Houston Dynamo v. Columbus Crew, Sunday, October 24

Porter a big crying man-baby but he routinely out coaches Houston skippers. Does Tab have a clap back?

They have pace enough up top to expose our slow CBs. Will the D be up to the task?

 

Correct!
Zardes is going to be a hand full for our backline!

 

no

 

my theory was good or even solid defenses give us fits. there are some exceptions both directions (SKC, Miami) but it holds some water. Columbus has 15 GA in 18 games.

i also think that lassiter is not a starter and until they make an effort to get manotas and ramirez on the field at the same time, we're going no place. soft defense, no midfield, and now only 2/3 of a forward line. they need to maximize the forward line and get more minutes to young performers like junqua. at this point it should be obvious the standard issue XI (post elis) is not working. the longer it takes to adjust the less i think the coach should have the job.

i do think he was handed a lousy card hand but unlike barrett or arnaud i haven't seen him tinker and tinker until he can get something consistent (if disappointing) out of it. he drew his 5 cards and only discarded one while seeming to play for a pair.

my sign of a good coach is even if we have a bad year he steadily brings in helpful players and elevates young performers and tweaks system so that we look better as the season goes on. the trend is instead going the wrong way. we came out of camp playing well, and then it's fallen apart since. between we sold elis and that form was not maintained, it feels like a fitness illusion or he's no better than the talent.

and to be blunt U20 is a job where you're handed all our talent plus anyone else with the right passport. you then run with the weahs richards sotos you are handed. this job is more complicated construction work within a competitive environment. if you think he's good with kids, that's a resume for an academy or RGV job. wilmer before him was a U17-18 YNT coach. this is men's league.

 

also, while i understand the argument that this is so bad a personnel set that demanding results this season is unfair -- i thought the defense was trash day 1 that we would struggle to overcome -- i feel like on paper we should be better than the expansion teams or some of the other stragglers getting points off us. our 27 GF are better than any non playoff team and all but 3 of the bottom half of the playoff 16. our GD is better than some teams above the red line.

so i grant it wasn't top of the table material he was handed. but nor is this wooden spoon. but the longer the season goes the more it trends that way. we didn't get a Texans schedule. it wasn't unfriendly. we played a lot of teams right around the same line we are, and as the season progressed the other team in similar points position would leave with the spoils.

 

Houston Dynamo
What it was: Do they have a high-usage central midfielder anywhere?

What it should have been: Is Mauro Manotas broken?

Manotas has gone from 19g/1a in 2018 to 13g/8a in 2019 to 2g/1a in 1050 minutes in 2020. He has scored once since February. It is bad and it hurts me to watch this right now, because I am a Manotas fan.

There are plenty of other things going wrong with Houston (they never did find that high-usage central midfielder, and the central defense is a major problem, and I don't think they upgraded at goalkeeper), but if Manotas put the ball in the net at his usual clip it's a good bet that they'd be safely above the playoff line.

Instead they're dead last in the West on PPG and have won just once in their past 10 games. Obviously losing Alberth Elis hurt, but it shouldn't have hurt this much.'

https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2020...visiting-one-big-question-again-each-mls-team

 

Lundkvist suspended for 2 games for a nasty challenge that got only a yellow last Sun. at Minn. Will miss tomorrow and next Wed. at LAFC.

https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2020...spends-houstons-adam-lundkvist-fines-two-more

 

Cabrera w the own goal but the goal you fail to score ends up the goal being scored upon you.

very bad errant shots by Quintero

we need to put Mauro’s picture on milk cartons because he is def missing

Looks like the lost all the value they could have sold him several years ago.

 

why do the enforce wearing a mask in you seat in an outdoor stadium and socially distanced so dumb

 

Have you gone to any of the games this year?

I’ve gone to all of them and appreciate all the measures being taken.

 

ask some of the Karens on this board to answer. Probably claim it’s due to Abbott’s order on masks but in general it seems redundant at best to have masks and distancing or more likely it’s a tacit admission that masks are mostly virus theater

 

Highest daily new infection rate since the pandemic began and rising.

It doesn’t hurt anyone to wear a mask in public or a seat belt when driving a car or speeding or making drinking a driving illegal. I don’t like wearing a seat belt yet there is a law because the majority wants me too.

There really is no problem doing it - it’s just to help protect others. The problem is in people’s minds.

 

Whatever I asked why wear a mask in your seat in an outdoor stadium no problem wearing it when getting up or leaving the stadium. Also the virus has like a 99% survival rate. Its like the people who wear a mask in their car why driving alone makes no sense. Also, we have been wearing masks for months now and rate the is going up so.....

 

Seat belts and speeding laws were all passed by state legislatures. If masks were so effective, then infections would not be rising - although if you read up on PCR testing you realize they have cranked it up to find dead fragments of viruses they call “positive” tests. More a casedemic than anything.

And if lockdowns were effective, then why is Europe having a rise? Or why isn’t it gone in this country?

 

feel free to catch COVID then and report back to us

 

On the performance of the team as a unit. well, ain't no rebrand or crest change gonna help that type of footy played down on the field.
Oddly enough, finding better talented players will. Run them out in hot pink uniforms no less.
Cuz in sports, you cannot win them all, but you sure can look like you are trying to field the best team your city deserves as a proven winner.
Shocking, I know.

 

99.9% chance it turns out fine

 

again feel free to catch it and come back to us

 

well maybe if I could find someone with it I would - or maybe so few people have symptoms it will be hard to find a taker

 

good thing asymptotic transmission exists. Just have 20 people over at your house

 

there is abundant evidence of virus passing more than the popular 2 meters/6 feet. of like a ton of people at a choir practice or church or restaurant and it goes everywhere. like out to like 20 feet. i think 6 feet came from the contact tracing theory that the most worrisome contacts are those within 6 feet for more than 15 minutes. like if you get sick that's who the county wants you to list so they can notify. it's the standard because it's more certain. it's not the standard because you go out 73 inches instead of 72 inches and are 100% safe. it's more like if you are within 72 inches for a length of time with an infected person that's bad news. so let's encourage people not to be that close very long. they don't necessarily explain it all to people.

masks are not 100% effective but nor are they 0%. only an idiot rides naked at 0% protection because a device he could wear only 95% protects him. people don't seem to get "breaking the chain." there is a lot of abstracted discussion of masks protect, you or the other guy, and i think this only encourages self centered conservatives who don't care about other people. let us take this out of abstraction. five guys in the wall for a kick. odds are the ball isn't hitting me in the nuts in the wall. simple stats. 80% it hits someone else. am i going to stand there hands up and test the odds i get racked? hmmm.

or, more pointedly, consider that you aren't some special snowflake that jesus picked to have to be ok in the circumstances, and that if you go hang around your maskless buddies, and get sick, and then don't want to wear a mask around us, it's basically pinball, and then you at the end wanting to not just risk yourself getting it, but then pinball around the rest of us throwing your little antiscientific rights hissy fit. do you think people in the plagued middle ages and 1918 threw a bunch of hissy fits? "my rights?" we are spoiled consumerist children. and if you gave two craps about business for real, you'd be trying to get rid of the problem and limit spread so we can GET BACK TO BUSINESS AS USUAL.

if you ask serious doctors about what is more important, mask versus vaccine, they will tell you mask. vaccine is let science take care of my problem. mask is let me proactively protect myself. i am amazed that "personal responsibility" republicans are like, fine, it's a choice, be stupid. that's not the way your rhetoric towards black people on welfare runs.

i keep waiting for engineers to pipe up that in a safety situation redundancy has its uses. i can have a plane that does nothing but fly by wire. or i can have one with emergency hydraulics. i kind of want one where if the power goes out or the computer freezes the flaps can still work manually.

and to be clear, while you think i am asking too much, "you can go to the darned game but sit apart and wear your mask" is an alternative to the lockdowns westie moans about. you have gone too far and basically decided we have to go out and can do events, but then no one at the event can tell you a thing.

this tells you how the GOP has changed that in a few decades we have gone from boring, over-prepared banker types, who would worry about such scenarios, and tell people they need to think ahead and take care of themselves, to this high risk speculation business model, where people like trump are rewarded for repeat failures, and we want to indulge people into socializing their risks. i am getting bored of bailing out republican presidents of their market crashes, and, in this case, pandemic. a conservatism that sells you are on your own should also be selling common sense self preservation. a conservatism that says you can pick your choice on this is saying you are expendable, i don't have to educate you, i can take advantage of you, and the foibles of your decisions are your problem. that is cute until something like a market crash or pandemic where your risk taking causes me problems. at which point it's curb your bullsh*t and behave yourself so we can get out of this sooner rather than later.

 

my thought process is over time -- like the texans -- this just steadily eroded and then the core left is a bunch of waiver wire types picked up for not being good enough last place. which is how you end up bottom of the table, is making a team from the recycle bin. we used to have not just elis but quioto and others, plus manotas playing well, ramirez producing, martinez contributing, beasley somewhat better at left back. just a steady drip drip drip and what's left is ugly.

kind of like the texans steadily let kjax and matthieu and others leave and then i am asking why is 29 or 26 still on an important wide out and i suddenly realize THERE IS NO GOOD CORNER LEFT, IT'S ALL TRASH. there is no better guy to swap over so hargreaves isn't being burnt crispy. same thing at running back. same thing at wide out. a bunch of the guys you might sub in for the guy who runs for 10. the texans have been more competitive over time but you could see the titans cross over last year in the post season and the response was trade players and get weaker. and they finally pulled too many jenga and there was nothing left. it's a bunch of filler. filler gets destroyed at the pro level.

this is even less defensible than the texans because it wasn't competitive to start with. you did inertia with a non playoff team. what did they expect. the texans at least began decent before they destroyed themselves.

the thing i don't think people realize is if you pull that one run of games out we have won one non-contiguous other game all season -- the home dallas game a few weeks back. the rest of the season is alternating ties and losses basically. this is basically 2016 under barrett. they can't even win if the try.

this should be the easiest house cleaning in the world.

 

the answer, westie, is europe left lockdown. they are basically enduring their version of our july and august. you keep pretending behaving yourself doesn't work. the ones that behave themselves all the time are the ones you don't hear about. the ones that keep opening way up and then closing you hear about because they don't learn their lessons.

i don't hold up western europe as the paradigm. you keep holding it up like i do because they end up locked down. you don't get it. you lock down when you already screwed up. the virus is already there. this is trump land. moan politically about doing anything about it once you have created the festering abcess already. at which point we're talking, do i see a doctor or do i just see if i croak at home. you're saying, don't take measures, don't see the doctor, tough it out. which is how people get killed.

the idea is to undertake border measures, health measures, tracing measures, where there is little or no spread and anyone who does get sick can be traced to their contacts. so we can cordon the virus off and not lock down. we end up locked down because we just let it go everywhere at which point your choices are system breakdown, hospital overwhelm, or tell everyone to go home.

you keep selling precisely the lifestyle that ensures that until we get a vaccine we will be a nasty mess. i understand it matches GOP politics of the day but that is theory. normally in a disaster you get practical. you are about to be dumped out of office because your politics gets people broke and killed in a disaster. they want practical. and even when he gets in office i am waiting for the red state governors to whine about how practical impinges on their rights, even as the hospital down the street from the governor's mansion is filled to the brim.