Why does everyone need a scapegoat whenever the team loses? First its N'Silu, then Janicki, then Soehn, then the ref, then Janicki, then Wicks, and on and on. Some of you guys need to realize that soccer is a team sport and losses are never usually just the fault of a single person. How about just looking at the positives and negatives of the team's play, not just that of a single person, and how about not throwing people under the bus for one bad performance. Soccer players make mistakes. They happen to everyone, and sometimes people just have bad games. I think analyzing the team's overall performance is much more important then just blaming a sole person for the loss. What do you guys think?
Well I don't really know what you're taking about. If you're referring to Wicks, and this evening... He's not a scapegoat for this loss. He's a dumbass. He's dirty. He's out of control. He's done. Conduct unbefitting, he should never play for us again. Win or lose. I would rather take Hamid into the playoffs than have Wicks on the field. If he's in the starting lineup at the next game, I will boo harder than I have ever done for anything. He disgusts me.
^^ 100% agree! also i think that if we are to blame anybody for tonights game, it is soehn for playing a 3-5-2 against a team that is MUCH faster than we are.... he must be retarded. also to answer the original question, its just the gut reaction most of us have--- something goes wrong and we need a reason for it or sombody to blame.
I'm talking in general about the last couple years. It seems every game someone is thown under the bus. Almost never in soccer is one player responsible for a loss. While the thing done by Wicks was stupid(though not malicious in my opinion) he was not the only reason we lost.
I can't complain because I stated before the match I wanted 3-5-2, and the only difference was Pontius for Santino. Wicks can be a scapegoat for disgracing the team, but not the result. He kept DC in it at the half and the first goal was a break away.
I agree that if the team fails to get a result it's usually because of the team but over the last two years there have been a lot of individual mistakes and many of them have been very big. If the team fails consistently then the coach is needs to be held responsible. If an individual makes a mistake and it results in giving up a goal then they get called out. So what? Many people here on BS congratulated Moreno for winning games this year (Dallas) and last, all by himself. Recognizing an individual performance goes both ways. Does it get overdone by some, probably. But there really have been individual performances that standout to influence a match, and that I think is because the team really hasn't worked as team for the last two years.
You're entertaining yourself by building up a strawman and knocking it down. It sucks. Stop it. It is not at all the case that by singling out one person for particular criticism, the poster means that no one else is worthy of criticism or that that one person's failings explains the result in full.
....abd sadly to say Moreno is a waste at forward....and Emilio is a joke of a DP. The team just has to cut these guys loose and rebuild. Their just not good enough, their slow and predictable....
Why is this so hard for people to understand: D.C. United, MLS, USSF, etc. are _selling_ a product. And we're the consumers. So, when the product sucks there are three options: 1) Not buy the product. Plenty of people have chosen this option. 2) Complain about the product because you believe it holds value, either now or in the future, and there are faults that should be corrected. (In soccer, those faults are people.) 3) Take what you get. Option 2 is the ONLY choice for a real fan. Geez, this isn't kindergarden where you get a gold star for for showing up.
I agree. It's almost your job as a fan to want your team to do as well as possible. Where I have a problem is when people don't take a broad enough perspective and whine about things that can't be fixed. With the constraints of our league, not every problem can be fixed immediately, or even quickly. Harping on the same thing over and over again just gets annoying. It's also possible for reasonable people to disagree. That doesn't mean (heresy, I know) that one party is an idiot. Finally, to address the topic of this thread, soccer is a team game and while identifying a scapegoat might be satisfying in some sense, it hardly ever explains every reason for a loss or bad run of form. Generally speaking, someone who points to one person as the cause of every problem has a pretty shallow understanding of the situation.
More seriously, though, I do think it's worth emphasizing the point I was trying to hastily make earlier (and not to make this point to you, but just in general). When someone goes off on a rant on a particular player or the coach, or that player's/Tommy's performance in a match, that doesn't (necessarily) mean that that poster thinks the outcome can be hung entirely on the object of their post. I'll often post some dumb rant on someone's performance; but that doesn't mean I think that's the only person whose performance was worth criticizing; it's just that's what's on my mind at the time of posting. I'm furious at Josh Wicks because our already crappy chances of winning took a huge hit when he made us go a man down, forced Tommy to use a substitution he wasn't planning to make, and scrambled up our formation/set of responsibilities. I'm even more furious than that because he made my team look bad, classless even, and there's not much I hate more than that. But none of that should be construed as saying that nobody else played like crap or that he alone caused a loss.
As the person who essentially began the heated discussion about N'Silu on these boards, I would like to point out that my bitching came about on games that we won (games, in fact, that helped us get to the point of playing in last night's contest). But I agree with the general sentiment of this post. Look, we could blame Wicks, I guess, but we would never have been in a position for him to affect the game like that with his tirade if he hadn't made about three or four truly superhuman saves. So I give him something of a pass on his monster mash. More than that, at the time Wicks was sent off, the score had just become 1-0, and that was a pretty fair score for the 70th minute. Frankly, it might have been a little generous for us. Yes, I would rather not have to have played a man down with a backup goalie for the last 20 minutes. But fairness suggests Wicks did not lose this game for us--that we had any chance at all is a testament more to him than anyone else on the team other than Jacovik. All in all it was a good game, hard fought, generally entertaining. Seattle was a little bit better than we, I thought, and we should all consider ourselves quite a bit lucky they didn't get a goal or two in the first half. Someone in the other thread quibbled with the "Seattle was better" argument, noting that while they had more chances, we controlled possession more. That doesn't fly with me. Ultimately you have to score, and Seattle was in good position to do that a lot more often than we were. Still, I was glad that for the first time in some time we made a point of playing as many of our best players as we could. Not a great performance from, say, Fred and Gomez, I think we would all agree. But all in all this was not the desultory performance that we often see with MLS teams ... particularly if New England is involved.
That's a fair distinction. After all, you can't rag on GM for your car's performance if you buy a Chevette instead of a Corvette. But I want to believe that DC United is a Corvette and the rest of the league are just traffic cones that we run over. Orange traffic cones, at that.