My take on JK was that he was a complete fraud whose only talent in soccer was falling over in the penalty area. I wouldn't trust him to coach an NPSL team.
my all-time favorite at a DCU game was when a guy (Bleeding Gums - from Simpson's maybe?) played on the anthem on his sax. Soulful, emotional, and sounded great from 10 rows back in 107.
Agreed. People occasionally acknowledge and excuses his managerial career in Germany, but they always forget what he did to TFC. They were absolute garbage.
I was being as kind as possible. I was staunchly anti-Klinsy from before he got the job because going back to 2006 he was getting an awful lot of praise for saying the same sort of thing I was saying as a lowly soccer Dad watching my son survive in our stupid club soccer "system." Not all the problems in our program were his fault, but boy howdy was he the wrong guy to try and fix them.
Was he really? He deserves no credit whatsoever for success of Pulisic, McKennie, Adams overseas? Seeing Chris Richards @ Bayern? Dest @ Ajax? Or Gloster moving to PSV? Gloster recently said: “I chose Europe because they give young players more opportunities here. In America they look more at the experience and how strong you are. If you’re good enough here, it doesn’t matter how old you are.” Pretty obvious that JK helped shift the mentality of a generation of our young players and I think the NT will reap benefits (as they are right now) long after his departure. He definitely made mistakes, some illogical/persistant decisions drove me nuts, so I understand fans who offer legit criticism...but the mob that think he didnt impact our federation positively AT ALL are irrational
Lets be frank, everything today is an absolutist proposition and driven by a mob mentality. I like the JK hire and he got this team out of the toughest group we've ever been drawn in. Got us past one of our bogey opponents in Ghana, got us past Ronaldo and Portugal and got a credible effort against Germany. Its a shame his man management skills weren't better, because he lost that team fast. Part of the problem, was duh, he's German and Germans don't think, act or motivate like Americans. I don't think he was fired for a loss vs Mexico and @ CR. No one could be 100% counting on those points and even with those results qualification was well within reach. I think Arena did a poorer job through the rest of qualifying than JK would have done. At the end of the day, I'll always blame the players who gave up on JK and gave up at T&T. That was shambolic and the players have to own that. No one on that T&T team was playing higher level ball than USL or the English League 1. We should have been able to go down there without any coaching staff and stomp them, but we didn't because 11 months later they still didn't have a winning mentality. I'll never look at Michael Bradly the same way again. The guy who brought us back against Slovenia in 2010 is not the guy who helped drag that team down.