Seriously. If I'm not in the currently anointed XI, and definitely if I'm not in the 18, I've got to ask myself what chance in hell do I have of getting on the field? Peter is like and old school baseball manager who doesn't use relief pitchers. I agree that a road opener was the ideal place to throw out four, five, six, seven, hell eight new faces in the starting lineup. Even getting run out of the park (unlikely) would've been better than this, and given us a hell of a lot more information about where our squad is.
I just don't understand what the plan is/was. Did they really think they could play the best 11 in all of these games because it was early season!?!? When are they going to rotate in the B team? Away in Panama in a CONCACAF game? In the home opener? Neither? It would probably have made more sense to rotate about half the team out for LAFC and the other half out for the Panama game. That would allow you to have some experience on the field with some younger guys in both games. Now we're in kind of a tough spot with what to do with the team in the next several games.
Absolutely, this was an opportunity missed, and we have to really hope the ramification don't continue throughout the season. We were never going to win the Supporters Shield in early March, but the potential downsides now are massive. A single road loss won't hurt us. But the knock on effect? I mean to me this seems to put us in a really bad spot for the CCL and the home opener, and the weekend following the return CCL match. It's as if we were practising the anti-Judo, using our own strengths against ourselves.
That's exactly was started chewing me up during the second half of the LA game. We went from 100 to zero in a finger snap. I don't get ESPN, so I was listening to the 810 radio feed, and a pre-recorded interview with Peter aired until game time. When the interviewer mentioned we were playing the same starting XI I didn't want to believe he meant the LA game - as rosters are only set one hour beforehand. I was in denial. I mean Peter has been doing this for ten years. Is there nobody on staff that can talk sense into him? If not, I'm pretty sure I don't want Zoran or Kerry or any of the others to succeed him. Peter needs a Zambrano to call him out, to keep him looking at the big picture. This is all of Peter's worst instincts balled up into one game. The self-delusional lineup, still not subbing players until after the fresher LAFC had, not to mention waiting for an injury to occur, and the nonsensical denial excuse after the fact about it being lack of concentration and not fatigue. Like, what the actual ********? Maybe Peter should've spent the last month sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber. Maybe he's the one that didn't make it out of Toluca intact.