Yes, it's helpful to grab points, and there's usually somewhere about 1.5 pts for the best team on the road. But no one is rolling out there and dominating on the road. Not us, not Mexico, not Costa Rica. Which is kind of the point -- it's not unsual to roll a team 4-0 at home and then really struggle on the road.
Some lineup choices are perplexing, no doubt. Some have mentioned that Sargent is being sabotaged on purpose by always playing him in front of a midfield that has Roldan as the #10. That he is being made to show poorly so Zardes can keep getting called. Whatever you think of that, the fact Roldan keeps getting played and people have that opinion is a red flag. The way Gregg talks about the roster, it is complete and not changing.
to be fair, i think the region is professionalizing. and catching up. i think the first is undeniable reality. i think the second is that we have not outpaced their progression. curacao can play us well because they have elevated their game whereas we are standing fairly still. mexico meanwhile has elevated their game and thus passed us by from being behind. focusing solely on the fact the rest of the region progresses tells half the story because it doesn't get into what we are doing and why mexico got better and we didn't. why a whole slate of teams progressed BUT NOT US. it encourages passivity.
I don't know. Even if healthy, he is gone from consideration. Why he, Bedoya, Wood, among others are gone and Bradley and Ream are retained, anyone's guess. If you can call Omar, you can call anyone. What the U23s were doing this window and what they are trying to do long term is a giant puzzle. Half the camp seems to be a limbo area for Euro players Gregg doesn't want to integrate yet, and half the camp is guys who will probably be released in March for qualifying because who would want them.
Bradley can pass the ball. He's aging and decreasing in mobility, but he can do the essential function of the role, which is to distribute to keep possession and to break lines. He can obviously be overrun at times, but he can break up plays and contribute to team defense. Not perfect, but there is rationale to having him in that role at times. I'm a Tyler-Adams-at-6 guy myself, but I'm not going to throw a temper tantrum if Bradley is in the 23. That's petty.
sargent depends on service and is more of a technical type and it matters who you put around him. i am not sure this is as true of morris or weah or others who have pure speed and can create more for themselves, or bail out poor service. in that context, i think he does suffer by whom he is surrounded. i thought in the preGC game he was sandbagged, but more in the sense the coach seemed to ignore he was one of the most effective of a bad lot, the only shot on net, and ill served by the others, in the only game he got all spring. not set up to succeed and i think unless he got a hat trick the coach was cutting him. is that purposeful or just him crossing paths with how dumb the coach is on his b team cohort, such that you are stuck knee deep in mediocrity by virtue of who else he sees as sub material? i think the innocent explanation covers it fine. anyone who goes out with the B team -- or even the A team some lineups -- suffers for the selections. this is why i keep saying get the names right and that fixes half of it. not only does that position get fixed but they start helping the next guy. to me when he wants to torpedo you, you disappear. sargent and weah earlier this year. holmes. some of the people he's never called. there i think he does play games of sorts where out of sight out of mind and he can justify his ensemble because "we don't even know how he would play." yeah, because you never bring him in. not only are they not accountable to performance but the sheer consistency of it all serves as protection as the cycle progresses. right back to last cycle and going in circles and not wanting to take risks because we play to win.
I think they are related. Playing the passive mid-block 4-2-2-2, the players get passive. They don't win the ball, they recover it. Around their 18, or most likely, a goal kick. Although Sargent started a great counter last night dispossessing a Cuban player in our corner; it is not easy to go so far on the counter. As Pulisic showed in @CANADA, hard to dribble 80 yards 1 v 5. The more aggressive defense allowed for counters where we started in their half or just in our's. Playing aggressively on defense puts your mindset to be aggressive in all phases. The first goal was a set piece off a corner won after winning the ball near the center circle. The second goal was a ball won off a pressured GK clearance just past halfway. We turned them over and hit them on transition. I can't remember turning them over in Toronto or getting one turnover versus Mexico in their half. It is hard to separate out the transition offense from an overall change in offense. Some suggest we didn't change. But our team shape, for most of the game, with the ball looked like we were not playing the possession game we played all year. You are right, the offense was different too on its own.
Some people have really dropped their expectations. I would think that expectations should be going in the other direction as the game "grows" in the country. I dont expect to just win games when we we play horrible teams. I expect to see performances improve and be at a level that translates to being competitive at the world cup. Sure I will make adjustments for fields and refereeing. This teams performances in these last two games are of team that would get absolutely crushed at a world cup. There were plenty of stretches we played in our half against Cuba!!! Cringe 😣 pic.twitter.com/0KEvaHNqVZ— John Pranjić (@ThatCroatianGuy) November 20, 2019
that being said, i think you have to take what sargent is for granted and that may mean for a while he is second string. whether it should be behind zardes is another question. to me, no. to me, the frustration of zardes in general, and any angst with is jozy too old or similarly frustrating, or is sargent too service dependent, or not fully cooked, or a good technical striker who maybe needs to wait for more skill to come up around him to unlock his value? all those questions should be leading you to some new plan. you can go in circles or you can come up with a different option that is more satisfying than what you think you have in conventional terms. and then while sargent cooks and the talent around him improves, he's a bench threat, one who will put his shots where he means to. so, pulisic or morris moved in, wood or green brought back, something you haven't already tried. otherwise GB seems to share with last cycle the capacity to both be frustrated with the present but then latch onto any single performance to justify one of the frustrating choices. as opposed to moving around landon and dempsey whenever we thought one line or the other was slipshod. that would be more like, if this is what i am working with, i am moving someone i trust more to there and ending the merry go round. ditto adams over yueill. you get the spine absolutely right and maximized and then worry about the rest of the lineup. if yueill helps, congrats, you found a productive sub.
It's all very reasonable. I think that people take for granted the ebbs and flows of national teams, and neglect to properly consider the position of US Soccer in the context of the world. 2002 was the high tide. That was 17 years ago. People expect a linear progression to reach Brazil status. We have not seen that. We see ups and downs. It's hard to predict. We have our great player pools and bad player pools like everyone else does. If that 2002 team relied on Landon Donovan and Demarcus Beasley to make every play, they would have been in really bad shape. They were not a young team trying to figure out the game...they were a team with a great combination of accomplished veterans and young stars, everyone looking to take advantage of a world cup to capitalize on an opportunity to accomplish their dreams. Now we have a group of young players coming through the ranks who look very promising. We lack the veterans to ensure that the team is always executing like they should. Almost all of the guys on division 1 European squads are essentially kids. It's quite obvious that with a young team you're going to see inconsistencies and ups and downs. Not only is the team young, but US Soccer is attempting to integrate them at the same time they integrate a possession-based system. If you told BigSoccer 6 years ago that this would be happening, the same curmudgeons who dislike the downside to implementing this while rebuilding and there are young players acclimating to the international level would likely have told you that the perfect time to do it would be while the program is rebuilding and there are young players acclimating to the international level. It's time for patience and a broader perspective. Time to sit back and watch the baby grow.
I kind of think that was an inside joke between Long and Ream. Wasn't it the previous sequence where the ball was rolling to Ream and took a hip level bounce right in front of him. Then in this sequence it is like, "safer to just lob it back and forth". Of course, Long over hits his lob and they get serious again. The 3four3 guys are interesting and the MLS guys hate them. But the 3four3 guys are not unlike the MLS guys in that they will kill any player that isn't a Kleiban client. It is like reading Doyle, if you understand the bias then it is easier. If they discuss a player as potentially great and he is not a client, that is truly interesting (Ledezma). They are very anti-USSF and Jay and Gregg. But they have a point, the USMNT didn't play possession soccer in either of these two games. Not sure they could on that field last night, but they didn't against Canada. Gregg has been there 11 months and it looks like he never started.
Every time we play someone like Cuba, we suffer from "don't rub these poor guys' noses in it" syndrome. That run of play in the tweet looks exactly like a symptom of that. When the guy marking you looks at you like you're a hero and believes he's a peasant/slave in some garbage communist/socialist dictatorship, the tendency is not to want to destroy them. US players are put in this situation regularly.
oh, i believe we should be doing a counter concept going for quantity of chances over purity of aesthetic. i don't think we have a ton of pure skill out there yet. but i think people underrate the willingness to hustle of some options deemed "attackers." i think morris or sargent or holmes will chase and do so more effectively than roldan. and they are better on offense, which demands opposing respect. this is one reason i am concerned with the affection for 8s, which seems to seek out muddled mediocrity on purpose. i instead want people good at their jobs, and then maybe pick among them based on either how good, or that they will also chase (offense) or attack (defense). one thing lost in your analysis is that a lone AM or forward who ran back, has to do this slalom run of sorts, in part because formationally you give them no help. if we put the wingers high, or maybe even the player trying to advance the ball is that winger but chased back, and then we put out there fairly useless 8 types who hustle around but don't link up, how are they getting the ball from point a to point b? if you wanted to help pulisic or sargent, to me, you play 442 or 352 and give them an immediate wide option. or instead have the mids in bulk working together to get it to pulisic and he doesn't have to do it all himself. i mean, to me, "go it alone" is a feature of 433s, not a bug.
But yeah, I mean this game was pretty much good only for the psychology of players who scored goals and are going back to Europe. If that. I think MLS used to be roughly comparable to the championship. Today? I think the best MLS teams can put out an 11 that would be top half, which is saying promotion candidates (there isn't much separating the top half), BUT there is a serious lack of depth that they have. So the best of the MLS could certainly hack it in the championship no problem. BUT the challenge becomes maintaining your form and avoiding complacency. The problem is that the leap to the EPL has grown tremendously, so even someone like Cannon might struggle there initially. Hell look at Almiron's at Newcastle. It's a meat grinder between the halves and the halves nots.
Why do you just keep making things up? When do we not try rub ther noses in it? Didnt we just beat the same team 7-0? I thought when teams didnt want to run up the score, they would just knock the ball around. If Mexico was a few goals, they would start pining the ball around so their fans could chant "ole". What you are describing amateurish, which isnt a surprise considering the players run out.
I have nothing to say about Roldan, other than I think he will keep getting called because that has been the pattern. Early on in the game yesterday, he was pushed off the ball and a decent Cuban counter attack started. Just like against Jamaica and Canada. He can't even compete against these teams. It is strange that he is successful in MLS. Best thing is not have 11 guys in your own third defending. Best to win the ball high with numbers high. So, those 8s can be useful if we let them be aggressive. If you have Adams and Long out there, you can even be over aggressive since they will cover for you. That is why NYRB was so successful with Adams, he let everyone else go for every 50/50 knowing he had their back. But, whatever Adams would do can also be done, to some extent, with a better system. Having Adams, knock on wood, come back and make Gregg's passive mid-block 20% better is not the most optimal outcome.
The biggest argument to that is that when teams like Mexico, Costa Rica and others use the high press against us, Bradley's ability to pass means f--- all in the system that Berhalter wants to play. We pass around the back fine, but try to ease the ball up the sidelines to the winger who drops deep, he's surrounded and loses the ball. Try to play the ball to the regista in traffic, he's got no outlets except the back pass. There were many reasons Pirlo excelled at the position, but one of them was that it didn't matter if your name was Claude Makelele or Zinidine Zidane, you weren't getting they ball off him in midfield. The guy was the best at using his body as a shield. All too often over the last few years, we've seen Bradley get dispossessed in dangerous positions in the center of the park, 2014 being the worst case scenario. Any high press is going to squash Berhalter's tactic like a bug. He needs to jimmy up something different if he wants success with MB.
cuba goal 1 was beat them to the endline and crash the box, which we did a lot of the first game. goals 2-4 were switches of play that got all the way across a very narrow team. i would distinguish that from a high hopeful cross to the middle. we were instead finding wide open people by kicking it over the whole defense on goals 2-4. back post or beyond. player gets the ball with less defense facing the net at a 45 degree angle as opposed to trying to head one in a pile of people. only goal 1 is crash the box and it's flank them and on the ground instead of lofted for the other defense to head. canada goal 1 is a deadball and again the "cross" clears the defense and is to the back post open player. goal 2 is a traditional cross to a head but the set up is again all the way across the defense to an open morris and this means he has more time and zardes isn't marked by a pile of people. goal 3 is a deadball but the cross is deep and not to the pk spot. goal 4 is more accidental, yedlin whacks a meh cross in, poorly cleared, to zardes' feet, in a way recreates how morris is getting open at the back door at a 45 degree angle. the trend is get the ball downfield and switch sides with a lofted ball, or hit someone on the ground crashing the box. if we whack normal crosses into the front of the 6 we get little joy. i see literally nothing where we try to work right up the middle and combine. someone looking at this would not be, ok, we will slowly build from the back, and work up the middle. this screams counter fast, get the ball wide, and either whizz it behind a beaten defense, or play it all the way over the top to beyond the back post. we repeatedly struggled to pass through cuba up the middle. it might even work a bit but at the end they had the box so stuffed it would eventually be lost. i do think we have some people who would be better at such an approach.
Growth isnt linear, but we should have fallen to this depth. That has been caused by the fed, Arena, and Berhalter. Most of this roster doesnt belong and if or youth come through the team will look very, very different. If we stopped with this silly first team nonsense, we could be "playing the kids", it would likely help their careers, and we would actually building something. We could also stop ignoring "experienced" players to take some of the pressure of the young kids that have broken through. One-------------Wood-------------Holmes --------------Two---------Three---------------- -------------------Morales---------------------- Johnson--Brooks--Alvarado--Yedlin ---------------------Guzan----------------------- One - Sargent or Dest Two/Three - CP and Mckennie That is eight decent experienced players with our best player and two solid young players all in the front 5. With the players available now I'd probably play all four of them and maybe go with Cannon over Yedlin. If Adam's gets healthy, Morales singing to have to fight for mckennie's spot. Weah becomes available and Sargent could push Wood to the bench. Ledezma breaks through and maybe we can finally move CP out wide because we know we have a players that can get the ball to him.
Did you watch all the clips. There were four total. Here are the other three. Note that this is four plays in the span of 20 minutes where nobody looks to know how to play out of the back and/or circulating the ball. I thought that is what they had been working on all year??? Ball circulation and breaking lines? 🤷🏻♂️ pic.twitter.com/Jnv2R3vf9Q— John Pranjić (@ThatCroatianGuy) November 20, 2019 What is going on here? pic.twitter.com/dbTSwyjP8w— John Pranjić (@ThatCroatianGuy) November 20, 2019 Building out of the back. pic.twitter.com/8c947oevaH— John Pranjić (@ThatCroatianGuy) November 20, 2019
That 7-0 win came at a time of uncertainty at home after the team got pasted 3-0 by Mexico and scored only a goal at Uruguay. There was a little pressure on the team to recover and establish a good goal differential for the Nations tourney. Not to mention Cuba had several folks defect before the game and they were probably somewhat deflated by that.
I'm afraid much of the "improvement" had to do with Canada losing midfield because they played Fonz at lb, Kaye instead of Fraser at dmid and Cavallini up top who was useless in midrole, unable to get behind our defense (like Fonz can) and not a good partner for David who consequently disappeared. As you saw, Herdman took Cavallini and Kaye off early.
Yeah, you definitely have to understand their biases, but they are nothing like that clown, Doyle. There is definitely the appearance of an agenda, but I have been following them for a while and I havent seen them be completely wrong on anything. I dont blame them for pushing Efra, Uly, Alex, Kobe, etc. Those are some very high level prospects. I thought Gary was very high on Ledezma? The players Gary questions, it isnt hard to see why? Two off the top of my head are Pomykal and Mckennie. I am interested to see how both of those guys turn out. Mckennie has already made it to a decent level, but could see him flat lining. I think Pomykal is over hyped and hasnt done anything for that to happen other than play in MLS. He has some pretty holes that could cause his game to not translate to a higher level. Click on this for a bunch of examples of our poor shape with the ball against Canada. Here are a few moments when USMNT had possession in their own half against Canada. According to our coach we are a possession based team, but the shape/spacing doesn’t reflect this.— Joey Cascio (@Cascio_FG) November 16, 2019