Good one from Marc Stein: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/sports/soccer/geoff-cameron-stoke-city.html A good piece to compare/contrast with the recent interviews from Arena and Sarachan. The writing from Stein is a lot more neutral.
You also forget the ultra biased officiating in Concacaf. The Latin countries routinely get away with mugging the US players all the time. The refs do not call obvious fouls. Any time a US player so much as touches the other guy, he goes down as if shot by a sniper. For the life of me, why the US has not formally protested the officiating in Concacaf, I don't know. The US could build a very solid case in front of the CAS about it.
I would blame the “leaders” on our team that let opposing teams mug our best player without lifting a finger to protect him, before I would start whining about refs. That’s just me though, I’m more into looking at the things that can actually be controlled on our end, unlike our soccer “press” or federation who obsess over unlucky breaks, flukes and referees.
Do you realize that nine usmnt player carried yellow cards into the Panama and t/t games and if a playoff game was required the yellow cards would carry over. Not easy to retaliate under those conditions
You realize this had been going on throughout qualifying and like much of these debates, does not hinge on one game or player, but on the compounding bad decisions in multiple games? One might for example point out that those accumulated yellow cards show an over reliance on the same players, players that were not particularly performing well to begin with and who many, including the guy that picked them, said were worn down and broke under the pressure in Trinidad. Regardless, my point stands, which is simply that questions being asked and articles being written, should focus on the things that could be controlled on our side and were not, rather than on ethereal fluff such as; bad bounces, hitting the post, referees (which suck for every team in concacrap and if they have an incentive at all, it is in our favor), the other teams being mean to us, our ussf twitter feed firing up the trinidadians and wringing an inspired performance from their C team, etc. In short, our coaches and federation want to avoid responsibility and accountability, or even any genuine dialogue about what happened and our soccer media is more than happy to do stenography and regurgitate these dumb narratives.
Wow. Welcome to the big time people. If you read the latest media in the USSF presidency you can't help but feel as if soccer has finally arrived. Manipulative 'info' pieces. I'm impressed. Someone very wealthy is finally scared enough to spend real money on manipulative media. Vote wynalda if you aren't a robot. If you are then Martino or Gonads. They are too idealistic to do anything significant.
Punting this over from @Sam Hamwich post in the election thread: https://www.si.com/soccer/2017/12/20/carlos-cordeiro-us-soccer-president-election-platform
How do we hold Strauss to keep track and report on how Cordeiro delivers on his platform? The ideas aren’t horrible and actually many quite positive.
Yes, but only dorks on the Internet know about it. I think media below the top level need to talk about these things. It needs to become more mainstream. Espn seems to have given some guys some rope, more should be behind that.
SI is a failing rag to begin with. Unfortunately, as I've stated, Straus is a good writer, but fox has good writers too. That organization leverages relationships 100% before actually reporting. I've really enjoyed The Guardian reporting too.
Here is what a very smart man is doing: he is building a vast coalition of people answerable only to him. GM, technical directors, coaches, steering committee, etc etc. With him at the top. Gulati was building a one man power center, Cordy is building a one man empire. He is going to turn USSF into FIFA. Get ready for some serious infighting and intrigue. For pure entertainment, this is going to be great!
Dear Fox Soccer: your american play by play and commentary announcers are so uniformly terrible, I refuse to watch your broadcasts. I watch them in dutch, farsi, russian, french, german, spanish and esperanto before I will watch your broadcasts. Sincerely, SH