Geez, what a bummer. I wanted to see him at least compete for a spot as the striker. Gregg seems to already have made his mind up. Terrible. Hoppe scored more goals than any striker in a top 5 league with half the minutes on a crappy team. At least give him a shot to see how he can do.
You do actually need glue guy vets, it's just preferable you're not wasting spots on the guys that serve those purposes. I think all the guys that fit that tag still make sense with the call up other than Roldan, and the counter argument on Roldan is actually a good one (great locker room guy, in the midst of a great season), I just don't care about the argument because he's always sucked when he put on the shirt. But having vet guys is a necessity, it's just important that they actually also have utility. Zardes has utility, good guy in the room, does score goals, does make good runs. Lletget scores goals, Guzan is good in the room, and the vet keeper slot. It's only Roldan that's nonsense to me amongst the vets, but even he has valid arguments to favor him.
lletget should be in the 23 based on game performance. shouldn't even be there. the other two it's lame and circular, they are there because they have been there before. neither yeuill nor roldan has dominated or looked all that great. i get on some level the coach should bring in his B team for B team tournaments but their performance begs the question. more pointedly, if the idea is cynical trophy chasing, how does calling in people who did meh at 2nd place GC 19 or the mediocre NL group play help you there? usually when one summons the B team as their chance to win it's not knowing full well they couldn't win last time. there is a logic. logic isn't always tracking the facts. with this bunch his most informative roster and best chance at winning the tournament would have been actual experiments. this likely ensures a semi exit or final loss. for which he will not be punished because he has NL in his back pocket. i also feel like the pro veteran thing on down to the B side tends to protect the coach's decisions. it kind of frames up the roster decisions like the threat to, say, the backs is zimmerman or pines and not reynolds or richards, which is a lot easier to justify. to me for a coach who likes incumbency and continuity a "horvath" can only throw sand in the gears and remove some of the power from your hands. i personally think this should be more the players deciding who wins out, on the field. but this works out very top-down. like i was saying earlier, if morris stays healthy does reyna play much. if steffen's knee is fine does horvath ever play. if long is healthy does mckenzie get called. with the exception of lovitz many of the perceived evolutions of GB were forced by injury.
The US in my opinion plays far too much at home. The Gold Cup wasn't the problem, not winning on the road was a huge reason for not qualifying. Playing the Euro won't stop England from qualifying. Preparation for WCQ and building more chemistry/assimilating the coach's tactics. You're seeing this from the US perspective which is understandable but for Mexicans and Canadians, it's preparation for playing on the road and the US at home... you don't get better preparation than that for when it matters...at the WCQ
Um we played every single Copa America from 1993 to 2016. That's 10 editions. We never had to skip anything. No one argued about the real difference of anything. Someone asked why MX fans were angry that we have to play vs MLS players and I gave the reason. That the fed sees this as a must-win tournament is obvious.
It's a shame about Clark. But there are enough newbies to keep me interested. Especially looking forward to seeing Hoppe, Busio, Williamson and Robinson. In some ways though, this tournament is bigger for some of the established players on the periphery. I suspect some of them will play themselves out of serious consideration for meaningful matches. Sort of how Trapp and Bradley did earlier in the cycle.
Right now, it's: Adrian Mariappa Alvas Powell Oniel Fisher Wes Harding Javain Brown I think Duncan would definitely be able to compete for the starting spot among that group. There's enough existing depth, however, that he probably won't be pursued aggressively if at all (I don't think he's even been contacted yet, although his agent is a former Jamaica international so the topic has probably come up). If he's in the squad, probably, yes, although it'll depend a bit on his fitness given his extended break from club football.
most good teams i was on were on the edge of turmoil. good players tend to be aggressive and ambitious and at least some of them to have personalities along with it. most pleasant teams i played on were mediocre and soft. i kind of want a slightly selfish 9, an obnoxious 6 and backs who tackle their own grandmother studs up. i also feel like i am listening to a version of the "intangibles" arguments made in favor of the failed '18 cycle midfield which didn't have enough actual productive mids. i think 1G 1A Nagbe types are way overrated at that level. if you are depending on people who manage a goal a 34 game MLS season to set you up a few times in 6 games against better teams in an international tournament good freaking luck with that. and someone has to do that productive work to win games and lift trophies. to me the only mid who doesn't have to produce should be the 6 who produces in their own little way. we should not be consuming AM slots with players who don't do anything in particular very well and produce intangibles at best. and if the current career situations of the promising prospects leave unclear who those producers "are," you guess. you run out a few and find out which get it done. you don't grab your frustrating security blanket.
Yeah but T&T has totally imploded as well. They have a terrible relationship between players in fed if memory serves, and the team has been a total train wreck since Couva. They will not make the '22 or '26 WC's, meaning any WC Hail Mary for Moore would have to be with the USMNT. Moore will be 33 for WC '30, so I don't know man. I've always been aggressively pro-recruiting college style, but in this kind of case, I do agree w/the principle to some degree, just not the specific player. T&T is done for, period, for years and years, and by the time they might wake up, Moore will be close to retiring. I guess he could try to play for T&T for Gold Cups and Nations League stuff, but why would he want to leave Spain for that, to play for a horrible confederation that has zero chance of qualifying for a World Cup.
Those are his minutes from just this season. I have no dog in this particular fight, but I've seen people "search the googles" and post about it here a few times since this roster was released and be wrong about the basics. Still, Lewis is a confounding selection.
fwiw i swear that after bringing in bradley as the leadership slot in GC 19 what we actually found was he hurt us on the field and was aloof with the team. i mean, shouldn't the test on leadership or locker room guy be did he make that last tournament any better than it should have been? they had roldan before, he had no field impact coming on as a supersub and we finished second. the team did not seem inspired by his presence.
Lewis is there for raw speed off the bench. Period. He has 2G 2A in 7 caps which is more productive than others attracting less debate. I think some people think about soccer like you want a bunch of players of similar technical type but to me a good soccer team needs a mix of attributes. You just saw in the difference between Swiss/NL and CR the difference sheer speed can make. This is a rare instance when GB "gets it" and works towards formulating a 23 man team suited to roles as opposed to an all star team of club form players pleasing to meritocrats. Lewis is the guy you throw on late in a tight game to create chaos and see if you find another goal. And you don't need to know his club form when he has 2G 2A in 7 caps. His little niche is already proven. He's on the B team because he's sloppy and can't even start club. But the A team should have a better version of the same player in case they have someone who can mark Pulisic or Reyna but not match up on speed.
Such a strange conversation. I like the player. He was in the mix under Sarachan. It was befuddling he wasn't for GB. GB calls him and y'all want him to turn it down for TnT who just got eliminated. That is not even a decision. That's like a convoluted way of questioning the roster choice in cuter language. The operative part of "he shouldn't be called on merit and thus should have been left alone to commit to Trinidad" is really the first half. The second half of that sentence, the ethical argument, assumes perfect knowledge and the value of club form proxies when to me until they play international ball we know precisely squat definitively. We don't know what we're getting so we call them in and see. So we can't possibly be undertaking some cynical but perfectly informed strategy to call bad players to deny them to Trinidad, who we just got through clobbering in such a way we should have been arrested for assault and battery. To me the more jacked up part is among the available options it's him and Pines and such and not CCV EPB Richards Reynolds. You have played your cards all wrong if those 4 are in neither of your camps and this is what the B team ends up like.
Every team will have someone who is a relative weak link. No team fields 11 guys all of the same quality. And there will always be debates over who should be there. Even if we're winning. Did you not want to an answer my other questions? It's all well and good to say you want an evaluation on the field; but I think it is pretty relevant what that actually means.
I agree with this. Some guys will rise and others will fall. This is a great opportunity for all of these guys for a fair shot at Qualifying and to remain in the picture for the World Cup. Remember everyone…the period of “let’s see this young guy get some burn and evaluate him” is over. I don’t know if you all realize it but we are NOW PREPARING FOR THE WORLD CUP! The World Cup in Qatar is NEXT YEAR.
If Tata can’t push down the rising USMNT during the Gold Cup, he’s gone. The worst fear in Mexico, that is now bubbling up all over the place again, is that the gringos and Dos A Cero are on their way back. That cannot be tolerated.
In the case of Zardes it's probably more like "We know what you've done before, and we liked it, but don't think it's good enough for regular calls in a top-strength squad. It's been a good while since we've seen you--can you still perform at that level for if/when we need it?"
It's not "du jour" when the same folks have been stressing the importance for years. "Du jour" means--literally-- "of the day". As in soup du jour or, more broadly and related to this website (and explicitly not "du jour") "Yanks abroad (or MLS) flavors of the week".
The one thing I don't want to see happen is Berhalter letting players in the 23 man squad go if they sign for new clubs during the tournament. Bob Bradley let 4 players do that in 2009 and it led to disaster. In retrospect, I think it was his biggest failure as manager, because you don't want to leave the weaker players vulnerable to get stomped 5-0 in a final. It's a scenario that could re-create itself because you have multiple players in this team with European interest (particularly Dike, and possibly a few others like Cannon and Busio).
Well, we've called Moore up for friendlies first. And he must know where he is in the pecking order. At some point it is on the player.