what is there to understand you got 45 seconds to start a play they can move all they want to confuse or what ever but still you got to snap the ball in 45 seconds.so basicly is not a strategy or tactics but who can confuse who better lol
@BOSNAINTER, my level of understanding of the intricacies of American Football (i.e. NFL) is as good as yours. I also don't care for the sport. But what NFL strategy or tactics and Ted Lasso have to do with actual real life American soccer coaches is beyond me. Gregg Berhalter is not and American Football coach that accidentally started coaching soccer. He had an extensive career as a professional player, mostly in Germany and the Netherlands, and was on two World Cup squads.
I hate watching American football to be honest, but it is absolutely a strategically complex game. In fact, one of the reasons I don't like the game is it is so highly choreographed with very specific movements for each individual player that it takes the fun out of it and relies too much on coaches crafting detailed strategies than players making decisions for my tastes. Go look at the sheer volume of plays a typical American Football team has to memorize, each with their own specific requirements. The constant huddles and stoppages allow teams to reset to a fresh starting spot that allows for entirely new patterns and formations for each play as the coach's desire. At a high level it is far from simple. Soccer flows too much to allow for similar complexity being more free-flowing with constant movement. You can't create overly detailed plays from an infinite number of positions on a soccer field the way you can from a set starting point for each play like in American football. Like said earlier, soccer is more comparable to basketball than football by a lot. Friends I know who play basketball grasp soccer's movement and spacing much more quickly than American football guys. I actually figured that was at the heart of why basketball has been much more successfully exported than American football.
There is another layer to this. Williamson is an elite pressing CM (at least in MLS). It isn't that the team is pressing, it is the overly complicated pressing scheme. Teams all over the world press, most Top 5 teams press in some way. But it does seem the way Berhalter has them pressing is very different than many clubs do it. Why? I can't imagine the scheme is more important than the players. Having Adams, Weah, McKennie in any pressing scheme against Panama should work. But Lletget is not an elite presser, at least not near Williamson. So, is Lletget in the Berhalter system better than Williamson in a more understandable system? I doubt it.
I don’t think Berhalter has them pressing much differently then one would do at the club level. I think the difference is at the club level you get alot more time together to make the the press work. Williamson skill set fits pressing, but Portland is not a team that presses very much. There’s plenty of advanced stats on pressing and there’s a ton a variety in terms of how often different teams press. I agree that Williamson is a better fit then Lletget for a more pressing system. And that’s probably why Williamson started the Gold Cup final. And one of the things you’ve seen is that as we’ve moved more towards this system, Lletget has been playing less and less. And for all we know Williamson would have been getting ample playing time in qualifying. But he’s been injured the whole time so it’s impossible to know.
If you have your eyes open, you can learn from many things that being said, I only said there are similarities. There are more between soccer and basketball, or soccer and hockey.
To me soccer is way more similar to hockey than basketball. Sure basketball has lots of fluid movement but they also resort to just clearing out a side when they get a mismatch and let that guy go one on one. And talk about BORING. No sport should have the last 2 minutes of a game take 30 clock minutes.....lol
My personal belief is that the differences (for both) are smaller than the similarities. For sure, there are obvious differences regardless of which you choose. One obvious similarity between soccer and Hockey that basketball doesn't have is a goalie. but both utilize dribbling to advance the ball or puck with the intention of breaking lines, going directly to goal (or hoop) or drawing player(s) to lay off a pass. both have to deal with packed defenses where they must be able to create openings through ball (puck) movement.....side to side, create a gap or opeining. Which is MORE like soccer.....I don't know, but there are surely many, many similarities. the footwork used by defenders in Basketball is the same as defenders in Soccer (and very similar to football it seems). A football defense is faced with similar patterns to those faced by defenses in soccer, hockey and basketball....crossing patterns, diagonal movement, verticality etc. A counter attack in soccer exists in basketball and soccer. The way you clear space, or create space is similar in all the sports. The differences are more subtle, but the big ideas are very much the same imo. I do agree, however, that one of the biggest differences is reated to hte numbers on the court and siz of the court. It allows a single player to have an outsized impact on the game.
There is a similarity between association football and gridiron is that 150 years ago they were the same game. The first intercollegiate game of football in 1869 was played under English Football Association rules.
Why would a manager of an international team try to press like one would at a club level when there is not enough time together to make such a press work. Astute readers will realize that one could substitute press with any complex, very-coordinated, tactical element and the question remains the same.
Our best match of this cycle imo was the qualifier against Mexico and we pressed them off the field in the second half.
Did we press like a club squad or like an international squad? Was it high pressure or high press, there is a distinct difference. The SUI goal is what happens when you fail to coordinate a complicated high press/counter-press scheme. Starts at 1:20 but this clip cuts off the first part of the sequence which starts with the Yueill dive-in.
Not to mention the requirements of each position, lol, it's absurd. There's a reason they used to say it took 3 years for a QB or a WR to break out. It was damn near impossible to be productive early on due to the complexity of the game and the only reason those factors have changed is rule changes that were passed 15 years ago to protect QB's and WR's and ramp up scoring after the Colts complained about losing to the Patriots for the billionth time in a row (that was the WR part anyway). Again, there's a reason that Quarterback is considered by just about everyone the single most difficult position to succeed at in any professional sport period, especially pre-protection changes in the 1990's, and especially 1980's and earlier (take a look at clips of what the Steelers, Raiders and Bears did to Quarterbacks before protections were brought in in the 70's and 80's etc). If anything, the game is too complex and too sophisticated these days, it's anything but simple.
I don't disagree with anything you say. We are having issues on the ball in the attack. Not really the press. Some, though, have come out attacking the press specifically when, IMO and maybe not yours, it has been the most improved and successful area.
For a guy who doesn't have any "fans", there are a lot of folks who continuously jump to his defense. It appears that you are setting the bar for criticism at something that is obvious to all with 100% certainty. That seems a bit high dont you think? You don't think a few upgrades to players couldn't make a big difference in the team? I also see that he has additional information that we dont. What is that information? Is he using it correctly? Is it really hindsight if some US saw that Roldan wasn't good enough after his 3rd cap? You are the second one who seems to aith in Berhalter so I will ask you the same questions I asked @dlokteff What decisions has Berhalter made that make you think he has a good handle of this pool? Is your trust of him just blind or have you seen him make selections that were clearly right down the road? How do you explain all the guys he has played over and over and then ultimate failing so bad that he had no choice to drop them?
I definitely think there some on here that would disagree me no matter what I wrote. Not sure why you think those two things are mutually exclusive. Also, not sure the last guy I quoted was disagreeing with me because he was talking about specific names and I was talking about the principles used to select players. BTW, did you ever figure out why we were discussing Adams the other day?
That's because most of your posts amount to "another reason why Gregg sucks." In many cases the specific points you make are not researched and very flawed. When people point this out you dismiss them as shills. You said that Greg wasn't integrating young players quickly enough. Adams was given as an example. Adams was fully integrated by the Fall of 2018 but missed most of the first half most of 2019 through injury.
I understand the distinction. Most of the second half of the Mexico qualifier was played in Mexico's end of the field.
You guys never try to understand what people are saying. Your posts in this discussion are so far off base. I am not sure I have ever said Berhalter sucks and pretty much every post on the topic is "another reason or example why his player selection sucks". I dont think I commented on anything else about him because I can't really tell how he is doing because he gets the players so wrong. I havent seen anything to suggest what I have actually said is flawed. I most certainly didn't use Adams as an example. Given that I have politely suggested you go back and read the whole discussion, I am going to suggest that you are purposefully misrepresenting me.
I'm not sure who is attacking the press but lets be clear that I am not in that camp. In fact, if you go back to the beginning of GB's tenure, even in this thread I was one of the early vocal advocates that a high pressure/high intensity scheme was ideal for our emerging player pool.
big sky I have said this before and I'll try it again. Name me ONE player who was left off a roster where there wasn't an obvious reason for Berhalter doing so. Just one. We can discuss all day long if choice A would have been better than choice B. But to just say Choice A is clearly the correct answer and that there was no logic to calling in player B is just wrong. And no I am not a Berhalter can do no wrong. I about threw my beer at the tv in the home match against Canada when we got ahead and he didn't sub immediately.