Tactical malaise, inexperience and, poor mentality. Yesterday was the trifecta and for as bad as we looked, it was a tossup, ugly match.
Could be the case. It looked like we wanted to do both, counterpress and then hold the ball. And when we couldn't win it back quickly we were supposed to shrink the field (this is where the pressing triggers might have been poorly executed).
Central American qualifiers are where the rubber hits the real road. You can throw out all those deceptive friendly wins. They don't add up to a plate of frijoles down south. You better be on your game or you will get thrown to the lions. It takes a particular competitive player who relishes a tough challenge. It also takes a coach who knows what buttons to push and knows who has the right stuff. Honestly, I'm seeing that less and less over the last 20 years, both players and coaches.
He's defending his league. It was the teenagers (all 3 of them) from Bundesliga that lost in T&T. Not incompetent coaching (strikes again) or dead weight Bradley and friends.
Aaronson came on because we had absolutely no creativity in attack and he was the best option for that. Bringing Adams to shore up DM was the right idea, but moving Acosta to CM instead out of the game, was not.
Perhaps. That's a read. I guess I read it as inconsistent effort, even up top. Arriola pressed hard, Zardes largely jogged and Weah reacted late then often overpursued. Just a mess. But I'm not nearly enough of an expert to tell what the plan was when that chaos is occurring.
One of the weirdest things in that Couva game is the way Bradley encroached on the area that was supposedly Pulisic's. If you guys re-watch, look at how many times Mike gets in the way when a ball was directed to Puli. It's almost as if those two were not in speaking terms.
He had to take someone out and Musah was the guy out of position time and again. I guess Berhalter thought leaving the tired Acosta to cover that side was better than keeping Musah there. Neither option was good. He should have subbed both but that'd have been three subs. PS: There's a rumor that Musah was injured, btw.
I saw the rumor from someone supposedly ITK about Musah's injury in the morning, on Twitter, but can't find it. CBS seems to have picked on it, though, for their ratings: https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/ne...-team-struggles-in-shocking-defeat-at-panama/ Yunus Musah 4 Was kind of alone in the middle and couldn't get into space and cause any danger. Also looked as if he was a step slow, perhaps dealing with a knock. Came off at the break.
Would've added Torre or Busio to add creativity. Aaronson is more trigger-puller than creative player.
You forgot to add that Julian Green is a slow, below average Bundesliga midfielder, with a terrible understanding of the game and who has no claim to a Nats call up.
That would actually be a fumy parody of a soccer player, unfortunately it is real and happens on a consistent basis.
Not rotating in new starters does not mean run Adams, Aaronson, Pepi etc a full 90 the next match. In Adam's case he didn't go 90 vs Jamaica either. How about starting the guys who subbed off early so that at the very least they can help the team get off to a better start rather than allow Panama to build momentum from the jump until it became almost a certainty that eventually they would score. Instead those guys were brought on to try and stop a fire and save the game.
Yeah, there were like 7 guys that should have been subbed out, but only 5 subs go around. Lletget was awful, but I can see he wasn't one of the 5. I'd probably kept Weah and dropped Acosta, might have the worst out there last night, although there were several of options for that title. It was a really poor starting lineup.
Lletget messed up the reception of that ball. That bad second touch forced him to retreat. Lletget and Zardes don't have the ball control for the international game.
When players all over the pitch are losing duels and and getting beaten to 50/50 balls, then there's an intensity problem. I don't mind if you pin that at least partly on coaching; I believe the team was not prepared for the game that was played, but rather for they game that Berhalter mistakenly thought Panama was going to play, and if so, that was costly. Nevertheless, we were as bad in the second half as we were in the first, and it wasn't all tactical. We were out-competed.
Yeah, I have to wonder why the evil MLS agenda didn’t apply to the Nations League final (only one MLS starter), while it did against Panama. Seems pretty random in its implementation.