Yeah, Acosta was a mess last night both sides of the ball. I was pretty surprised he wasn't subbed out. Of course there were probably like 7 guys I would have subbed at half time given the chance. He had been playing reasonably decent leading up this game, so was indifferent to him starting, but no reason for him to stay on. If he was at least playing strong defense Adams could have played higher up when he came on, but he wasn't.
That’s a bit of a cop out. Berhalter has screwed up the midfield frequently, but there’s no ignoring the fact that we are really weak on depth at the 6. Busio got plenty of time at the gold cup, but didn’t really impress.
It's another case of valuing Yedlin's experience over the risk of DLT pulling a Lletget houdini act. I think we might have seen the last of the vets at this point. I don't know where you trust them to get a result if you prioritize home matches and then they do THAT away. The contrast is if the gameplan got away from us (Weah breaking our shape, Acosta progressing the ball), do we expect more youth to be better at keeping their heads and committing to a tactic? Thats a wild card IMO. My head thinks it can't be worse to throw out DLT and Hoppe but if they are renegades too then you end up with a team just as disjointed but with the fan base trashing young players instead of the vets. Tl/dr: its a problem when the players don't have the mentality to stick to a gameplan, either inexperience, ability or lack of belief. But I think Gregg's attempt to remedy that was experience at potential cost of ability.
Arriola is just the next in line of average MLS guys that Egg thinks are key players. Even the Berhalter Brigade has most of these guys identified correctly. They are all role players that can help if surrounded by better talent. That's the definition of Lletget. Same with Acosta. But Lletget had 20 games in a row. Now Acosta has 20 games in a row. Arriola is our 7th best winger at best, and just got 180 minutes. Everyone here agrees that these aren't starters or world beaters. The problem is Egg thinks they are, and his opinion is the only one that matters.
Good call. Weah's press was super weird yesterday. Such a head-against-brick-wall strategy, I hope it was instructed. Because if not, I have (many) questions about Weah.
Aidan Morris could have been useful if his progression had continued this year. Heck I'd take 2014 Beckerman as the backup 6. Hassan Dotson, Matt Polster. It's impossible to call everyone, but we consistently prioritize passing in midfield instead of ball winning and are worse off for it. How many pure ball winners got a chance to win the backup 6 job? Regardless, Acosta had done it defensively at the Azteca so he should be better than that. Makes me think again we were prepared to defend 3 ways (1) compact, (2) counter press in opponents half, and (3) by recycling possession. All three aspects broke for various reasons.
I agree about Busio, that he would have been pushed around in the middle in CCAF like Brenden, like one of the solutions many have in LDLT, the creator w/ a career total of 2 assists. But vis a vis Sands, and a lot of players, you're conveniently neglecting to acknowledge that he was used in such a daft manner by Berhalter, as he does w/ many players if you're being honest, after winning the gc w/ him playing what people acknowledged beforehand was his 3rd best position. You can't then say afterward, on these basis, that because of his play, he can't do x, y, and z. He wasn't allowed to. He answered pretty well after Berhalter added a 3rd cm in Honduras. Then he was left out. That's not building anything.
I'm not saying there is an easy answer or decision, but I would say part of the coaches job is the ability to evaluate talent and the ability to step back and look at the state of your roster at a strategic level. GGG has been in place long enough to expect this from him.
I thought we had figured out that if we want a lone 6, Adams is the only one capable and if he isn't available, we have to change things up. Guess not.
You are talking about the coach whose back up plan to the back up plan was Jackson Yueill long after even SJ fans realized he was cooked this year...
And that helped us win the Honduras match, instead of losing it, a 6-pt difference if we compete w/ Honduras for a spot. So it had benefits. In the first window we probably would have secured 2 more even from earlier subs, beating teams off depth, in part. It hasn't been more successful because we didn't use some of the players who beared fruit in the gc & others became injured. For what we could control, the gc was a more useful tool for us than our opponents. But they always have the built-in advantage of playing road matches for prep, while we enjoy the friendly confines.
im going to offer a different view of what went wrong just for fun. the starting 11 wasnt the problem. wasnt the problem. it was too much, obviously. too many worker bees. some of them had shockingly bad matches. but it was exactly what greggs done numerous times- put out a team to not lose and once we get to 60 minutes start the subs en masse to steal a point. thats the playbook. we can be surprised by how thoroughly he went "hustle over talent", but not that we started a team that clearly wasnt going to win as is. we were never going to score- thats not even the goal (no pun intended). the exceptions to that have been vines and moore getting fluky goals early in which case we could sub to hold a lead but the template is stay level, throw the kitchen sink at the tired legs of lesser talented teams late. what happened last night was a complete breakdown of that "proven" formula in not recognizing the real problems and subbing pretty close to the opposite of what was needed. at halftime look beyond the obvious. look past acosta and lletget and two of the three forwards (zardes and weah) having maybe 6 touches between them...ill repeat- scoring wasnt even the point. we were never going to score, so why be surprised we werent scoring? the one thing that was different between last night and any of the dozen or so 1-0/0-0 gregg specials was that mckenzie and bello obviously couldnt do the job. panama was pounding on the door. panama was going to score- that was plain to see. that was the real problem, not not scoring. and the solution was clear to anyone. miles robinson at the half puts "the plan" right back on track. then you can bring on adams, you bring on aaronson. but gregg even got that wrong in leaving acosta on. aaronson was pinned back trying to play two positions since acosta at the 8 is vacating a spot on the pitch. acostas defense wasnt good, but it wasnt the problem, so while obviously adams is an upgrade it was upgrading a much lower priority. it was an emt at a pretty grim car accident resetting a dislocated finger while the patient is unconscious and bleeding from the head. after robinson and adams ldlt and/or busio were necessary. everyone could see that we couldnt advance the ball to the halfway line, much less the attacking third. and it just got worse with each sub. gregg was so underwater he wasnt even on his own script anymore. yedlin for moore was stitching up a small cut on the patients forearm. hoppe for zardes, weah, lletget...literally anyone was the move. hes the single player we have who can advance the ball on his own. roldan and pepi for musah and weah didnt address anything. and its not even about roldan being garbage- its that it still doesnt address getting the ball into an attacking position (and being musah rather than lletget that came off actually compounded that problem)- hence bringing pepi on was completely pointless. if we had made those changes, to first and foremost keep priority number one according to the blueprint- a clean sheet- by fortifying the defense and then made purely attacking subs maybe we could have salvaged a point. it would be the same shitty odds we always have with berhalter, but hes been incredibly lucky so far. but its no guarantee, obviously. gregg simply didnt recognize the blatantly obvious fact that panama were going to put one past us if we didnt make a change. and he didnt. not the most obvious move to make even playing not to lose. especially playing not to lose. and then he completely lost the plot. we very expectedly conceded and every sub we made only made it less likely to score (while still not addressing the defense somehow). he just kept digging and digging. thats where i am right now. i dont believe the starting 11 or the position they had us in at the half were unrecoverable. its a shitty position, and one many of us have been saying for months is a completely unnecessary gamble and fundamentally unsound way to build a team around but hey- two trophies, right? but i dont know that last night was much of a departure from the position weve been in multiple half times before now. it was def a lot uglier- but not worse. but from that point it was simply coaching malpractice. he got away from his own principles. he didnt recognize the foundation, the only reason he can get away with his gameplan in the first place is keeping the ball out of our net. from there he can throw on attacker after attacker and hope something sticks. thats why im not interested in this blanket rejection of mls/role players. arriola is exactly the same player who did very well for us four days ago. zardes is still the only forward we have who is capable of all the things a forward is supposed to do- even if he sucks at a few of them. we are all aware that acostas deal with the devil to get back into the team was a complete and uncompromising defense for offense switch- he hasnt completed a pass this calendar year. how could anyone be surprised by that? they are tools who can be useful, but require a craftsman. the problem- THE PROBLEM- is we dont have a craftsman. gregg is the biggest tool of them all.
So far we are at 4 points from 2 home games. And 4 points from 3 road games. So basically -2 at home but +1 on the road. If we beat Jamaica away we are in good shape. Would he nice to give ourselves more margin for error. I think the January window will be strange with MLS out of season we will probably see an extended camp. Might not be a bad thing.
I've said it before. In a way, I would be ok with not qualifying. That is the only thing that is going to get Berhalter fired, and we need a real manager for 2026. If we squeak into Qatar and get hammered in all three matches, Berhalter will be our manager in 2026 - which would be a travesty. So, I'm watching the quallies with mild indifference.
and thats the problem. youre happy to throw a lot out players under the bus but need a notarized guarantee of betterness to entertain the very thought of replacing an utterly neutral lletget. and we get it- you said he was bad...you just dont want to do anything about it. advancing the ball half the time and losing it the other half is exactly the same as doing nothing with the ball 100% of the time. why would anyone expect you admit ldlt may be better than lletget when you maintain musah and reyna arent "guaranteed" to be?
Well I would never be ok with not qualifying, but there is one important aspect here that is never really mentioned because it's an overall point. And that is that our coaching pool is not advancing at the rate of our player pool. What makes it worse is that all our best, promising coaches would be better served continuing their club career before making the leap to international coaching. This is actually a big problem (clearly so after awful performances like last night) and why I want to see us start going after better international coaches. Which of course not going to happen because USSF is so poor they are begging for donations for YNT camps. We are actually in trouble here.
There’s no way Berhalter will be the manager for 2026 if we make it to the World Cup and fail to make it out of the group. And personally I’d be pretty devastated if we once again failed to make it to the World Cup.
If the gamelan is to recycle the ball and Lletget is the only one trying to follow the plan when everyone else panics it looks bad. I think he needed to adjust and start organizing the offense to effectively win second balls after hoofing it. Its on Gregg to prepare the team with a good gameplan, but the players also have to commit to it (this can also be Gregg's fault if they lacked buy-in for the gold cup 'aimless keep away until opponent is tired' strategy). I think we lacked composure and the gameplan got thrown out by the players on the field early on and Lletget was trying to settle the game back into the original plan, to no avail. Honestly opportunistic bunker counter and compact defense would have been a challenge for Panama to score on. They barely created much against a broken defensive scheme. I think Weah went off script pressing and Acosta/McKenzie getting cold feet in possession just blew it up.
Or, we could just not call up and play half the squad out of season when we have plenty of players who will be in mid season form, especially when those players represent the top players in the pool anyway.
Many fans were misled about Berhalter after he “managed” to coach his way to 2 successes prior to qualifiers. But I knew those tournaments in no way reflected his and the players’ performance in the hex. From the beginning I knew that the nepotistically appointed Berhalter was going to fail to qualify. He’s not going to make it to Qatar. Then we have the problem that the USSF is clueless and will never hire an appropriate, skilled coach.