Jozy and the Footycats: Altidore at Sunderland

Poor Jozy, he's gone from freezing his nutz off in Sunderland to freezing his nutz off in Beaverland.

 

Look who we found at the airport! Welcome @JozyAltidore #TFClive pic.twitter.com/GisL3RtUbH

— Toronto FC (@TorontoFC) January 15, 2015

Toronto FC@torontoFC · 1h1 hour ago
Look who we found at the airport! Welcome @JozyAltidore #TFClive

 

To Jozy's time in England! You can't never not say he never didn't not give it his all!

 

Meanwhile, in the RTG forums:



"Even if we don't get a replacement he's the only player I know who will strengthen the squad just by leaving it."

http://www.readytogo.net/smb/threads/altidore-to-the-mls.1017913/page-4

Now they're just being mean.

 

I bet the Grown Ass Man and the Wondonator score more than Altidore this season.

 

Looks like Luke on his return trip to mos eisley. Nothing but good memories.

It is also incredible to me that a man paid $6mm a year job to train during the week and sit on his ass on the weekend and just moved to higher paying job to soccer-scrimmage on the weekends can look unhappy. Sign me up, sounds like heaven!

 

Some may have claimed to see the dreaded 6 double negative in the wild, but when you come face to face with it, you don't know how you'll react.

 

In before they close this mess.

 

He's still a yank, and playing abroad

 

Tina, before they turn out the lights I just wanted to say I enjoyed your posts in this thread. Sry it had to end this way, kid. We'll always have Sunderland

 

Yeah, I'd say MLS is a foreign concept to most Americans...

 

damn it seems sunderland fans and usa fans have a total different narrative with altidore lol

 

We all agree he's a canny lad (nice guy) though.

 

I wonder who will get the last laugh ..

Jozy kept his cool and said nothing negative to Sunderland or the fans.

My bet is that Sunderland gets relegated and that Jozy is back in Europe before Sunderland makes it back to the Premier League.

While Jozy did not perform well (largely due to a loss of confidence) - Sland is a crap club and crap weather and has a crap roster. That will not change.

As always - the US in the long term depends on the growth and success of the MLS - never ever forget that.

As a country we have the population and resources to build a league. At the end of the day - the EPL is about the top six clubs and that will never change. Enjoy that Sunderland.

 

Guys think of it this way. What if a guy from Spain signed one of the biggest contract deals with your favorite NBA team after a career year in the Greek league, and then proceeded to average 2 points a game for the next season and a half... ESPN, you, your friends your town, and the basketball message boards would be destroying this guy and you know it. That's pretty much what Sunderland fans have been feeling like. Dont act as if American sports fans are just so humble and forgiving. Remember those guys across the pond take this sport as seriously as Americans take the NFL, NBA, etc. I get where most are coming from, but I don't really get the angst and hostility towards Sunderland. They gave him the chance to shine time and time again. But he failed the task. That's it.

 

This. That's long-term thinking. We have the resources, heck we only need the market. People start showing more interest, we move the most money in the whole planet. BOOM, Microsoft, Xerox, IBM, Boeing, HP, Universal, etc. start investing in our clubs. ManCity will look like a bunch of beggars.

 

Truth be told, they have been nice, and now are reacting because some American (or fake-American) fans are writing crap like this in their forums:

http://www.readytogo.net/smb/threads/crap-poster-following-crap-striker-out-of-the-door.1021805/

Many of them were to the last saying Jozy could still "come good." They are a zillion times the fans of a club like the Spuds, who never gave Deuce a chance.

 

Of course. But the thing that no one will mention (nor needs to, really. They're fans. That allows irrationality) is that at the end of last season everyone (ok, not everyone, but many on the boards) were singing Wickham's praises - how much better he was than Jozy, homegrown, real striker, piss and vinegar etc. etc... And while some of us - like me and Poyet, and a few around here, were pointing out the hard work Jozy was putting as a solo forward being double teamed and opening up some space for Bornini and Johnson, some fans at S'land were saying he was lazy and no good and had the touch of a donkey (to be fair, some on his board were saying the same thing) and then he'd go off and score for the USMNT and that was just inferior competition or friendlies or who knows.

Then when Wickileaks runs dry and Fletch is back to the Fletch who can only hold onto his past fire for short spurts of caring, well, that's down to something else.

Again, there is one simple, clear fact over the past two years: Strikers - especially front line strikers at S'land don't score. Not Jozy, not Scocco, not, save a brief burst of 3 games, Fletch, and aside from his miracle games - which were, indeed life saving miracles - not Wickham (tho, to be fair, he is not exactly a front line striker this season very often.) Why does everyone think Borini would rather languish at 'Pool than run the show at S'land? 'Cause it is an attacking black hole.

Poyet was right, last season, to use Jozy as a hold up man with the idea of Borini, Gia, Ki, Johnson and/or Larsson running off him to score. But he couldn't hold Borini, Gia has yet to really come good and Jozy didn't finish enough of his few chances to make that gameplan pay. So now, without Jozy getting starts and, in the end, any minutes, they are 1 point above relegation, second from the bottom is goals scored, went almost a full game against 'Pool without a shot on goal.

So sure, who wouldn't want to stop paying a guy who doesn't play. And maybe Defoe will be their miracle man this season. We shall see.

 

I'm not sure the comparison is totally applicable. American coaches can be scouted, watched, and evaluated through MLS and USMNT. There is no parallel for a foreign coach in American football. And although we are not a nation of superstars, we've produced a reasonable number of European-caliber players, showing that there is an infrastructure capable of producing talent suitable for Europe. There is much less evidence to show that Europe can produce NFL-level football players.

A bias is a bias, regardless of where the blame lies.

Maybe a more apt comparison is basketball. As a Cavs fan, I'm watching the first NBA experiment with a Euro HC. It's not going so well for David Blatt, and unless he turns it around, there certainly is going to be a bias against European coaches (beyond the one that probably already exists). I'm sure there are plenty of high quality European basketball minds that consider it a bias that an NBA team probably wouldn't interview them, when they see so many American hacks get multiple chances.

Again, it is certainly a bias.

 

Defoe has been officially announced by Sunderland so Altidore will surely be unveiled today.

 

Confirmed by Sunderland here: http://www.safc.com/news/team-news/2015/january/defoe-signs

 

Official:

http://www.torontofc.ca/news/2015/01/toronto-fc-sign-us-international-jozy-altidore

 

This thread continues to baffle me to its very end. Even on this last page, Sunderland are getting a kicking. They arent a great club, they dont score a lot of goals, but placing so much blame on their door is incredible.

Jozy got 18 months. He got over 40 league games, in which he scored once. We gave Mo Edu 10 minutes then binned him. Sunderland got rid of Scocco after 6 months because it wasnt working. Altidore got the chances, but there is only so long you can wait for a player who has shown no signs of being able to perform in the Premier League. Sunderland are not a side that can afford to wait for someone to start scoring, particularly someone with 2 goals in nearly 70 Premier League games.

This is not a hatred of an American. They may choose to use phrases which give that impression, but after spending millions on a striker whos scored twice in 18 months, they'd hate him if he was from Equatorial Guinea or even if he was from Wearside.

 

Uhm, David Blatt was born in Framingham, Massachusetts and went to Princeton, where he played for Pete Carill.

In terms of fer'ner coaches, the NHL had a couple (Ivan Hlinka and Alpo Suhonen). Hlinka had previous North American playing experience in Vancouver and Suhonen had been an assistant coach prior to his appointment as the head man in Chicago. Neither coach lasted in the league.

The "best" example is the MLB, which had a number of foreign born managers but most of them like Ozzie Guillen or Felipe Alou had tremendously successful and long playing careers before moving into management.

PS. Oddly enough, foreign born coaches - and I will exclude Dom Kinnear - have not done all that well in MLS and are subject of quite a bit of scorn and ridicule. From Ruud Gullit to Juan Carlos Osorio to Marco Schällibaum to Carlos de los Cobos, their popularity was quickly on the wane.