If you are going to bring this up then be honest about what actually occurred: Jones goes over to Klinsmann and tells him that we are getting destroyed in the Gonzo/Bradley/Chandler triangle. Klinsmann says fine, move over there and take care of the problem. Jones and Bradley flip sides with Jones moving over to the right side. Later Jones again goes back to Klinsmann and says it is still a problem, Gonzo at RCB is not stepping quickly enough to provide pressure. Bradley walks over and joins the conversation. Klinsmann decides to not replace Gonzo with the inexperienced Birnbaum or height-challenged Orozco but instead reconfigure the squad into a more defensive 4-4-2, while challenging Jones and Bradley to step up like they committed. Jones steps up and leads the US back, MB90 continues a very poor match which led some to wonder if he was tanking.
Well, I guess we disagree on how Bradley should be judged. I don't really see how he can be blamed for failing to make players better. I don't understand how he can be blamed for the way other players play with the ball,or how they run off the ball. I can understand how his lack of defensive ability forces the defense to adjust their shape but I don't believe it is sufficient to cause all of the problems the team has.
No more Lovitz, Roldan, Trapp, Baird, or MB90. I'm okay with average MLS players like Zardes or Lima making up the numbers because they at least can play in the 'style' Berhalter wants. Berhalter has to win back the locker room. He can start to do that with better selections.
The defensive shape and where bradley receives the ball absolutely drives how others run off the ball and how much time and options they have when they receive the ball. It's a fundamental reason we have looked so bad. Much of this is driven by our coach's reliance on playing out of the back insistently but IMO that's tied to Berhalter wanting Bradley as a regista. Next, we can agree to disagree but when playing a regista, that player's job is to make others look good as he's the point guard/QB. There may be a point if he was hitting guys in stride with lots of space but we know that isn't happening. how about we look at other options and see how that goes?
Just curious. Is that from something your read, or is it what you observed/inferred? I know at the time many people speculated about what was said but I don't remember any definitive accounting of the conversation(s) but I have forgotten things before...just ask my wife.
Agree on Bradley, but I am skeptical that personnel changes are the solution (I know it wasn't your thread). The key to success lies with Berhalter. I am not even convinced that his "system" is all that complicated. Either it is overly complicated or he is doing a poor job of communicating the individual roles (or possibly both). Either way, he needs to change or be gone. I am not going to comment on the likelihood of either.
No problem but my point is just that once players get the ball it is on them. If the issues that Roldan and others had were with receiving, I could agree but the issues that I am most concerned about are what players do with the ball when THEY are making the pass. How many bad passes (simple passes) are just given away? Too many in my mine. How many times does a player seem like they are trying to figure out what to do with the ball? too often. The fact that so many players are having that issue leads me to look higher...Berhalter.
I think Ream is a pretty good poor man's Brooks, but maybe it's Ream and Bradley stacked on top of each that creates the problems. Maybe Ream would be OK at CB with a better 6 shielding him. I've got no clue who can be an Adams back-up. Maybe Morales?
I don't think it's either complicated or un-communicated. It's just not right for our pool and is particularly bad because it's built around Bradley. I agree with you that he's not terrible on the field but he makes everyone around him play terribly - he's a casino cooler now and we are prime example of the Bill Simmon's Patrick Ewing theory
I'd experiment but you want someone with range and defensive bite. I think that helps Weston, Pulisic and Brooks/Ream tremendously and probably helps Roldan and Yedlin as well as we're not on our backfoot all the time.
that's not how i recall it but it's off of my memory. i do believe that we played much better after that, even though it was in vain.
I have seen enough. Trapp/Bradley didnt force him to pass the ball out of bounds vs. Canada and his other assorted errors.
One comment I would make is we don't actually have this series of compensations for Bradley and that's the problem. We stick a guy with limited mobility and not much bite in the defensive midfield role and we don't compensate one bit. Instead, we push the other midfielders forward of him and have to defend with just the back four far too often. We're vulnerable because we don't compensate for Bradley's weaknesses, we leave them out there for all to see and teams exploit it. If we were going to compensate for his weaknesses, we'd field another central midfielder with some bite who plays good positional defense, like was done in the past when Beckerman was rolled out to solidify things. That was a compensation for a defensive weakness in the center. Right now, we have no compensation for the weakness. Initially, Berhalter planned on compensating by playing Adams as the inverted right back but he's dropped that setup since Adams has been hurt, no one else can do the job, and it causes other defensive problems in other areas of the field. The problem isn't that we compensate for a weakness, the problem is that Berhalter is not even attempting to compensate for the weakness in the center of the field. His only other attempt has been to pull McKennie deeper, but the two don't seem to play well together and he has since started pushing McKennie more forward making the problem worse and we end up with this insane 424 shape where the front 4 don't even apply much pressure and teams can slice right through.
Respectfully, that's not how I see it. I see us setting up mid-block and then having our midfielder cram close to the back line and shying toward the center to cover for Bradley. When we do manage to get the ball back, 10 of our players are in our third and with little space to work in, we get pressured heavily and turn the ball over.
I'd say different points of the game it works out differently, but I guess when I think of a compensation, I think of doing something to solve a problem, not just letting the problem fester. I guess I don't see compensating as a bad thing. You always have a weakness you have to compensate for.
You’re a military guy too if I recall correctly? I’m not trying to blow my horn with this, so forgive me if it sounds like I am, but the one thing I loved about the military is the focus on quality leadership. In my opinion, at least, the military provides the best leadership training, especially in the combat arms occupations. From the lowest private in the Army, he is familiar with mobilizing a unit and personifying the standard of quality characteristics that makes someone a good leader. For instance, loyalty duty, respect, selfless sacrifice, honor, integrity, personal courage (LDRSHIP). Likewise, every private is familiar with having a battle buddy and being responsible for another person. Now, I bring this up, because from my experience, it seems like the civilian world lacks a lot of these basic leadership qualities. And, one thing that has been outlandishly clear to me about the state of the USMNT is that there is a major leadership problem. Sure, the talent isn’t on the level of France. But that’s not the issue. The problem is we don’t play like a team anymore. And we look like a bunch unorganized, grab ass, bag of dicks, who only play for number one. So, if there is one thing that the US could work on right here and right now... go back to the basics of good leadership and team management. Accentuate our strengths and work on our limitations. Know who are our key players and put them in positions where they have to build up the rest of the team. Furthermore, get feedback from the team and then execute a coherent strategy that has an understanding of second, third, fourth order of effects. Make every new guy on this team plan on op order and execute that plan. Assign new guys a battle buddy and make leaders responsible for the performance of their subordinates. Require leaders to show up even if they’re hurt. Point being, there is just so much that in terms of leadership that this team is missing and until that’s sorted out, no amount of nothing else is going to do a damn thing.
Well, I think there is a saying in military - maybe you could phrase it better - that Captains fight the war, Colonel's decide the tactics and Generals provision it.
The tactical/mentality change that could be transforming almost overnight would be to stop telling players they must keep possession as a philosophy. They are thinking about it before they receive the ball and during, which is distracting. Leads to costly to's, back passes, and less chances for strikers up high who could maybe win the ball aerially or on post-ups if the ball was just flighted in their general. Just because you do that as a safety valve doesn't mean that's your main strategy. It's just making the right play in that situation. Players would desire more options, not less. Defensively, apply a coordinated press of 3 or more somewhere on the field. 2 players bracketing and if they split the d with a pass a 3rd stepping up on the player. You want more possession? This is one way to get it initially. Then you don't necessarily have to break lines, or as many. Winning the possession battle in today's day and age is meaningless. So I don't get this logic that it's joining the rest of the football world in the modern way to play. The likes of Colombia, Uruguay, even Brasil are baiting us into some cheap possession and then trapping us. Hard to come to overly firm conclusions on players w/ harebrained tactics across multiple managers. For the players who do succeed, it's a bonus; a testament to their adaptability and/or ability. Someone of Wes' caliber and versatility hasn't even been able to do it. I don't know if these constitute small changes, but they'd be easy to apply with the right people in charge, and the topics seem to be pertinent to the direction the discussion was going.
There is no doubt that having Adams and other stronger defensive players in the midfield will improve it. But we also have a general funamental midfield issue that even with Adams and McKennie, a two man central midfield defensively (and a three man offensively) will get overwhelmed by numbers both ways running through it. Adams and McKennie aren't going to stop the box Canada through at us defensively - two against four is always losing. And offensively, our skill is not such that we are going to rip through a midfield undermanned. Ironically, I think this is something Berhalter knows. Lost in all of the furor of Tyler Adams as RB is.... ...the whole point of that was to create a four man midfield. Ever wonder why most youngsters are integrated slowly but Dest was thrown right in? Because he has the skill set to come inside offensively and create a four man midfield. I think our midfield issue is part personnel, but also partly that our young players aren't good enough to dominate when outnumbered, especially on the offensive side. We not only need better personnel in the midfield, but we need enough talent across the board so that we can tactically overload the midfield when desired.
Realistic small change - bench (or don't call up) Bradley and Trapp for the next 6 matches (I'd say forever, but I'm starting small). Not Morales for 45 minutes, or Yeuill for a game against a team that has no chance. That's it. Try something else. The same thing I've asked for the last 4 years as our team replaces one cataclysmic, worst ever stink bomb with the next one, in a series seemingly focused on a race to the bottom, seeking the next way to alienate or lose the next batch of staunch fans/defenders.
I hear what you’re saying, but if a captain is doing the fighting in any war, something seriously went wrong. Think more, the coach is a platoon leader, a 2nd or 1st lieutenant, and the team captain is a platoon sergeant, a sergeant first class. The platoon sergeant is in command of his squads (who the squad leaders are in command of their fire teams). From there, the privates make up the element who, with their team leader who leads as the one man and telling his ‘joes’ their left and right sectors, are going to be doing the “fighting.” In other words, typically the “one man” through the door is the team leader, a sergeant, followed by his privates who carry the m203 (typically carries the breach equipment and combat lifesaver), m14 (carries the litter), and squad automatic weapon. The captain is pretty high up in that food chain, and would be more like the Earnie Stewart, making sure all the admin and logistics crap is squared away and justifying the mission to the platoon leader and reporting back to the battalion commander, the lieutenant colonel, about the operations in his battle space. Then, the battalion commander collects that info, who reports back up to the brigade level, a colonel, who reports to the division level, a brigadier general, who sends that further up until it gets to the president, Congress, secdef, etc. who are ultimately trying to appease the population. In this case, the fans. All that nerding out, point is that the upper echelons do best when they are mission focused instead of task focused because they’re not the one going eyeball to eyeball with the enemy, or in this case the opponent. However, leadership is focused on the morale, discipline, and training/character development of the lower ranks. And, there is an expectation of every subordinate position to know how to do the job of the position above them, and if say, a Private doesn’t know how to do the job of a team leader then that is a direct failure of the team leader. So on and so forth. thus, everyone is constantly put outside their comfort zones and meant to rise to the occasion. More so, the idea is to “work yourself out of a job.” Yet, the most important part is that if any order is so complicated that the lowest man on the team cannot understand it, it’s too complicated. I don’t see any of that with this team. It’s a bunch of headless chickens who don’t seem to be given any clear direction yet seem to be looking around waiting to hear what they’re supposed to do. They lack that initiative. And it’s no wonder that they’re underperforming. In short, the coach needs to be teaching the guys who need to be leaders on how to be leaders. That responsibility needs to fall on the shoulders of guys like Pulisic, McKennie, Adams, etc. the guys you want to build the team around. Rather than around Wil Trapp, Daniel Lovitz, and a host of other guys, who, military speaking, need to be sent to the s1.