Pogrebnyak, (Dempsey's ex-teammate) with some comments on English and German football. http://www.soccerway.com/news/2012/September/09/pogrebnyak-enjoying-english-paradise/
Yeah, that always left me kinda bemused, but that just goes to show that even the great ones have their blind spots, and OldGuyFC was one of the all-time greats around these parts.
yep - the only point was that even the most knowledgeable soccer guys get it wrong sometimes. OldguyFC was unrelenting about Robobob but some around here are now refashioning him as the Renaissance of American soccer. Arm chair pundits are always fun, especially guys like GVP who are so certain about their own genius. Oldguy wrote a much better post, however. And knew a heck of a lot more about soccer.
Personally I hope the guys who insist that we play defend and counter style of soccer are happy with the result because it was evident that we were going to lose that game . Back to blasting it out of the back and hope it gets to someone in a blue shirt. Even the commentators advised that style of play when we went ahead so early. Stupid tactics in today's game. Did anyone notice how we lost the ball constantly and how Jamaica always got to a headball or loose Ball first?????? that whole display was a farce, like we did not care at all. The outlook for every player must be that the ball belongs to me and devote 100% to that tenet. We did not do that. Lackadaisical at best, non-committed and sad. Some of the players were totally locked out, that should never happen....Blame JK, I would say the fault lies on the field....Many of the players on the field were popular BS choices, people moaning and groaning why they were not being used, yet here were quite a few and what happened. Now we are still saying he chose the wrong players. Altidore was in for a long time and what did he do? How many of BS sweethearts were on the field and what did they show us? Yupp JK must go.
The utter bullshit you produce in every single one of your posts is impressive. But please enlighten us, who are "the BS sweethearts" and who should have been playing instead of them?
I agree. After we went up, we got complacent.... fast! Altidore didn't look good either. Those players were playing 'cold'.
The Serenity Prayer goes: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference." I don't think JK is going to change his ways. And since I cannot replace him, I'm trying to have the wisdom to accept the defensive, ugly soccer the USMNT is producing.
Olson Johnson: [after Gabby Johnson's speech] Now who can argue with that? I think we're all indebted to Gabby Johnson for clearly stating what needed to be said. I'm particulary glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.
Seriously. Nobody has been saying that. At all. We're pretty much all good with being more positive and wanting to control the game. We're not really cool with who JK's trying to do it with...
Right, of course. I agree. But a lot of people believe that the USA's sit back and counter with numbers approach, while it has definitely been effective for at least a stretch of time for the USA, isn't effective when you've got such a sketchy backline that can't really handle the pressure of being that negative defensively. It might benefit the squad to control the ball more and give the opponent less of a chance to go at your defense. The issue is that the offensive requirements of a side that decides to be more proactive is completely different from that of a reactive team, and it's a lot harder to figure out, it seems. One thing we do know is that we're not going to get there with three defensive midfielders on the pitch at all times. Simple as that. Basically, we seem a little more likely to achieve "A" if we take control of the game more. And we might get B along the way
Klinsmann never really fixed the CB issue. He's left the whole, and put a wall in front of it, so it's less noticeable. But chances are the hole is still there. So far there is no trust in the CBs, you'll have midfields whose main purpose is to help in defense. Which means it'll be easy to cut them from the forwards and AMs. Any team worth its salt has studied the USA under Klinsmann before the game, and they know that. Not for the friendlies, but for the real deal.
The issue is, we still haven't learned how to transition from pure defensive (or found the right players to play this) when everyone is trying to help our d line, and how to transition that into attack. We've stopped the majority of goals through teh run of play.... but how do we transition from that, into attack?
I agree. We were a good counter attacking team... but beacuase of the freedome we gave our CM's on offense.....we gave the opposing team a big hole in the middle to attack through (a path). Since then, we've clogged that hole... but it's killed our offense. We've got to figure out... how do we attack / transition to attacking from this? Do we lay off clogging the hole a bit? Try more offensive minded mid's with less defensive capability? What's the answer here? Get our CB's more involved in attack to help?
The problem is, did we need to move away from something that was working well when taking our player pool into consideration? Our very 'primitive style' of play - as the Bradley "haters" liked to view it- was relatively very effective, bringing us a lot of good results. Over time our players are going through a development and end up in better places. This would've meant that our 'primitive style' would have automatically been upgraded to a higher level. Playing Johnson instead of Bornstein for instance. Playing Michael Bradley AS Roma for Heerenveen/BMG era. Replacing Fulham's Clint with Spurs' Clint (18 goals - let's hope he can do it again). Gonzalez, Ream, Cameron, ... for Boca and DeMerit and maybe Onyewu. And so on. Now we find ourselves in a situation where the coach is claiming to go A, but going B, while excluding players that belong to A. After this 2nd Jamaica game is over, Klinsmann needs to get his act together and evaluate where he's (been) taking the soccer program. "Every time we played simple [...], we created chances. In between those moments we just made things far too complicated. [...] You've got to keep things simple [...]. We have to fix it now. We have to fix it" - Jurgen Klinsmann Fix it, Jurgen.
Sadly these are the things that my 'E license' gets me to say to U-12 players. I was almost insulted to hear him say this sh!t.
Why? Our best attacking player, Dempsey, sometimes gets in trouble by getting fancy. Jones does as well. Reminding them that it is sometimes not a good idea (like on a crap field) is such a bad thing?
This post is just going to rehash more BB vs. JK stuff. There is a medium there somewhere.... it's on JK to figure it out. He stopped us leaking goals even though our best defense was a good offense..... but how do we turn our good defense... into offense? What is the medium? One coach had us play very strong, counter attacking soccer... but it made us suseptibal(sp) to counter attacks ourselves, and hurt us vs. Ghana in the WC. JK has fixed this issue... but at hte cost of our offense. What is the way we can have our cake... and eat it too?