It's in general not good to hook up a coach and teeners coming from a different back ground in culture.
Have you done any research on Wicky? His entire coaching career was built on coaching youth teams and he did so well that Basel let him coach their first team where he also succeeded. If you think Wicky is a bad coach you really need to remove the anti ussoccer bias
It looks as if the US is playing 3 teams it normally would not face until the breakout rounds, where it usually loses. Senegal and Japan are as diametrically opposed as you can get. Japan wants to control the ball, quick passes and combination play. Japanese kids start playing this style from the age of 4 or 5. Every team in Japan plays the same. And the US? Without any form of systemic organization and understanding from the players, it's just a bunch of waiting around for the Pulisic parents and the Reyna parents to teach their kids rather than the system. Then SUM can ride their coattails and make $millions off an asset they did nothing to create. The US could easily go 0-3 in the next games and still play the best soccer of any U17 in a decade.
I enjoy that the possibility that Senegal might just have better players, and simply outplayed our players is apparently impossible. It must be that the coach is HORRIBLE or there's something systematic. Senegal had two guys who were fantastic, and frankly looked better than our top attackers. Our team is not shockingly imbalanced -- it's a youth team -- with no natural CBs and a lack of athletic CMs. The immediate dismissal of all our players -- sometimes five minutes into the first match -- is ridiculous as well. And the lack of accounting for age. No need to write off Danny Leyva guys -- he's 16 -- we have no idea who he matures into. These are the 24 best U17 teams in the world. It's not a very good predictor of what men's teams will be the best in 5-10 years, but it's still the best right now. It was never going to be easy, and plenty of people on here that watch this group cautioned that it had some pretty big holes.
I can't speak to player selection because I do not know the pool... The players, with the massive exception of Reyna, just sucked. Terrible passing, but what really really hurt them were the tactical choices made. Many of them were very basic positioning errors and failing to properly pursue or block off opposing attackers. A gruesome lack of mental application, IMHO. Rather unbelievable, actually. I've seen fairly low technical skill levels before in at the U17 level, but never such a collection of tactical defensive errors. Hardly the coach's fault.
Okay guys. Relax a bit. These are 17+ year old kids. With that age comes wildly different performance levels in time. It's a simple truth. If they run wild high a string of matches, donot trust on it they do the same a couple of months later. It even can differ from match to match.
The coach's credentials were useful to the extent that they got him the U-17s job. After all, it's not like there's a long line of coaches wanting to coach our youth national teams right now. Can you breathe? Yes. You got the job. Wicky now has the job, given his "credentials", one would think that he wants to move up the ranks fast so he needs to demonstrate his ability to win games. It's time to deliver some product on the field via results or a style of play (ideally both). A lot of folks were very high on Wicky because "his" team steamrolled every team -including Mexico- during qualifying as if that were a unique achievement on a tournament that was played at home. All that said, it was evident that in the championship game against Mexico, the entire team was gassed. Who knows what really happened. IMO, it was Wicky's -and his staff's- inability to manage prior games and rest players accordingly that partially led to that debacle. When the team was winning a semifinal game by three goals and GD isn't at stake, you rest your starters...coaching 101. He won every game in the knockout stage by an average of 5 goals with very few rotations leading to the championship game. At the time, most people gave him the benefit of the doubt after qualifying because he was new to his charge and concacaf, didn't know the players well, Florida weather, etc. His honeymoon is over; he had a couple of camps to correctly evaluate and select players and these are the players he picked. A coach's player selection will always be a polarizing topic so I'm not even going to go there. However, what happened yesterday with tired legs again? The kids looked gassed again in a mild 80 degree weather since the first half. Wicky may have "impressive" credentials for some but he's showing a fundamental lack of game management skills or even worse, motivational skills. We'll see what the next two games bring but Wicky -and staff- need to do a better job at managing these players in all aspects of the game (physically, tactically...). They look so tired, frustrated, defeated, unmotivated. It was difficult to watch. Yes, these are 17 year old players but energy and motivation should not be their problems at this age. Technical and tactical mistakes can be overlooked at this age to a degree but the lack of bite witnessed yesterday was exactly what we saw in the second half against Mexico.
The last team was, maybe, the best ever and they had a complete stinker against Colombia. Looked as bad as last night. They followed that up with their best game by far against Paraguay. I'm sure it was not the players that chose to play so slowly. They had a couple of spells in the beginning of each half where they got the ball forward. But the last 30 minutes of each half were real hard to watch.
The telling moment for me was when we won the ball off the break, but busio instead of driving the defense towards the box decides to slow play down, pass it to Leyva, who then back passes to the CB.
As I noted, we could easily play the best 3 matches of any U17 team in US history as still lose all three matches to 3 very good teams.
i would take a -20 gd if it meant another class as good as the last two. harsh reality is getting 3 great players per u17 cycle is fantastic
To me, it’s looking at the upside. I saw potential upside in Reyna, Busio, and Scally. I was disappointed in Pepi, but I’ve seen his talent elsewhere. Maybe it was a bad game. Same for Leyva. I even thought Las could be alright, but he has a lot of work to do. I don’t know why Bello didn’t start. That said, Yow sucks. That’s Wil Trapp 2.0 all over it. He’s slow, weak, technically deficient, and tactically doesn’t understand the game. More so, Gray and Armour suck. I highly doubt either will become solid pros. In my opinion, Kobe sucked too, but I keep hearing all this hype. And I definitely was not impressed by Saldana. Of these 5, I think signs point to them needing to consider another career in their life.
Kobe was the best player on the team -- how did he suck? His distribution was very good and the only somewhat consistent way that we were able to advance the ball. Defensively, he was good and deserves no blame for any of the four goals conceded. Overall, I think reactions to this game are way overblown. I was disappointed in how they performed, but I think a lot of it has to do with the simple fact that they have not faced a side as physical and aggressive as Senegal played. Physicality is a big part of the game, but I'm not going to suddenly get down on a bunch of prospects because they get out muscled in a game, especially when I knew there were limitations to the roster coming into the game.
More on Kobe- watch not just this game but every game he plays. You'll see that attackers tend to back off him. And why is that? Because players size up each other and quickly see where they can be exploited. Kobe's comfort on the ball quickly becomes apparent and so attackers don't want to get wrong footed and have him charge up the field. Virtually all of Kobe's short range passes go right to the intended target, almost always on the ground. No hospital balls. While his long range passes don't always connect (whose does?), they usually go to the correct target (vision), and if they miss they don't miss by much. This guy has as much upside as anyone on the team (just wait till he starts playing regularly at LB in Europe) with perhaps Reyna having more.
At CB his lack of height on headers is a disadvantage, otherwise I don't know what liabilities you're referring to.
Kobe was our best passer, was the best defender, and is so good at defending that the team is starting him as a CB even though he is a LB. He has a bright future.
It’s generally not a good idea to overreact to how individual players play at a big youth tournament. At every one of these tournaments there’s usually a good player who has a very bad tournament, yet those who haven’t watched any other games will regard them as bad players.
I don’t think he passes well enough to be a #6. If he grows another few inches, he should make a good CB.
His passes weren't good enough for a CB either. Technically they were OK, but to the players who were immidiately challenged and had no skills to overcome those challenges. Gregg's "playing from the back no matter what" system wasn't helping him either. Actually I'd prefer Pepi or Reyna to lose balls after his passes rather than Saldana or Leyva.
Agreed. Chris goslin has pretty good moments in his u17 WC. But he’s pretty much out of the sport already.
I almost never agree w/you, but I do here (how's that for a passive aggressive self aggrandizing compliment?). My only quibble would be in adding a detail that's helpful in noting how much changes w/perception of the player pool w/teenagers. 2017 U17's who made the 2019 U20 team: Keepers: 0 out of 3 Defense: 2 out of 6 (Dest and Gloster) Midfield: 1 out of 6 (Durkin) Forwards: 2 out of 6* (Weah and Akinola) W/regards to forward, you need to add Akinola, to make it 2 out of 6, as he was injured after being named to the team, and you also need to add Sargent as he would've been on the team if he had wished to play on it. So essentially 6 players from the U17's who had been named just 19 or so months earlier (October 2017 to May 2019, not close to a full 2 years) managed to be a part of Ramos' 2019 U20's WC team. 6 out of 20, if you add Sargent. Some of this can be attributed to ---? type decisions, like leaving Llanez off the 20, but this is more or less consistent w/historical trends. Unless my memory is failing me, in my experience, somewhere between about 25-45% of a U17 cycle advance to the U20 team two years later. Some will fall off because they were wrongly identified for whatever reason, some will climb into the picture because they were wrongly left off previously, and some will simply be discovered later. I'd like to think people more or less have a good sense of what players may or may not be likely to be in the picture two years from now. Some guys like Nyeman were injured and didn't have the citizenship stuff completed, others were wrongly left off or on the roster, and generally, while some will quibble, I think there's a general sense of players that have a reasonable chance of being a part of the picture in '21. To me, those are: Tier 1: Gio Reyna Kobe Hernadez-Foster Tier 2: Pepi Leyva Tier 3: Ocampo-Chavez Busio Bello Carera That's my guess anyway. The only guys I'm reasonably confident in are Reyna and Kobe, I suspect 3-4 will be relevant 3 years from now.
Gio and Kobe most likely won't be with the 20's as they'll have progressed to the USMNT. Gio because he'll have broken through at Dortmund this season and Kobe will break through in Germany (assuming he goes there) most likely in January 2021 and will claim the USMNT LB spot. Uly Llanez will be the third player in the upcoming u20 cycle to not make the team as he'll be above the level. Assuming Pepi and Leyva dont see a massive drop off in their progession then they should be in this situation along with Moses Nyeman in 2023 (early 2004 standouts like Evan Rotundo are on this watch list as well).