Can you pls name the players who are excelling in this system? Who are the ones nearing their ceiling? Ten games is enough time to see that sort of progress IMO.
Of course, this isn’t what we’re talking about at all. It’s a player who earned about half of the available minutes for a mid-table B1 team vs. two average to below-average MLS players. As mentioned a bunch of times, there are minor league players who are better than major leaguers but they usually fall into Best XI and rising athletic youth players.
yes he has he's struggled with the ability to tactically play from the back often passing a)to the wrong player b)passing players into bad positions and this has led directly to not just giving up chances but goals.
you said it happens 'plenty of times'...I said not if the team is well coached and you are now saying it hasn't happened plenty of times? the us often looks confused about what they are doing and even more so what the other team is doing. not only has it happened plenty of times it happens most of the time. I mean tonight they'll be shocked when they get high pressed it will be like they didn't even know it was a possibility. GB will be waving his arms and players will be pointing and looking around confused.
Lol. You’re right. We keep criticizing the same fundamental decision that Berhalter makes for every game because we don’t understand soccer tactics like you do! It not because Berhalter keeps smashing our heads against the same stupid strategic decision that causes the reason for tactical changes. Nope, that can’t be it.
Fair enough. Given the thread topic, I assumed you were talking about the Gold Cup, thus my dismay. I'm 100% sincere here, 0% snark. A majority of the posters you're arguing against, the GGG haters, don't watch MLS. That's what I find so fascinating about his Adams as RB/CM experiment. It's pretty much the opposite of how he used RBs to provide width with the Crew. That's also why my panties are unwadded on this topic. I think he will try it, and it will fail. The key is, how quickly will he realize that and move on. My daughter plays high school soccer, and at the challenge level with her club. (Here, that's for the girls who play for but aren't stars of their high school teams, if you want to understand the level.) Her teams do the same damn thing...constantly showing as a 4-1-5 or 5-0-5. Drives me nuts. The coaches* don't notice. *Last year her club team actually had a competent coach and they stopped doing that and had a reasonable season after getting their brains beat out for 2 seasons. It's just such a simple f'ing adjustment...play with a midfield. I find it hilarious that our NATIONAL TEAM would lapse into the same failure. That's why I'm generally more forgiving when our coaches have bad tactics. The American player's greatness weakness is NOT technique, it's tactics. It's obvious they don't spend enough time watching soccer on TV growing up. Guys like Bruce and Jurgen and GGG have so, so much to overcome.
To me, a lot of the shape, spacing and lack of off-ball movement comes from having a poor defensive DM who also cannot reliably break lines while under pressure via ball shielding/dribbling and or incisive passing. Our CBs are forced to play a low block to avoid transition. We don't use them much for distribution as we rely on our regista, who often sits no more than 5 yards from the low block. Our midfielders are forced to play deep as well to avoid transition. Our attackers have a choice - stay high to create space or come back to our half to get the ball. This is pretty easy to defend as they don't have to really worry about their press being broken and they've compressed the field dramatically. They're telling us that the best way to attack is direct one / over-the-top as that's what they're giving us but we are so focused on looking stylish that we don't take advantage of what our opponents are offering. If we had a top level regista that could either reliably break that first line or wasn't a sieve defensively, that would give our opponents a pause and probably cause them to back off the mid/high press in fear of getting exposed with numbers. But we don't have that or anything close to it. Drives me crazy.
Watch again without the a priori assumption that Bradley is to blame for everything from the crucifixion to Rick Rolling. A small part of the problem is that Bradley doesn't make those 3-5 yard dashes to get himself truly open, and it costs him a half second when he has to release the ball. The bigger problem is that all of his logical outlets are either hiding behind a defender or not making that 3-5 yard dash themselves, leaving him no good options. I'm mean, if there's one arrow left in Bradley's quiver it's that he still can deliver a pretty good direct pass (by the standards of the USMNT.) He doesn't get nearly enough help. Knowing the Bradleyhate, when I'm watching and he makes a bad pass or a back pass, I often use the 10 second rewind on my DVR. If you do that, you'll probably agree with me. And this is how I know you don't do that. By far most of the crap plays people blame on Bradley come when that is NOT what is happening. 4 or sometimes all 5 of the other non-defenders are more or less level with the other team's back line. Ream not being or playing as a true fullback adds to this problem.
Let me be clear, I generally think that Bradley makes good decisions among his options (that’s why he’s a 90% passer) but his limitations make it easy for opponents to dictate play. Teams don’t press our back line much, they press him and still have 7-8 defenders covering their half of the field while we have at least 6 players in our zone. What I recall is that McKennie remains deep and often to the sideline and when he receives it, there’s very little he can do with it. If I understand your point correctly, you think that our other midfielder and perhaps an attacker should come deeper? Where do they need to move to when Bradley receives the ball in front of our CBs? Given that Bradley often collects the ball very close to our back line - how much do you want to compress towards our end?
What you call a "small" part of the problem is in fact a huge part of the problem. He simply has a very hard time making space for himself when a player is upon him. These days he can "deliver a pretty good direct pass" only when he is given time and space. When he is pressured his passes are consistently wretched. I am here talking about forward passes. His back passes have always been his forte....even approach world class. Which would be terribly impressive if retreat is considered advance. I have been watching Bradley's game, for club and country, very closely the last couple of years, and have found that the one consistent factor across all matches in the difficulties he faces are himself. On occasion other players can fail to make a move, but those moments fall to insignificance in comparison to MIkey failing to make a move. Oh, one last point. There must certainly be some who hate Mikey. After all, everybody is hated by somebody just as surely as everybody hates somebody. But I'm quite confident that almost all on these boards do not hate him. For myself, I thought he was a first class player for the USMNT back in 2010. If that was who Mikey was now, we would not be having this discussion. But his play now is awful. It is consistently awful. His contract is a massively unrewarded burden for TFC, and you should not expect to see him play for them next year. His presence on the USMNT is massively unrewarding, and it is a shame we still see him play for the USMNT. He makes us weaker, more fragile, and that this side was engineered so that the only alternative present to him is Will Trapp tells us much more about General Egg than about the sort of team we could have presented if Berhalter had been willing to do what Dave Sarachan, of all people, was willing to do. Move on from a failed past.
You know I am an MLS guy. And I will admit to being a GGG "hater." I get experimentation. I even like it, under the proper circumstances. My issue with this experiment is that normally, someone experiments if you think it will improve upon what you already have. To know what you already have, you have to … you know … TRY it in its normal way first. With Adams, GGG never did that. He came in, never gave Adams an opportunity to even practice as a dmid (both he and Adams said so), and went straight to the experiment. To me, this is roughly akin to having a young power hitter. He comes up and hits home runs all through the minors. He then gets called up, and blasts homers in the majors for his first season, while batting .280. However, another coach takes over before his 2nd season. And then - that new coach immediately starts him in the #7 spot in the lineup, citing the need to experiment on what's best for the team, while taking the older .240 slap hitter, and batting him cleanup. If this happened in baseball to a team that you and I followed, we would be LIVID. We would not be debating the idea of letting this play out without speaking out. I said this before Berhalter was hired … Adams was the national team's best performer in 2018. And he did so while playing primarily in the middle of the field. To not even give him a chance in 2019 to defend that title, is downright pathetic.
And with this single move, Berhalter lost more credibility than he did by calling up Omar Gonzalez and all the other similarly-questionable decisions Berhalter has made put together.
I wonder, is this Gregg critiquing his players or critiquing his own chosen strategy? Why was there no adjustment, then, Gregg? And why wait so late to use your subs?
The team hasn't looked tactically clueless plenty of times. Almost all of the times this team has struggled, it's been second string players who can't receive a ball properly. That *is* an issue, it's just not a tactical one.
You believe that playing Bradley causes **offensive** tactical gaps? Because that's what most of the adjustments have made.
I have to be honest, I can't recall seeing any posters doing that. If that happens you should call out the poster on the spot because they are clueless. I suspect that I watch more MLS matches than most around here. I have also stated that ATL and LAFC are 2 of my favorite teams in the world to watch as far as pure entertainment value. IMO if you dropped those 2 squads into BL2 they would be in the thick of the promotion fight. Morales over Trapp or current MB90 is a no-brainier for anyone who knows what they are looking at. The downside of MLS vs BL2 or The Championship is significantly slower speed of play, especially defensive intensity in central midfield. Everything happens much faster. That is where Trapp, Bradley, Roldan, and others struggle as they step up to the international level.
Actually, I think using Bradley as a playmaker from the back absolutely has negative effects offensively. We set up to knock the ball around the back until we can find Bradley in space deep. By the time this happens, the opponent has plenty of time to get back and cover the passing lanes, Bradley has the ball deep in space, he's mostly disconnected from the players further forward and he's left hitting a lazy pass to a wide player that doesn't penetrate the defense and we move up field slowly. Bradley has always preferred to drop deep and get in open space before moving forward and he's had a series of coaches pushing him to stay higher up the field where he is more effective. Klinsmann definitely mentioned wanting Bradley to play higher on multiple occasions, he was always played with a 6 behind him at Roma, he was a two-way player at Chievo, he was a goal-scoring midiielder in Holland. He has only been a high level 6 in his own mind over the course of his career. (OK, maybe in Toronto, but I've not seen much of his play there.) Berhalter's setup indulges his tendency to want to stroke the ball around in deep open space without demanding anything more and it limits us in the attack while providing little defensive support. Especially with all our injuries, I'd be fine with Bradley playing a box-to-box role, but he would need to be committed to putting in the running required, which seldom looks like the case out there.
I'd say 3 things. 1. If you draw a line from the RW to the striker to the LW, it shouldn't be a 165 degree angle. It needs to be sharper than that. 2. Our fullbacks are very poor at providing a wide option. 3. The other central mids need to do a better job of finding space between the lines. This is pretty fair both as a valid difference of opinion and as a correction to poor word choice on my part. I'll completely concede it's not small. It would have been better if I had written "smaller" or "lesser." I still disagree that it's "huge," but hey, it's a good point of discussion.
The 2nd issue is that when he does get on the ball he takes way too long to move the ball. Touch one, touch two, touch ... The defense has shifted and all the good options are gone. Compare the number of successful attacking one-touch passes that MB90 makes vs other quality international #6s.
I love it when you try to use big words its tactics he has players in the match that can't play in the set up they are in...that is a tactical issue.
are you trying to say if one of the wings took a step in it would fix something? only lima plays as a fullback ream is a 3rd cb and plays that way he doesn't provide a wide option because thats not what they are trying to do.
Make those ********ers play in Dallas in August and let's see how fast their speed of play is. But it's a fair point; we all know if a Championship team played the same style in Houston they'd all be dead by halftime. But that also means MLS players get time on the ball they wouldn't get in a northern European league that takes the summer off.
Right, but a big reason for this is there's no forward passing option less than 25 yards away. Trying to one touch that far is a recipe for turnovers. That's my point about the 10 second DVR rewind. Try it and I think your opinion of Bradley will improve. At least a little. (I'm an optimist. ) No, I mean if one of them pulled 10 yards off the back line.