Why is Jill Ellis still employed?

Discussion in 'USA Women: News and Analysis' started by Cannons, Mar 9, 2017.

  1. Cliveworshipper

    Cliveworshipper Member+

    Dec 3, 2006
    Gotta love word replacement.
     
  2. BrooklynBaby

    BrooklynBaby Member

    Jun 17, 2015
    Memphis
    Club:
    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Just out of curiosity, does anyone think Horan has a future at forward on this team besides Jill Ellis?
     
  3. Cliveworshipper

    Cliveworshipper Member+

    Dec 3, 2006
    Interesting stat:

    The USA just upped its record to 4-19-4 in games where it conceded three goals. ( ESPN)
     
    cpthomas repped this.
  4. Cliveworshipper

    Cliveworshipper Member+

    Dec 3, 2006
    Two of those losses were against Brazil
     
  5. Semblance17

    Semblance17 Member+

    United States
    Apr 27, 2013
    Lighthouse Point, FL
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    https://www.starsandstripesfc.com/2...zil-tournament-nations-four-things-we-learned

    ^This was posted in the Tournament of Nations thread. The section
    Experiments are good, but you need to be clear about what you’re trying to learn
    seems to summarize a lot of the points that have been circulating in this discussion, such as the apparent ambiguity of motives and logic that has persistently continued to tarnish many people's perception of Ellis throughout this experimentation phase.
     
  6. cpthomas

    cpthomas BigSoccer Supporter

    Portland Thorns
    United States
    Jan 10, 2008
    Portland, Oregon
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    To me, that was an absolutely abysmal blog post that is virtually useless. A lot of posts here are much more intelligent.
     
  7. Cannons

    Cannons Member+

    May 16, 2005
    Well after watching this tournament, and also games before these, I find myself asking..."where are we really going" The answer I keep coming up with is NOWHERE. We look nowhere as good as we have in the past in many areas. People will say that "Jill is trying things out" or maybe "there's time until qualifying starts." That may be true but, at some point I would expect to see something that resembles the #1 team in the world. What I saw in this tournament was far, far from that. The passing was not great, individual performances mostly off, team play... mostly average. I saw little to get excited about.

    I think it all comes back to the fact that Ellis is not the right person for this job. She picks the players and makes the lineup, she also has to take the blame for poor showings. I saw players on the field that I think are flat out, not international caliper. I saw Ellis trying to push square pegs into round holes over positioning several times. The end effect... we have little attack and just look poor. Lets not forget we were down multiple goals to Brazil after losing to Australia. We couldnt bury Japan, who beat nobody. I think we have stopped looking for new players that may be better and are locking in on a bunch of "bangers" (lower skill, physical players) This was not a good outing and no amount of spin will fix that.

    At this point, I have no idea why we aren't looking for a better coach than Ellis. One that will find more Mallory Pugh type players and not settle on the Horans of the world. Jill is not the person to do this. We're actually regressing.
     
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  8. olelaliga

    olelaliga Member

    Aug 31, 2009
    Look for more players like Pugh? Which games have you been watching? I am not yet seeing any semblance of a world class player there. We can blame JE for all the hype and hold her responsible for unrealistic expectations. Pugh has pace. She has some vision but its not exceptional. Her technique is at best adequate. She scored a nice, but one I would expect all u18 forwards to finish more often than not, goal against Japan, but was invisible the rest of the tournament except of course when she blew a sitter against Brazil.

    She didn't even dominate any youth international WC events to justify her call up in OG16 anyway. She was arguably the third best forward on the u20s in New Guinea this year. She was so bad in the previous, 2014 u17 (team she captained failed to qualify) and u20 (so bad in the first game against France M French had to switch up positions to shift her wide since she couldn't handle CAM)

    She is not a creative force in any way. Take the ball endline and cross back is as simple of a tactic as can be imagined. Lavelle, Heath and Rapinoe are far more sophisticated and complete players in my opinion.
     
  9. cpthomas

    cpthomas BigSoccer Supporter

    Portland Thorns
    United States
    Jan 10, 2008
    Portland, Oregon
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Of course Lavelle, Heath, and Rapinoe are more sophisticated and complete players. Lavelle is four years older, Heath is umpty ump years older, and Rapinoe is umpty ump + years older. When a coach is building a team, they have to take those kinds of things into consideration and try to project where the young one will be when she reaches the older ones' ages, in order to decide whether it's worth investing a WNT space in the young one now.

    But, I do agree that the early gushing about Pugh probably was overstated and has created unrealistic expectations -- such as that she have the sophistication and completeness of Lavelle, Heath, and Rapinoe -- and let's include Sullivan with Lavelle.
     
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  10. hotjam2

    hotjam2 Member+

    Nov 23, 2012
    Club:
    Real Madrid
    The Dutch have just won the Euros in fine fashion, winning by 2-3 goals all their playoff games. But they lost several friendlies before this tourney. So it shows you got to take a few knocks before peaking at the right time.
    There's got to be a fine line drawn though how many times Ellis says she's experimenting & trying to win some of these tournaments. We can't wait for another two years before she finally decides to play with a full deck. Hopefully her boss & don't wait till concacaf & puts some pressure on her to finally win one of these tourney's, as the recent events/upsets proved on both side of the Atlantic that woso is always evolving, and we won't want to fall behind.
     
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  11. blissett

    blissett Member+

    Aug 20, 2011
    Italy
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    Well, to be honest, Netherlands won 8 friendly matches out of 11 in 2017, losing only to Australia, France and Japan.

    The fact that they had 11 friendlies in about 6 months, and most of them vs quality opposition, that's what actually made the difference, in my opinion.
     
  12. hotjam2

    hotjam2 Member+

    Nov 23, 2012
    Club:
    Real Madrid

    my bad, I mean't to include especially the 3 friendlies towards the end of 2016 as they lost to England & Belgium by one goal and got simply devastated by Germany, 4-1
     
  13. blissett

    blissett Member+

    Aug 20, 2011
    Italy
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    Yes, and that lead to sacking previous coach and giving the lead to Sarina Wiegman, who subsequently won that boatload of friendlies in 2017 and led the team to winning Euro Championship.

    If it was an argument against firing Jill Ellis, it wasn't the best chosen on earth! :x3:
     
  14. hotjam2

    hotjam2 Member+

    Nov 23, 2012
    Club:
    Real Madrid
    with hosting the Euros right around the corner, the Dutch needed to make a drastic change. It's currently way different circumstances, the real big tournament(WC) for the US is still two years away. In the meantime there's a ton of players that Ellis should be looking at before she can make her final picks. For that she will have to take some knocks.
    The US is very deep in talent; not with standing all the strong NWSL players, watching some of those Australian/W-League games, I was surprised how the 18 or so Americans dominated that league, and yet not one of them has made it as a regular on the NT.

    You could wonder why hasn't Japan fired their coach yet? She hasn't won in her last 5 games as well only 6th place at the Algarve Cup, Too be sure she done what a lot of US fans would like to see do; drop old guard players for newbie, but they looked shockingly slow, as compared to the Jill Ellis hand picked newbie, Taylor Smith(who had two incredible assists vs Japan)
     
  15. kernel_thai

    kernel_thai Member+

    Oct 24, 2012
    Club:
    Seattle Sounders
    Is that a mercenary merit badge of sorts?
     
  16. Cliveworshipper

    Cliveworshipper Member+

    Dec 3, 2006

    I have no idea. It was on her résumè
     
  17. kernel_thai

    kernel_thai Member+

    Oct 24, 2012
    Club:
    Seattle Sounders
    My guess is on the resume' update u put that in bold type so it's more noticeable than Euro 2017: Eliminated in quarters after six straight titles
     
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  18. DoyleG

    DoyleG Member+

    CanPL
    Canada
    Jan 11, 2002
    YEG-->YYJ-->YWG-->YYB
    Club:
    FC Edmonton
    Nat'l Team:
    Canada
    Which she likely got for her professional career and representing Germany internationally.
     
  19. Thomsen

    Thomsen Member+

    Aug 6, 2016
    Club:
    FC Bayern München
    #119 Thomsen, Aug 19, 2017
    Last edited: Aug 19, 2017
    What's the problem with Ellis? Always thought she's experimented in her NT games for the next World Cup. Is Jill like the american version of Steffi Jones or

    I haven't really been impressed watching US WNT this year tho.
     
  20. cpthomas

    cpthomas BigSoccer Supporter

    Portland Thorns
    United States
    Jan 10, 2008
    Portland, Oregon
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Part of the answer to this thread's question may be that the US still is ranked #1 in the world by FIFA (as of the new rankings that came out today).
     
  21. Gilmoy

    Gilmoy Member+

    Jun 14, 2005
    Pullman, Washington
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    There was some good movement in today's FIFA rankings, essentially confirming what we suspected. "Hotness" is probably correlated to steepness of recent trend, i.e. dr/dt. This tends to cause relative changes in rankings, as a team zooms past its peers who stood still.

    - USA are still #1, Germany are still #2. Those points we earned over 4 years still beat the recent contenders' brief hot streaks. We did, however, sag to our lowest points ever. (If that continues, we'll drop off the top.)

    - Netherlands' Euro win earned +61 pts and +5 ranks to #7, their new high score.
    - England's Euro semi appearance gained points, to #3. Doing well in big competitions counts.
    - Austria earned +73 pts and +4 ranks to #20.
    - Australia earned +43 pts and +1 rank to #6. We see that friendlies aren't worth quite as many points as Euros, but Australia did benefit from top-10 friendly bonuses. Japan -2 spots to #8: they got passed by Australia and Netherlands. Brasil -1 to #9: got leapt-over by Netherlands.
    - At the other end of the cat, Norway -52 pts, France -46 pts, Spain -36 pts and -4 ranks.

    OTOH, I don't think remaining #1 is directly correlated to Ellis's continued employment. She'd essentially be playing with house money and the largest stack of poker chips on the table, and probably there was just no way she could lose that lead to any 1 team in just 2 years since WWC'15. (Pundits might argue she tried her best :D:oops:) Our lead was just too big. And we beat Germany once to do it, and once since then, which takes care of our nearest rival. (England might yet get us both, but the gap was too big for one Euro cycle, and there's not much on the schedule until WWC'19. France seems to have lost their chance for now. Netherlands and Australia are still filling in 2014's potholes.)

    Ellis does have a deep plan; sometimes I think it's too long-term, and so she tends not to excel in short-term environments like NCAA. We'll see how it pays off.

    Odd tangent, but not unrelated: USA wvb fans are similarly polarized by former legend and current HC Karch Kiraly. I think he's got a plan, and a philosophy. Detractors allege that he's ruthlessly kicking aside competing egos (whom happen to be our "best" players -- which I don't really buy), and yet failed to improve our Rio'16 result (bronze). We have this thread over there, too :D I snoop on both :coffee:
     
  22. TimB4Last

    TimB4Last Member+

    May 5, 2006
    Dystopia
    Conclusion: Hot we are not.
     
  23. Dundalk24

    Dundalk24 Member

    Jul 20, 2007
    PA/OH
    It will be interesting to see if the calamity of the men's team has repercussions for Gulati, then consequently on US soccer and the entire organization.

    The men's team are the brand on which the top brass rises, endures, or falls. If you don't exit after this then when? Can't separate BA's failure from the brain trust on this. Whatever plan, vision, or developmental approach they've been implementing is clearly not producing results that I would hope they would be aspiring to achieve. No silver linings. No feeble unconvincing excuses. You can attempt to sugarcoat this steaming hot dung but you'd be parodying yourself.

    The time for cleaning house and organization wide renewal has come. There will never be a stronger argument to do so than right now. Such changes, if made, would have a wide reaching impact on the USWNT programme, if not before 2019, then certainly beyond.
     
  24. Gilmoy

    Gilmoy Member+

    Jun 14, 2005
    Pullman, Washington
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    On the field, I thought we were due for a got-spanked. We looked insipid. Our B17s play way faster, with more electric movement and sheer effort of will, than our MNT did this Hex. (And Ghana's B17s are even faster and more frenetic than ours -- but we were up to that challenge.)

    Program-wide, I could smell a reboot coming. It's been rightfully said that our MNT core is the same as last cycle, and nobody is better than they were 4 years ago. (Ugh.) Even if we had limped into WC'18, we probably could have expected to get shellacked there instead of here.

    Heck, the BeIN split-screen snippets of the other two CONCACAF matches tonight, and all of the CONMEBOL matches, were absolutely insane in how fast and urgently they played. But even thinking so is part of the problem. We should think that's normal, and do it ourselves.

    Arena was done regardless, like a temp worker; he wasn't even guaranteed to be the 2018 coach. Gulati's fate is ... The Last Jedi-ish intriguing. US Soccer's revenues will surely take a hit over the next cycle.

    The long-term boys' development approach (and DA for girls?) might still be on track. This cycle was kind of the last hurrah of the previous group who didn't go through that, so they're not necessarily indicative.
     
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  25. BlueCrimson

    BlueCrimson Member+

    North Carolina Courage
    United States
    Nov 21, 2012
    Cincinnati, Ohio
    Club:
    Sydney FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I'm a fan of any and all house cleaning done at US Soccer.... provided they don't use the loss of revenue as an excuse to take money from the women.
     

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