No, you are either committed to defense as the end goal or not. There is a list of players who have shown good defense. There is a list who could be given more chances. And then there is what Cannon, Yedlin, Robinson, and Brooks have done on the field. If you go back that direction for even some of them, to me, in Concacaf, you are wearing a kick me sign. You are saying I don't take defense seriously, and I want to continue down this road of losing games 2-1 or 3-2 late, or getting flat out run over 4-0. As long as that happens, we are the 3rd-5th best team regionally, even scoring 17 GF in 10 games, and marginal to advance give or take any changes in world cup field size. I have trotted out film and numbers and analysis to explain myself. If you don't buy it, fine, but the video and numbers tended to show Brooks to be even worse than Yedlin and others deemed liabilities. You can chide me for not following the gospel but the numbers are what they are, the film is what it is. He basically cost CR all by himself. He gives up goals about every 2-3 games. On a normal non snob planet that would make him as suspect as a guy who gets back doored badly once a year. The list I showed included GC semi, GC 3rd place, CA 3rd place, CR qualifier, and then yes some friendlies. Those were key games last cycle. Acting like they were all friendlies is not just a mischaracterization, but a lie. Can we at least admit facts are facts, and that many of the games he helped blow counted?????? And then when England or Colombia beat him in some full speed friendly we get blown out in, what, you don't care??? I don't care about "major league starter," or whatever linguistic games we are playing to basically say that playing in certain leagues makes you special. I see that I have set some of you off this morning by offering a different analysis of why we have problems. I see that when someone pursues their analysis and doesn't just cave, you make it personal. But the numbers and video showed what they showed, and you are not going very far in Concacaf with a pretend defense. We couldn't shut down TnT away much less CR or Mexico. Only a crazy person would be like, let me bring back that defense.
While this is an impressive achievement I think his point is that playing in college or being MVP of your team doesn't make you an expert on soccer.
Given that he puts little credence in the global soccer meritocracy and believes "you either have it or you don't", I think he's auditioning for John Brook's start.
If John Brooks is so terrible why is he able to hold a consistent starting spot in one of the most competitive leagues in the world? In fact, his team is vying for a Europa spot. do you not think it's much harder to solidify a starting spot in B1 vs. MLS/B2/Championship? Aren't you a fan of bringing in Sargent and Weah even though they can't get the consistent major league minutes that JB does? Yet the players that you think are better aren't even considered for Best XI in much lower leagues. Why doesn't Wolfburg replace him with Zimmerman (whom I believe is your choice to replace JB)? Why isn't Zimmerman considered for MLS Best XI? Why is that if they are better or equal to JB? Is it that you see something that the entire soccer world doesn't see?
You think this is a different take on participation trophy, and in sports like cross country skiing there it bears fruit. But from my perspective, a domestic strength has been organization and commitment to defense, that we were born tournament ready. I see these counter-arguments of "playing for fun" and "work on skill" as flip sides of the same missionary coin, trying to abandon a historical strength that made us a regular qualifier and a tournament ready side, in favor of some notion of being liberated skill players. With zero acknowledgment that such an approach is basically a bet on whether we can still make the world cup while getting away from how it worked before. Norway is a world cup nobody. Even Holland and Spain, who seem to be our new snob player paradigm of pure skill, have, what, a world cup total? Why isn't the paradigm Germany and Italy? You know, 8 world cup championships between them, organized in defense, but able to be pretty in the attack. Can we quit pretending the 2 cannot be aligned? People keep talking up Bundesliga and Serie A players, but oddly without German and Italian organization and intensity. Part of the reason they win as often as they do is they play to win and get stuck in and don't just make an abstracted goal of artistic prettiness like some tiki-taka club. More to the point, call me when we have the players to play that way. Our skill level has improved and I have nothing against that as a focus. I just think that is not at the level you think it is yet, and historically what made us competitive, perhaps earlier than our skills merited, were tactics and organization and defense. If you want to work with 10 year olds on that, fine, but the adult pool is what it is and you might want to play in a way that maximizes it until we start producing the Neymars and such to take this in a prettier place with the senior NT. And this is not advocating turning us into some Northern Ireland bunker team. You can do organized defending and get stuck in without bunkering, and then turn around and play pretty ground soccer without being a kickball team. Leicester was doing it just a few years back. I just want a sincere commitment to defense that can pitch shutouts, and some of that is personnel, eg, Yedlin giving up our lone goal to Chile. To win that game you have to pitch 90 minute shutouts against the sort of teams you appreciate. I think some of you are such snobs who love these other teams you can't imagine us holding them so you give up and say let's compete on offense. Which far as I am concerned is giving away the store because if we abandon defense as the goal then we aren't even going to be on the same planet as Brazil and England on the ball. The only thing that was keeping us in those games was nullifying the skill difference with our defense, and then seeing if we could break their defense for a quick goal or two.
To put it in a pithy way, some of you seem to want Dutch soccer with German results. Or Dutch skill with German players. There is a reason each of them has their different level of success. One of them is stereotypically pretty at the expense of obsessing about winning. The other is a 105% intensity grinder that mixes skill on the ball with athleticism, fitness, and organization. Be honest with me, which do you REALLY want. I think some of you are selling something that sounds like pretty at the sake of winning which is less attractive when you are already missing world cups. You're telling me pretty will come in the future, but I don't see much of anyone besides Sargent and Pulisic who are that polished at all in this bunch. I mean to me what is weird is B.1 players on a pedestal but then not wanting the Red Bull Leipzig style dedication to organization. Some of you are implicitly selling what to me instead sounds like old Brazil or 70s Holland, in which case, they would rather play pretty and lose, and we as a group might want to chat about that as the team goal. I also think some of you are regionally naive that if you show up with a bunch of slow semi technicians that you are going to beat either skilled Mexico or CR, or athletic Panama running circles around us, and that a serious approach to technicality would mean sincerely doing whatever it takes to be the best skilled team in the whole region. Which I don't think is going to happen by just leaving kids out on fields by themselves. I think we like to sell the idea of kids on favela streets but my experience was playing Mexican pro team age group sides at international tournaments where they were already 1- and 2-touching us to death with neat spacing. And that is not feral kids left to be, that is TAUGHT. That is merely a different brand of organization.
Can y'all make an argument on the facts as opposed to hyperbole and lies??? The premise that other people don't see what I do in the players is mythical and verging on circular, Long has been a routine starter lately. Lima started a recent game and was on the last call sheet before being jerked around. We just for reasons unapparent to me went back to Yedlin who then cost us a goal. Zimmerman was called in for the camp cupcake friendlies. The coach made that decision to not elevate him. Lichaj has been irregularly used for years and was on the Mexico lineup when we won. Parker was on the France team last year when we tied. I would like to see some of the YNT/dual national ttypes, too, but I am not "seeing" imaginary names. I am "seeing" people who played in the Mexico win, the France tie, and in recent friendlies including this year. And then I guess I am foolishly favoring those successful players over the defense that got reamed by England and Colombia, and before that. I will not belabor the other argument but it's basically a bait and switch, what works for team A should work for team B. Team A is these days a meh-ambitions midtable side with a midtable defense. They win less than half their games. So most nights they tie or lose. They are not an unusually successful team in their league achieving special things. I grant them no special subservience. Call me when they play defense like Leipzig. I repeat myself, if the snob equation of being big club assets was the fix, we would already be fixed. We aren't. Most of these guys were the spine of a team that failed to qualify. So maybe look how they actually play.
It's a circular analogical type argument. As a few of us have said, did Adams suck until he left? And magically become great on arrival? Real meritocracy is seeing playing time at Dortmund, Bayern, Liverpool, etc. You are conflating any old first division team with UEFACL quality and therein lies the fallacy. Worse, some of you then pretzel yourselves by arguing against someone like Weah who on paper is PSG. So it's an inconsistent argument trotted out to defend only some players who by the time they need defending have usually screwed up a few times. At which point why on earth am I acting like they are some perfect big club product anyway.......the facts already tell me otherwise...... Again, my deal is performance in the red white and blue and I am bored with these sort of transfer arguments where a player who doesn't do his job here gets extra credit for where their mail goes the rest of the year. For NT purposes, who cares. We have NT tape. It either works or not.
Wait, so there a big gap between the midtable of the B1 and the elite team. Gotcha and agree. But somehow, there's not a gap between midtable B1 and MLS? You never really discussed why Fulham looked so good in the Championship with 1.0 GAA and then gave up 2.25 GAA vs. EPL teams the very next season with mostly the same squad. I'll give you a bit more info - it wasn't only because of the games vs. top 6 teams that they played against......... Joking aside, the point I and others have tried to make to you is that there is as big a, if not bigger, gap between mid-table B1 and B2/Championship/MLS and midtable B1 and the UCL teams therein.
The brutal thing about this BS is the remark I made this morning was just an offhanded thing about a friend. Not even about me. That quit yakking about participation trophies when a friend of mine who won a youth national championship and was all-state was so bored he quit. Achieving standard issue merit awards doesn't necessarily make you happy. You still have to love playing. I find the "no participation trophies" parents dumb because they have no clue what truly maintains the hard work at the highest levels. To play hours a day for years you have to love it. I'd be curious how many of the grinder parents were successes themselves, or have had kids go pro. I do not get how that opened the door for the ad hominem trash that followed. That was not even talking myself up. However, if you are going to talk smack, you will get corrected. So, what, that I challenged your ideas? 99% substantively? Sounds like either political games -- trolling essentially -- or people unable to make their substantive response on paper. You threatened counter-tape which didn't manifest, likely because Long isn't really allowing NT goals. You have offered no counter-stats. All you have is the club snob argument, verging on self-evidence, that merely being in a place makes them good. That's proof of address for mail, not proof they play well. If they actually played like you think they do, THEY WOULD BE ON BAYERN. Does that get into your merit based brains???? Someone made an argument about the benefit of UEFACL players. He was, presumably, assuming those teams were, duh, actually in Europe. For some reason in certain leagues that distinction is getting elided and any club on down to the bottom is a "big club," until relegated. Adams went from a good MLS team with low GA to a similarly good B.1 player on the best B.1 defense. This is not magic and problematizes the notion that it's two inherently incompatible pools at dramatically different levels. The whole pure merit argument is bunk. On average, some hint of truth, but you sign actual people, not statistical constructions. An actual person in a good league can be a poor player. An actual person in a mediocre league can be excellent and merely bound by contract. Until sold, and then he becomes a good player in a good league, and he didn't change much if any. This does not offend meritocracy because the game is run by capitalist and other random principles, contracts, who sells shirts, what positions we need, whether we are lazy, not some pure meritocracy tested and enforced annually. To me you are confusing the quite obvious distinctions like the elite players on the European champion versus bench on MLS, with everything then in between is a tad more complicated than you're willing to admit, a fair amount of overlap and luck separating one situation from another. Donovan, Kamara, Espinoza, etc., long list of our players who go over there and either excel or at least do just fine. And then if Gerrard shows up here old, out of shape, or dinged, just another dude.
If the players you espoused actually played like you think they do, THEY WOULD BE ON WOLFSBURG OR ANOTHER MIDTABLE MAJOR LEAGUE TEAM, NOT IN THE MINORS WHERE THEY ARE NOT EVEN MAKING BEST XI.
what blows my mind is it's not like i am saying some nearly spotless brian mcbride or eddie pope legend needs to be reconsidered, but rather a player with limited good games, and plentiful bad tape and numbers. i could get agree to disagree but acting like i am being stupid and this is beyond debate is a big fat f*cking lie, troll stuff. by about now for reasonable people the debate should have shifted from him being sacrosanct to at least "but i am not sure who else." if not my position where i can start listing people to at least try. at which point i might entertain something along the lines of, i can't be sure this will work out perfect -- which is true -- but with that tape and numbers we sure as heck better be shopping. so any time we quit acting like i am clueless and not just stating inconveniences for you is fine by me. by your argument kenny cooper should have been the starting US forward. you are confusing status with performance. merely being on ManU doesn't make you the world player of the year. it doesn't mean you even play that great when you come back here for us. kenny cooper was on ManU for 2 seasons and he had 4 goals in the shirt. kirovski was on ManU and Dortmund and while he had one titanic shot against Germany, he was not our best player ever. there is a list like this and i can keep going. zelalem. karabisiyoon (sp?). adu. on and on. versus many of our best players ever were MLS or passed through Fulham. or got spit back by big club Europe.
Kenny Cooper was an automatic starter for ManU and Kirovski started for Dortmund for several years? I honestly didn't know that. I do know that Jon Brooks is an automatic starter for Wolfburg, a team vying for Europa and has started for years in the B1. By the way, most people here acknowledge that JB has serious consistency issues and isn't a UCL type player. However, the gap between that and MLS/B2/Championship is so huge and JB is closer to major league UCL than the B2. That's the primary point.
It actually is a meritocracy that is tested annually as major league teams are always forced to show how good they are to compete for (1) title (2) UCL/Europa (3) avoiding relegation. They also usually have a sizable pot each year to buy/replace existing players and depth at each position. To the extent that there’s overlap between major and minor league teams, it lies in the absolute best of the minor leagues. As it is in every sport, only a small fraction of the lower levels can take their game to the next level. You’ve mentioned Adams, LD, etc. These were all MLS best XI level players who were constantly talked about moving to better levels. Same with Davies and Almiron this year. This is the small fraction that I mentioned above. If MVP Almiron is a guide on a “mediocre [major league] team that loses or ties most of its games”, that’s the level of MLS play that one needs to show to be considered at the higher level. The players you mention aren’t recognized as all-stars, other than Long who is getting strong consideration as a potential starter. Is Zimmerman at Almiron/Adams level?
You're mixing and matching now. I am looking for players, not teams. You're talking about team success as akin to individual success. Unless your team is winning Europe I don't tend to believe any margins among teams are decisive for players, as manifested by Adams going from one good MLS team to another good B.1 team. Now, if we're talking Bayern or Liverpool, hmmm. I agree then with the poster weeks ago saying THAT kind of experience might redound to the NT benefit. Or reflect a quality margin a NT would excel from. Depending on the chicken/egg. But in terms of rank and file teams, a lot of teams have a lot of players all over. Get real. Furthermore, when you harp on a mediocre team like Wolfsburg, you're diluting "meritocracy." They aren't top of their league. They are smack in the middle. "Big club" is being reduced to meaninglessness. And let's be real there, it's inconsistently applied by its practitioners. Weah of PSG gets talked down. Yedlin and Brooks get talked up. That sounds political. Your other fallacy is being temporally stuck. You recognize that Adams can be one place one year and the other the next and it reflects quality. So we need to look at a longer run. Well, when I point out my stats, I think some of those players deserve more props than they get now, and will perhaps get them in the future. LAFC is atop the MLS West and has allowed 8 goals in 10 games, a GAA of .8. Recognition sometimes lags. Who makes up that defense? Miller in net -- who got called in January and is one of my dark horses -- Segura who is Colombian, Beitashour is Iranian, and Harvey is 35. But who they do have on that good defense that we can use is Zimmerman -- who got called in January and a few times before that (while you want to pretend he is being ignored by everyone). Before he was LAFC he was US U18, U20, and U23. In the very same YNT pipeline as the Steffens of the world. Quit acting like I am saying call up Joe Willis or something. When he was in Dallas they won USOC and the supporter's shield. He is now a stalwart on an expansion playoff team now atop its division and tied for the league lead on goals allowed. But let's instead talk about the merit of midtable with middling goals allowed. See, the game you're playing is really vicarious, you wait for the good leagues you like to recognize a player, or for someone to give them an award. How about being the guy who figures it out before the awards and leagues and everyone else gets it? Also, its a bit jacked when a player is already being called in to go back and say, woah, I will degrade you for where you play. Or in the case of Weah, make a fuss about minutes and ignore the goals per 90 when he does play. It's a snobbery game that seems designed as a smoke screen where even though someone has worn our shirt and played well, we look for external excuses to forward someone else. Even if that someone else has plenty of shockers in their closet. Politics, not soccer. Get back to who can play in our shirt. It's really simple, so far my impression is Long can defend better, and Zimmerman scores like every third game so far. So they cover anything Brooks offers but better. And I've given you numbers to back it up, off the US team as opposed to mix and match with Bundesliga. Why not stick to being a Bundesliga brat and I will be the US fan who tries to notice who actually plays well for the US team. To be fair, some of them are in fact stationed in Germany; just not the ones you think. Like I said, you keep talking up meritocracy and then ignoring the player you tout has basically moved laterally in his career among midtable sides. If he was that great Kicker would have him on their list and he would be headed to Bayern or Dortmund. Apply your own darn merit criteria there.
No, that is actually an accurate description of him in the US shirt. A few good games, a lot of trash. The difference between OK/replaceable, good, and great in fact comes down to that consistency. The whole problem with the US is few players playing at a high level every night. And the secondary problem now is people confusing status and an occasional decent night with playing at the Pulisic Level. When what really happens is I run out Yedlin and Brooks and actual results go away. Wins become ties. Ties become losses. We miss Russia by a point. And from watching him versus what has become a rather erratic Dortmund team I have been watching this year, he was on the hook for 2 decisive goals in both games. In one he allowed the header back across for the winner. In the other he fouled a player back to goal and that turned into the winner on the free kick. So I am bluntly curious what you are watching, that you literally seem to miss every mistake he makes? I could get some sort of percentages argument. Try and convince me in the wash it comes out. But the 2 B.1 games I saw against my team he was the GOAT. And I've belabored the actual team we're supposed to be talking about. Do you care? Guess not. We can relearn that lesson some more. Run him out this summer and replay GC 2015.
Right now we have Olosunde at ManU. "But I wasn't that impressed with how he played in his cap." OK, apply across the board. QED.
At the end of the day, you think that being an automatic starter for midtable B1 club is the same as playing for MLS. They're not even close - the gap between Wolfburg and Bayern is far smaller than the gap between Wolfburg and MLS. Furthermore, Zimmerman isn't a player that people are describing as an MLS Best XI so he doesn't fall into the Adam, LD, Almiron, Davies group either. I'll again ask, (1) why do teams that have a low GAA average in Championship/B2 get smoked with double the GAA the very next year? Hmm. Maybe we shouldn't compare GAA average in major vs. minor leagues. (2) if Zimmerman is so strong, why isn't he being considered for Big 4 clubs like Steffen?
Let me give you another example, Gideon Zelalem. Signed by Arsenal age 17. A snob favorite for future senior team material. Never plays an EPL minute. Bounces to Holland and Scotland, which are more like MLS level. Comes here, has like 56' MLS so far, playing more for Swope Park. And then some of these people he can't fend off for SKC time? 16 year old HGP. That is now the US U17 we instead watch for (Busio). I am trying to think of the last time Zelalem was in a US camp for any team. And he used to be trading off that Arsenal thing. And now it's like does he turn out to be part of the x% U20s who is really a minor league player. Two lessons there, one, you never know who turns out, and second, a temporal club affiliation can fool you.
You don't know what you're talking about. The best Championship 2018 defense was Wolves, who also won the league. Do you want to tell me where they are in the 2019 EPL now? Thanks. You are confusing what happens to Fulham, who wanted to knock the ball around and build from the back, and gave up significantly more goals last year in an open style of play, with being a team built on defense getting promoted. And what is being obscured in this equation is if Tim Ream can captain Fulham to 19th in the EPL then if there weren't work permit rules and snobbery and problems related to our being worth more in transfer (and thus not cheap pickups anymore) how many American backs could also play there???? While you pretend it's too massive a leap for MLS. If Ream can hack it I can give you a list that can hack it. They wouldn't all play for Liverpool but then Brooks doesn't play for Bayern. Many might be on the edge of relegation but that hasn't stopped talking up McKennie. I mean, you're acting like I want to cap Kevin Garcia, the Dynamo backup we signed from the Irish League. Yeah, he would be out of his depth in EPL or B.1. But what we are really talking about here, are where capped internationals "should be." Of that "type," we already have people at Newcastle, Reading, Atlas, Spurs/Swansea, Levante, Wigan, Hull, NAC Breda, and ManU reserves. Against that background, sorry, the better USMNT defenders in MLS could probably slide right over at some team that you would then have to respect in your little scheme. Which makes the whole argument temporally-narrow and a bit misleading. That I am judging someone for being here and not there, when if they were free tomorrow, they would make the jump in a snap. In plainer English, if Adams is Leipzig, CCV Swansea, etc., then I think Long could hack at least that. Acknowledging that basic "translation" of his cred, arguing that Brooks gets the nod for midtable B.1 is underwhelming. You also continue to engage in the part-for-whole fallacy that implies that because Leipzig would clean RBNY's clock as a team, and might on average have a better player, that Adams from MLS doesn;t belong there. The facts disprove that faulty logic. I am not looking to select "Leipzig" versus "New York," that is not how this works. That would be obvious as you suggest. I am evaluating "Adams" or "Long" versus "Brooks." That is more complicated. Brooks might be a career middling type who gets some mileage off being big and German, and playing erratically decent games. Long might have just signed a MLS deal after working his way up to NYRB.
I don't even think you read posts. Long is a candidate for MLS Best XI and/or all-star as was Adams. These are the types of players who are candidates to move up to better leagues and an argument can be made (as posters have acknowledged about Long). Zimmerman is not in that category. I don't know of any major league team who was looking to pick him up even though he was available on a FREE this off-season. He is not as good as JB. TLDR: career midtable B1 player is much better than career MLS player. As far as the temporal - I think the ability to earn major league minutes/starts over many years is a significant accomplishment for US players and I don't think that many MLS/B2/Championship players (except for the absolute best and young risers who are quickly moving through the system) can do that.
All due respect but that's the way the cookie crumbles at first. Pulisic got 10 minutes his first game. My first game in college I came in down 0-3 with 30 left. By the end of the game it was 2-3 and I started the rest of my career there. It's what you make of it. And the whole argument is a tad fake. Based on goals/90 I'd call him into a 30 man and he can fight with Sargent Weah Jozy Morris Zardes Dwyer Siebatcheu etc. for a roster spot. I just wasn't all blown away by mere hustle play. I can go get Sargent who can trap a shank clear from over his head and stuff it in the net on an international keeper. This is not the Colorado Rapids. The standard demands special play. If he gets more shots start either setting people up or banging them in. Otherwise my bet is we have about a half dozen mediocre workhorses who chase people on defense. However much people don't like Weah Sargent Wood that was 6 goals for the NT last season in their runs. No goals when you get in 3 games don't impress me much. Martinez had a goal in less than 30 minutes.
The punchier version is this. Nova gets into the 3-0 Bolivia rout where Weah and Sargent score. Doesn't score himself. Nova gets into the 1-0 Paraguay game where Wood scores. Doesn't score himself. Gets into the 2-4 Colombia loss where Wood scores. Doesn't score himself. By my theory that makes you no better than my 4th option just from those 4 players. Ramirez has a goal in 18 minutes this year (I keep saying Martinez). That's precisely the turn I want to see from a sub who wants more time. Zardes flailing around? Slam one of your own in. The offense magically took off when he and the subs came in. I still don't get why the perception of that is the other way around, nor probably would anyone who watched the first two games this year. Even Zardes has his one goal in 3 years. Otherwise what I am doing is overrating club ball to jump you past NT forwards who scored on teams you couldn't. Forward in particular is a put up or shut up bidness. I assume he will get more chances based on his resume. His job then is to make the 23 and do something to distinguish himself from other options with NT goals.
Brooks has a quality that is highly regarded in American culture: guy is dumb as a box of rocks. He's physical, though. And can make a pass. But, in general, the anti-intellectualism of the average American has also reached soccer. We want them big, fast, strong, and with the IQ of mules.