeah, Sunil really blew it. I don’t think he did anything to warrant firing (except the first two games of the Hex), but if it was going to be done, it needed to be done sooner. By late 2016, he should have just sat on his hands and prayed... it would have probably worked out for him too.

 

So again, I've bagged on MB for the last four years (and of course, was proven to be right by what happened). I've done the same with the constant GK rotation from one subpar overage guy to the other. And more of the same with Jozy. And please, don't even get me started on Backpass Beasley still being somehow involved.

My point is it's not up to those guys to do anything but show up and play. They played poorly, yes, and the effort was sometimes subpar. But when you are called in every time, when your name is set in ink on the team sheet, when you have literally nobody to fear, knowing regardless of your performance for club or country, you will be trotted out there as the only one "experienced" enough to win or qualify...how can you not get complacent? How can your performance not suffer?

The players returning to MLS was awful. But again, can you blame MB or Jozy for grabbing a huge paycheck? If someone offered me twice the pay to work half as hard, I would take it 10 times out of 10, and nobody would blame me!

The blame goes straight to Arena. He had numerous chances to rotate, to promote comptetition, to uncover hungry, younger, better players. He chose to ride with the same guys. This was praised by the media and most fans, with only a few of us saying that wasn't the right decision. It turned out to be the wrong decision. But that decision was Arena's.

You can blame the players for less than stellar effort (I think they generally tried pretty hard), you can blame MB for poor leadership (I have), but I have trouble assigning most of the blame to these guys that became lazy because they were allowed to be. If performance suffers, if laziness creeps in, they should be dropped. And they should have been dropped. But once again, that's on Arena.

 

When did we start taking things that Bruce Arena says to the media at face value?

 

apparently, pretty damn hard. I'd like to see some hot shot Euro team come in and try and qualify in fortresses of Trinidad and Tobago, panama city and tegucigalpa. Nearly impossible, I'm telling you.

 

You're only as good as your subject material.

 

Is it worse that we take what Arena says to sell a book at face value?

 

What's the book called? 800 pages of snarky trolling?

 

Why buy a book when we can that right here for free?

 

Says the voice of experience ...

 

So Arena wants the search for the next coach to include foreign candidates. And Klinsi cites MLS as having a backbone and getting stronger every year.

Sensible comments from both gentleman. They could team up and be good friends, and maybe invite Mr. B. Bradley out for a coffee.

 

Yes, you're trolling when you start saying Arena has done more harm than good and dismissing our QF as luck.

 

No, I think he has done more harm. He set a tone of arrogance that has permeated US soccer for some time. I’m not aware of him providing solutions to any problems and instead positioning such that he can discount the issue, just like a petty poster here would do. His interviews in 2006 were repulsive just like his comments about dual nationals prior to 2017.

I also think 2002 gave many people a false perspective of where we were and many became very, very complacent.

I think 2002 was an amazing accomplishment, but we were also lucky like we have been every other time we have gotten out of the group. We were lucky to get to play a team we knew and didn’t respect us in the round of 16. He did a great job to have the team come out strong against Portugal in the first half, had a great plan against Mexico, and the team prepared against Germany. We also didn’t look to great for 2.5 games in between then.

 

But JK was equally lucky to get out of group. Ghana imploded but the US was lucky to get by them and not draw. The one game we looked better was Portugal and against Germany and Belgium we played the kid of football a team fighting to avoid relegation against table toppers play.

He did equal damage by making sure our depth was paper thin. Not to mention exile a legendary and needed talent. For every Yedlin there was MOF and horrible experiments that everybody knew would be bad from start so we got stuck with loads of caps for a Zardes, Jozy and MB. And he started with a fresh cycle no excuse for developing players but he called in the first team to shit the bed in a GC. Play the kids you claim to believe in so much

 

Both these men are responsible for this disaster and show different levels of arrogance. I think they strangely lack what the other is missing. I think Bruce is better on tactics but his man management sucks, I mean no GC in the final qualifier and why he didnt use that tactical ability to play for a draw. JK is good at man management but as Lamb pointed out and Jogi Loew has shown JK has absolutely zero tactical sense!

 

I never said he didn’t get lucky... it is actually in my post. You are wrong about the Belgium game.

Who are these players that he didn’t include? Arena didn’t seem to include them either.

 

Belgium was one of the most pathetic tactical approaches I've ever seen and literally every metric bears that out. And then of course Klinsmann blames the players for what happened, after he refused to field more than 2 true attacking players, and decided to make a defensive midfielder our creative engine. But yea, that wasn't at all the US looking like relegation fodder.

7 - 0 would have been a fairer score than 2 - 1 in ET.

Jurgen Klinsmann is the biggest fake and liar in the history of our program, and wasted 5 years of talent and directly was resposible (along with Arena) in the most embarrasing run in program history.

He told he was going to play attacking football, and proceeded to produce the most conservative lineups we've seen, always with multiple defensive midfielders, rarely with creative midfielders. He also used defensive players in attacking positions. And then he blamed players for not attacking more.

That's Jurgen Klinsmann. He got fired from Bayern Munich for being one of their worst coaches in modern times, because he couldn't tactically manage his way through a U10 league, and his players had to do tactics, secretly, because he couldn't be bothered. Unfortunately he brought the same mentality to the US.

He says we're going to play proactive football, and then runs our players to death in camp, and treats them like USSR athletes.

If you are attacking Arena while promoting Klinsmann, you are trolling.

 

Klinsmann was also terrible at management, or do you think picking Brad Davis ahead of Landon Donovan, and then starting him against Germany, was a good thing? DeAndre Yedlin at Attacking Right Wing?

 

I meant man management as in talking to players and getting them to play well. This only works if they are German, already tactical sound and have a good technical coach. Then you can work on motivation.

 

I've got two issues with this.


#1: Why are you suddenly assuming a tie in Mexico? Is it because we cleared 3 points in every single match with Mexico in the hex since the draw in 1997? I'll give you a bit of rope w/this erroneous take from one perspective. After largely dominating the series with Mexico at home from 2000-2010, we began sputtering at home against them in 2011. I don't think we lost a single home match against Mexico for a decade, then since 2011 we've lost a Gold Cup Final, a Gold Cup Playoff Ticket Final, and then in 2017, the home opener against Mexico. So there was at least a bit of a trend since 2011 that wasn't exactly brilliant, but I don't think it's fair to argue that a tie was a more reasonable expectation then the full 3, especially when.

#2 you turn around and present a full expectation that we would collect the traditional draw on the road in each of our remaining road matches, knowing 3 of the 4 would be in Latin America, traditionally a difficult road for us, period, and an especially difficult road in the Jurgen era. I will cede the point that through 2010, we were consistently solid at collecting our road points (outside of Costa Rica, and to some extent Azteca), and winning generally at home, w/just the rare hiccup. But what's interesting is what happens starting in 2012. Things go south, and fast. Between 1996 and 2010, four cycles, we generally achieved expectations, we won the vast bulk of our home matches, and other then Costa Rica, and Mexico, we collected draws on the road in most matches with the occasional win mixed in, a grand total of 5 wins, 8 losses and 7 draws over those 4 cycles, and a GD of -2. Not too bad.

Then you can see the roof cave in with Klinsmann. Klinsmann's record in Latin American when playing in the semifinal round and the hex: 1 win, 4 losses, 2 draws, including our two solitary road defeats in Latin America outside of Mexico and Costa Rica in qualifying campaigns (1-2 @ Honduras and 0-2 @ Guatemala) with a goal difference of -6. If you think it has more to do with the player pool then anything, well, add the Arena road games in Latin America, and the record across those two cycles becomes 1 win 4 losses and 5 draws, with that very same -6 goal differential.

I'm not sure who deserves blame more, and I don't know if I care. I think both screwed up in distinctly different ways. I think Klinsmann was a bit too full of himself, had too antagonistic a relationship with certain players, and seemed disorganized and as an old instructor of mine loved to do, he liked putting his players into a sense of disequilibrium to promote learning, and often it just seemed to promote anxiety and poor performances instead. Arena grew more conservative over time, like the hex was a microcosm of the transition between his adventurousness approach in 2000-2002, and his vastly more conservative approach from 2004-2006. I remain totally baffled as to why he was so overconfident in his player selection with a largely old roster on a Friday night to be so willing to trot out the same old roster just a few days later. It makes little sense. At the time, like the players, and Arena, most of us we're a little too over confident as well, not really seeing how disastrous the player selection was for that game until it was too late (not saying we didn't have quibbles, I think just about all of us had a couple of guys, especially Gonzalez, that we wanted nowhere near the field, and that the formation was worrisome, especially considering how well T&T had played against Mexico a short time earlier).

All might have been different if not for a bad clearance and a wonder goal, but as many have argued, we were both incredibly unlucky, and also, the worst we've EVER been, considering the talent available, in my lifetime so in a sense, we earned our bad luck. We were lucky, after all, to get a last second equalizer in Honduras a month earlier (though we were unlucky to have Costa Rica get away with a red card offense AND score and take control of the game a bit later during that same pair of matches in September, that one non-call was probably worth a 2 goal difference in that game if not 3 from what the result actually was (0-2)).

It's difficult to get a firm grasp on things, but when you look at the 1990-1996 developmental debacle, look at the trend lines w/the teams performance starting around 2011 (March 2013 to June 2014 being a fools gold situation in retrospect), the clues of this ignominious fall were always there if anyone looked hard enough. Just looking at road performance in the semi's and the hex, you can clearly see that after the high water mark (2005-2010), the team clearly entered some sort of decline both on the senior level and junior level (the senior level starting in '11, the junior level starting in 2007 with the U-17's and just getting worse and worse until it finally began turning around in 2015) and the decline seems to have reached its nadir across a series of end points (the U-'17's and U-'20's both failing to qualify for tournaments for the first time in decades in one case, and the first time ever in another after having generated nothing but awful results during the tail end of the aughts, the U-23's being completely humiliated in qualifying in 2012 and 2015/2016 for the olympics with the very same players that largely sucked big time in youth tournaments earlier, and then the Gold Cup failure in '15 followed by the Playoff ticket choke against Mexico and then the culmination: a hex in which other than a pair of solid performances against Panama and Honduras at home, and a nice enough draw on the road at Mexico, the team played horrifically bad at Costa Rica, at Honduras, at Panama and at T&T with everything on the line, and had a second consecutive home debacle against Mexico after having largely owned Mexico at home for decades other than the 2011 Gold Cup disaster.

We all know the story. What bothers me most, isn't really the bad taste of Klinsmann and especially Arena, it's the fed, which has been completely inept and tone deaf throughout following the debacle. Virtually nothing has actually been handled well following it, not even the scheduling of friendlies and venues for said friendlies. If it weren't for the giant pile of exciting young prospects coming up born since 1995, I'd be in even more despair now than I was six months ago.

A look at qualifying performance on the road in Latin America since 1996:

1998 Cycle:

Semi's:
1-2 @ Costa Rica
2-2 @ Guatemala

Hexagonal:
2-3 @ Costa Rica
1-1 @ El Salvador
0-0 @Mexico


2002 Cycle:

Semis:
1-1 @ Guatemala
1-2 @ Costa Rica (famous Berhalter third arm handball game)

Hex:
2-1 @ Honduras (famous Mathis wonder goal in the 87th minute)
0-1 @Mexico
0-2 @ Costa Rica

1 win, 3 losses 1 tie GD: -3


2006 Cycle:

Semis:
1-1 @ Panama
2-0 @ El Salvador

Hex:
1-2@ Mexico
3-0 @ Panama
0-0 @ Guatemala

2 wins, loss and 2 ties and GD of +4


2010 Cycle:

Semis:
2-1@ Guatemala

Hexagonal:
2-2 @ El Salvador
1-3 @ Costa RIca
1-2 @ Mexico
3-2 @ Honduras

2 wins, 2 losses, 1 tie GD of -1

2014 Cycle:

Semis:
1-1 @ Guatemala

Hex:
1-2 @ Honduras
0-0 @Mexico
1-3 @ Costa Rica
3-2 @ Panama (w/the two goals in injury time)

1 win, 2 losses, 2 draws -2 GD

2018 Cycle:

Semis:
0-2 @ Guatemala

Hex:
0-4 @ Costa Rica
1-1 @ Panama
1-1 @ Mexico
1-1 @Honduras

0 wins, 2 losses, 3 draws, -6 GD



So historically, we're looking at a U.S. team that has basically lost anytime it's ever set foot in Costa Rica, occasionally grabbed the rare draw at Mexico, and then struggled in Honduras, Guatemala, and Panama to grind out results, occasionally actually losing matches to 2 out of three of those teams (and we would have lost in Panama in 2013 if not for them taking their foot off the gas pedal, and some nifty finishing by hungry youngsters). All in all we've collected

6 wins, 11 ties and 12 losses with a GD of -10 in 29 roadies down in Latin America since 1996. Excluding Mexico and Costa Rica, I'll admit, the record looks a good sight better:

 

As a Galaxy supporter, I disagree on Arena.

Tactically, he's very limited. He can organize a stubborn defence, then he lets his attackers figure it out themselves until such time as he gives the order to bunker.

But the man usually gets people playing for him, and I'll always be impressed with how he handled the potential Beckham/LD powder-keg.

If he has a fatal flaw, it's a reluctance to deviate from what he knows, once a formula has succeeded for him.

Hence his tendency to call on the same players and stretch them just beyond their usefulness and overlook glaring weaknesses, rather than risking change.

 

This is the standard approach of picking and choosing what to complain about. The arguments are always the same. Poor tactition, agreed. Got fired from Bayern, sure.

Nothing else is really balanced. I defend klinsmann, or really approaches he took, but not sure I’ve promoted him. Those who dislike klinsmann are too emotional to see anything clearly. He isn’t a good coach, but a decent manager with style that doesn’t work for everyone. He experimented a lot and his execution wasn’t always that good. He didn’t shoulder blame, but at that same time wanted the players to take more responsibility. In the end, he always seemed to have the best interest of US soccer as a focus.

I thought the Belgium game was one of the bravest games we have ever played and wish we would approach all games in a similar fashion. The game plan was decent in an attempt to get a result which was a very unlikely outcome no matter what. He fielded 3 mobile 6/8s because we were so severely outmatched, but he didn’t pack it in and often attacked with number.

At least 80% of failing to qualify is on Arena. The first two games are less important than the last two. Those who assume Klinsmann would have failed to qualify are ignoring history. His experimental ways and not treating every game as must win, put him in a tough position quite a bit, so he has also had a track record of needing to recover... which was quite good. Arena suggesting his job was in jeopardy in the spring of 2016 only adds to that. Poor starts to the Hex in 2013 and qualifying in 2016 were turned around and the Copa was a very strong performance with job on the line.

 

Arena's tactics though......I mean my God they were so bad it was shocking. Then the panic response was giving Benny like 30 seconds to save it? Just so bad.

Again read G. Cameron's article...sums it up perfectly.