I feel lucky to get my lose by one Grouchy point. That could have easily been 4 or 5 to 1. Maybe Mensah's contract guarantees starts as well as pay? It's hard to think otherwise when we see him still in the lineup. Mensah stinks all year, gets red carded for 2nd time and is back in the lineup at first opportunity. Abubakar gets red carded and doesn't make bench.
Mensah is getting laughable. He was close to getting a second yellow card.(was kinda hoping) Maybe baseball is his sport.
Mensah was easily our best defender on the day. Crognale over ran the ball when all he had to do was force the guy wide into a less dangerous area. On the second goal, Crognale & Naess are 2 v 1 with Wondo & conspire to leave him wide open. Yes, Wondo got ball side of Mensah late & hit the bar. And yes he had a comical sequence where he missed on a header & then jumped on a guys back. Still was our best defender. Jimenez was constantly hitting unpressured passes directly to the other team & Raitala is too slow to play wingback. 3G is floundering around for solutions. In the back and up top. It is a crapshoot week to week. 3 road games vs teams below the red line nets us one point and we give up 2+ goals in all of them playing 5 in the back. Clean house after the season.
As bad as Mensah was on that play, at least he messed up near midfield. Crognale was poor as well. He is however, a rookie. I expect those on occasion from Crognale, and very few mistakes from Mensah.
I come here to praise our players, not to bury them. Now that we have seen an entire cast of characters revolve around our midfield and defensive positions and bench spots, it should be obvious to anyone with two eyes and synapses between their ears that the system isn't working. Maybe Barcelona can keep possession of the ball from its goal area to its opponents, but I've seen season's worth of us trying to keeping possession of the ball in our own half and building slowly up the field with short passes, long blooped switch the field passes, and square passes preceded by wild gesticulating to teammates who are not running forward or indeed running at all. This so called system is not so much a system of winning games as it is a system to reliably give goals up on turnovers week in and week out. And since this is all we attempt to do, coaching geniuses like Chris Leitch don't have to spend hours on game tape or at the white board explaining it to their own players how Columbus Crew can be beaten. Is this really our players fault? Sure Jonathan Mensah isn't great, but I bet he'd look better on any other team in MLS. Same goes for all our defenders.