i watch a lot of Tigres games. Tuca is renowned for not being an aggressive manager. with another manager that Tigres squad runs the Dynamo over in the first 20 minutes of the first leg. with Tuca it's patience and the an eventual wearing down of the opponent. if you dont know this, its very easy to look at the final score and assume the Dynamo were of equivalent quality. they are not.
OMG. I had missed that Struna is on $1.1m salary. That is absurd. He is nowhere near a $1.1m defender in this league. No where near. Jordan said he would be a top-5 defender in MLS. (And the Dynamo system would need one that good.) He is not top 25.
I don't deny that their is a significant gap between Liga MX and MLS teams, particularly bottom-feeder MLS teams like the Dynamo and a team like Tigres, but the type of salary and the supposed pedigree we get with him, he should not look so easy to beat. All of this is moot in any case because Struna is now routinely coughing up goals against MLS level opposition. I don't know if he's just completely checked out now or if this is really who he is and the early run of games at home against weak opposition fooled me. He's reminiscent of Raul Rodriguez at this point. Better than a lot of the guys the Dynamo have trotted out at the position, but disappointing given the pedigree and cost.
just a theory: could it be that the heat has worn him down? we know athletes' bodies acclimatized after a time, but is the opposite effect possible if youve never been exposed to the high temps and humidity?
I’ve long postulated that while Houston teams become acclimated to the weather, constant training in it has a wear-down effect if you train thru summer. Teams in MLS hate the Houston weather but I don’t see opponents wilting in it to the degree which you would expect
Additional theory: most of the team looks like they have given up on the season. I mean, Vera has been a halfway decent midfielder most of the season and he was atrocious last night. The Dallas mids routinely beat him like a drum. So maybe it is a combo of the Houston heat and MLS travel fatigue with a healthy dose of "the season is over, I don't give a damn anymore since nobody else does either".
i said something slightly different, which is why bet on the brother of a player who already flopped, when the brothers have similar histories/CVs. one thing you need to remember, as i said at the time, is we at best are a "moneyball" outfit. limited pool of money, few risks taken. these risks we take have to turn out fairly often or we will suck. it's not like, in some other situation, there is a good and a bad rooney. their resumes looked similar. you're then wanting me to bet the clone is better than the original. and pay a million plus for the privilege. and that's our "spend" for the year. for some reason you just have it in for me or want to troll me today. cause factually the man looks like a mistake. he makes $1.2m right up there with Manotas. does that look like that level of quality? or does that look at best like remainder bin, and at worst like, well, we were dumb enough to sign the clone of a defender who flushed from MLS in one season, and hand him more than a million to do so? in context this is like Landin or Torres-bad because of the investment. and you're making smart alecky troll comments that somehow try to be both sides of the fence. if i am right -- and I have been since spring -- go troll the ones who missed it. take a step back. we just paid more than a million a season for a serie B defender who actually was often loaned out. i assumed at his CV this was a sub DP deal.
that's when you put the team in a defensive shell that inherently protects them, and you tell the team that we're pretty much screwed for this season, but i am going to play the ones of you who look like you care, and the ones who don't will not be here next season. that might not encourage the ones you might hope, but the issue right now is identifying the ones who want to be here and play hard -- or who can at least contribute -- and separating them out from the wantaways and the quitters. the problem is not just that we quit but that in a 433 a loafing unhappy team is a sieve. we aren't scoring the other way playing this attacking formation. so go 451 or 361 and just clog the midfield. play for one goal games. basically barrett. to be fair, i was critical of barrett at the time but he had less defense to work with and would never come out of his shell and take risks. if you're in a 0-0 65' in we can decide whether to risk 433. this is my issue with arnaud, is he isn't really altering what we were doing that didn't work, he's taking the same systemic approach with similar malcontents save quioto.
are we selling the big 3 or not??? at least one way of reading what has happened is the leading players announced outside interest and the rest of the team, seeing no one to replace them, checked out. we didn't shoot down the statements, but nor did we sell. we reduced their involvement, but didn't sell. it's a paper thin talent team. you can't sit key cogs over transfers that don't happen or personality issues. along similar lines, either do something about quioto, or play him. he has too much talent to sit. there has to be some way to get him on the field, midfield, LF, however. even as a sub. if he isn't going to play he needs to be sold or traded so we get value. that's not even getting into the stupidity of how a team that might want to sell its players mouths off about some of them and talks down their own price, so that we can blame the players to the media as opposed to the GM and coach. we then flake out on selling because we want more money. and the next players coming in are watching how we treat people. what a bunch of dingbats.
why did we trade for Niko Hansen? this is where i get into the GM/HC split doing us no good. it feels like a trade to look busy or provide depth we won't really use, because we traded for someone who hasn't yet played here. thing being there should be abundant tape and why bother getting someone who (assuming) when he shows up we don't like? isn't the idea to bring in players the coach wants, that help the team? maybe the plan is for if we sell but i haven't heard a peep since the manotas articles beginning of the window.
Who are the big 3: Elis, Manotas and......? Quioto is gone. Rumors are he was waived last week and not yet announced. In any event, his contract expires at the end of this season and no way he returns so really no point in playing him and nobody is going to pay you anything for a guy less than 6 months on his contract. The market for Elis (much like the market for Acosta in DC) has completely dried up. That was always the risk of not selling him last offseason. I don't necessarily blame Jordan for not selling him, he bet on continued improvement which based on last season and Elis' age was not a terrible bet. If it had paid off, you sell him at more than what was being offered last year. The downside is if teams lose interest because he is underwhelming, then you're in a pickle as he's heading into the option year and by next summer you're back to that less than 6 months to go on contract with a guy who probably doesn't want to return. Manotas, until he actually gets sold I'm going to continue to believe that he is going nowhere any time soon.
i think you ran right past my comments about "controlled" and "physical" in this rush to passive aggressively dog me out. i said that their approach to the game probably makes them more like MLS. whether it "flatters" or not is besides the point. it is what it is. you're trying to say, but, well, if they had a different coach and a more aggressive approach......... counter. factual. more to the point, a methodical team is going to provide a stern test for our forwards, and pick at the defenders they like. your point is apparently ignore the feedback. when, to me, it's i want to know whether they find my attackers challenging, or which defenders they pick on. in our case, they went after struna and fuenmayor, and to some extent the wide guys. you are confusing "good enough a game to tell you about your team" with "equivalent." if i want to know what i have in a club team i play the texans a scrimmage. if i want to know if my HS players are good i would call up elsik right now. if i want to know if my college team can hack it, stanford, maryland, akron, etc. now, you might get somewhat fooled on matchups or systems, but tigres was the stern test that the first round team and the early season schedule at home weren't. and if you go back, with the exception of willis who played well, the problem players were already becoming evident. i could understand if your argument was that the "team" loss didn't dictate the season. yeah, they finished second CCL, and are very good and organized. but at the individual level i want to know who "cracks" in that loss because your losses are generally the product of a set of misfiring players. want fewer losses? swap out the ones who glitch. y'all pretended he was a star until the end of the season when our table finish is done.
At least if Elis transfer is botched Brener might take notice and sack Jordan (probably not), but I think say valuation dropping 2.5 million or 4 million would cause Jordan indigestion. Feel like lost cash is one of the few things that might trigger action On the trade for guys we don’t use, why did we get Ramirez for that matter?
if that happened, why would you waive a valuable player??????? did he get shopped in trade? shopped for transfer? or did we just throw an emotional fit and get nothing for a NT player, because he got a red? it may make "DeRo" or "Kamara" emotional sense to dump good players for nothing because we are sick of their tude. it makes no rational sense. you have a valuable asset. my issue with the rest is s____ or get off the pot. re Elis, I know Torres was a one dimensional player, but surely we should have learned our lesson from that. sell when you have the chance, if that's the goal. did we really not do that over a million or two difference when we supposedly had 3 interested teams? the converse -- getting off the pot -- is that if you believe interest has dried up, they play every week. there was a period there where they were not playing much. basically the second wave of suckage after we flopped at the end of the GC break. i understand pulling players off the field in bubble wrap for an imminent sale. but if they weren't being sold they should have been playing. otherwise it's like going through the motions of being a selling team, undermining the field product, and then not doing it.
Who is going to pay for a guy when you can get him for free in the winter transfer window? No other MLS team is touching him. Everybody knows he's a head case, a rape charge waiting to happen, etc, etc.
his deal is he's a fake moneyballer. he wants to both keep the player while playing well and sell them when we decide we don't need them. those two are not going to line up well. you will overrate the player at peak and then try to sell them in earnest when their performance and price falls off. basically what happened with Torres. and i think at least one reason why is the veneer that we are trying to compete. he is scared to take the risk of selling the stars off teams that win, but that's what a team in our position needs to do to profit maximize. if that makes us nervous then we need to be in the accumulating business not the selling business. see rationally my take is, you bring in Salazar, Ramirez, and Hansen to potentially sell Elis, Manotas, and Quioto. they become useless when you are too feckless to follow through on the sale strategy. but why did you trade for them if a sale wasn't imminent? if they were instead brought in to challenge the bench forwards, eg, hairston -- who would deserve that -- then pull the darned lever there just the same. it doesn't feel purposeful and effective because we don't follow through on the related steps. (for contrast, we go get bizama, we can duvall. acquisition, consequence. a sequenced plan played out. i think we got another white elephant but that is at least an orderly process where the switches flip as they should and we follow through on the thought process to the natural conclusion.) among the absurdities, to me, is tommy mac starting after we traded for forwards. and ahead of memo and quioto. this is a struggling team, did we really trade for people who only start in rotation, or sit the bench? at least some of this is where it feels like the GM (beyond basic suckage) doesn't follow through and then like the GM and HC don't really agree on the players we go get. we bring in people, and it's not like, ohhhhh, boy, new toys. they go in the bin and we have the same legos out still. that sounds like the GM is on one track and the HC another, and the HC dutifully after a few weeks sorts out how to make use of the crap the GM gets him. that is dysfunctional.
I know we’ve definitely reached the end of the competitive portion of the season when juve starts with the criticism of why we can’t turn all of our unwanted assets into the next Pulisic thru trades and player transfer fees
i have been saying this for months. our forwards, sold last offseason, would have been worth about $15m in fees. our problem is that unlike atlanta, we will not commit to selling what passes for our almirons at their peak. probably because we want to mantain an illusion and realize the rest of the team sucks and it's a house of cards behind them. make fun of me all you want but there are three routes out of where we are. you make these players happy and try to accumulate on a budget (dog of a strategy). you sell people and turn that into the budget you don't have (option i am advocating here). or you start putting money in the academy (won't do). becoming a selling team would serve their game plan of keeping expenses down now, and then expand the budget naturally by sales. or we can try Plan D which is ride the stars to like one playoff appearance once in a while, retain them to try and preserve the appearance we are trying to make it every year, and then waive or panic-sell them under some sort of holdout threat or them going to crap or becoming attitude problems. which seems to be the current plan. carry unhappy players to below the red line to give the pretence we are trying to get topside (but won't). so you get neither the sporting upside nor the money for the player. bravo. i don't think we'd ever get pulisic but several million every couple years or so would hopefully change the budget eventually. that's our path out of a cheap payroll is the machine gives us the money the owners won't. which is you sell the stars and replace them. repeat. and to do that you can't wait until you're sick of quioto or torres is surplus and struggling. you have to do it at peak. this team is scared of its own shadow and change which is why lundkvist and willis and beasley and delagarza and co. are back every year. and the funny thing is that after keeping beasley employed all these years we're now his whipping boy for not being competitive enough for him. it's true what he says, to a point, but it's also the irony of keeping a set of modest performers employed as your ensemble company who then resent you never tried to get al pacino or ryan gosling for the starring parts.
I’m fine with discussing valid transfer debates like Elis and Manotas. But the bottom 2/3rd of the roster has little trade or transfer value unless a team has a specific hole to fill like a backup keeper they need for depth. Quioto had zero transfer value (his contract is expiring at seasons end) and probably minimal to zero trade value since his rep is bad. Teams in MLS do not trade assets for guys with 3 months left
I know we think out loud on these boards and I don't mean to be harsh but this sort of criminal allegation doesn't seem appropriate for some anonymous discussion board.
i was talking the big 3 in transfer. i was talking quioto in trade -- i assume he got a green card for a reason. i do think as a failed team we might consider shipping out by trade some of the disappointments a la duvall. just to go ahead and create maximized roster and payroll space for the offseason. re no value, you're talking out of your hat. we just traded for ramirez and hansen. hansen in particular must be on a rookie deal ie we probably have an option this winter. zero value? and quioto is a starter-level guy and the team on the other end will know that. many might avoid him for the issues but teams right around the line or with other ambitions might take a risk. i also think it used to be common dynamo strategy under kinnear to trade for "rentals" in their contract year. ngwenya and jaqua come to mind. maidana, also, although that didn't turn out well. it's a "playoff push" one year strategy on paper, but interestingly in both cases they came back here and signed after playing abroad. our value was in the first stint, but it's something we've historically done to improve our chances in the playoffs. you always say there is no value and then driver gets traded. or are we going to finesse which certain boat anchor of a keeper we still have from that exchange?
but i think you've egged me into arguing the transfer and trade value stuff -- which i do believe in the abstract -- when my factual argument was i think it's a real possibility we have all the forwards on september 1. my concern is the opposite, that despite value and at least some intent to sell we will accomplish nothing. they won't do what it takes to make us competitive this year, but nor will they sell anyone to get us some money in. two rumored sales and probably pretty good offers and jack squat done. literally not any good at any phase of things. jordan needs to be fired now so we can hire his replacement by around regular season end. then the coach needs to be hired during the playoffs. that way the new brain trust can sit down and piece together what the future looks like before we even hit option decisions, free agency, etc. do this with a unified plan for a change.