Yeah, well, it's all we've heard thus far. Meyers seems too preoccupied tweeting about OSU women's basketball to follow up.
You act like Meyers is intentionally dissing the Crew by doing, oh, you know, his f***ing JOB that his bosses pay him to do. Look, I'm not going to defend some of the puff pieces that he's done, but holy christ.... the women's bb team is literally in the final 16 of all the programs in the country. Don't like the fact that Myers has to split time between Crew, OSUWBB, and god knows what else, then pickup a subscription to the Dispatch and interact more with the online articles. I guarantee you that the powers that be at Gannett or whoever the hell owns the Dispatch now see those clicks on the Crew articles and sees the clicks on Clippers articles or OSU Handegg articles and rank them. For FFS we have to get over ourselves sometimes.
He annoys me because he routinely seems incapable of understanding what he should be reporting on when he actually has the time to do so. In the Dispatch's Crew podcast last week he seemed unquestioning of Porter's belief that Berry was now Zardes' replacement. As if, hell, the guy scored some nice goals in limited service last season, so why question the head coach's decision to bench a USMNT player? Except that it's the reporter's role to question that kind of stuff. To understand that all most Crew fans want to know right now is LZ's status. Or even the mysterious disappearance of Diaz from the bench earlier this season. Several people on Twitter asked him about it. But it was the kind of obvious absence that should have jumped out to him, and that he should have asked Porter about post-game. Myers just seems like a not terribly well-informed (about soccer) or curious/questioning reporter, which makes the stuff he writes about the Crew rarely worth the time to read.
I can see giving him some leeway about Lucas since it is only 48 hours after the game ended. I do think his team coverage criticism is warranted though. His Dispatch Preview had Zardes in the Projected Starting XI. When the team released the actual starting lineup he retweeted and said "Same group, as expected" My question as to why the change of opinion went unanswered.
If tOSU's second string punter got a hangnail the Dispatch would be on the athletic dept 24/7 for real time updates.
No grouchy point for me or any of us Columbus Crew announces Lucas Zelarayan will miss 1-2 weeks with a right knee injury.A relief for #Crew96 he won’t miss more than a game or two.— Jacob Myers (@_jcmyers) March 23, 2022 We are signing a 10 for the next game...
So is this 1-2 week from now or 1-2 weeks of games? Seeing as it is pretty much 2 weeks to the next game as it is... I'm still seeing the Z doesn't want to go to Armenia right now argument as potentially valid...
Also, in the Porterverse, 1-2 weeks, sometimes means 3-4 weeks. At the very least, if he has to stay off the knee for 2 weeks, that means he presumably misses the 4/2 match and effectively (in terms of what fans see) equates to being out 3 weeks, being that earliest we'll see him play is 4/9 at Philly. Anyway, very good news. In 2008, Guille was hurt on an off for what was it, 8-10 games? Our PPG record without him that season was actually higher than when he played. It wouldn't be bad for the team to know LZ is out 4/2 and for Porter to be forced to approach that match differently. Does Matan get the start? Do we come out with a different tactical alignment? Does no LZ mean that Zardes finally gets a start?
If he misses the April 2nd game at least we will have another Argentine Playmaker on a one day in house...
If this turns out to be true, and this is just a relatively minor injury with no significant lasting effects, it is a great relief. We should be celebrating, after how bad it initially looked.
Yeah, wasn’t Artur due to come back basically for all of 2021 until it was announced out of nowhere that he’d had another surgery?
I refer people to this post by @LaMacchia in which he replied to a post I made about how media ask softball questions because they don't want their credentials yanked. It sucks, but it's the reality. ------- There's certainly been a lot of new Crew fans recently. Some of you may not remember a site called Hunt Park Insider. IIRC, it was started partially because of a perceived lack of criticism by the previously-existing media. For whatever reason(s), it didn't stick around. But yeah, people are more than welcome to start their own outlets.
But Slovenia is kicking ass in bike racing. Pogacar and Roglic are arguably the two greatest bike racers in the game today and, last week, Matej Mohoric won the first one day cycling classic of the season, Milano-Sanremo. And another Slovenian finished top ten.
HPI collapsed because I couldn't do it all myself and Fiddy didn't have any time. As for your first point, during the recent Straight Red Card podcast I was on, the guys asked me about my old feud with Grant Wahl and what it was about. Basically, I was frustrated because I was trying like hell to get people to notice that Jack Warner, President of CONCACAF, was a straight up thief and nobody else would write about it despite the fact that I knew damn good and well that they knew. So I used to regularly take Ol' Grant out for a trip behind the woodshed and smack him around rhetorically and he didn't like it. So, as I told the guys, Grant called me one night to try and make nice. I spelled out my complaint, namely that he had a huge platform and had an obligation to tell American audiences what Andrew Jennings in Britain, Jens Wienrich in Germany and the utterly courageous Lasana Liburd in T&T were telling their readers about the massive corruption, graft and bribery that was going on more or less out in the open. He didn't deny that he too knew all about it, but he patiently explained that the problem was that I didn't "understand the realities of modern sports journalism". By which he meant, as you say, if he wrote that stuff, he'd lose his access. He'd stop getting media credentials to tournaments and pressers and otherwise get frozen out by the people he felt he needed to talk to. I replied that a) nobody really needs to sit in a press box to watch and report on a game, b) the US team would never cut him off, he worked for SI, and if he couldn't get into the Jamaica locker room he wasn't missing much and c) it was the right thing to do. He was very put out that I didn't see it his way. But I fear that mentality drives a lot of reporters to hide from truths they out to be reporting. My contention is that if everybody just started reporting honestly, they can't lock them all out.
Apparently LZ is out 4-6 weeks according to the Armenian national team. Meyers is all over it, don’t worry!!
Feliz Cumpleaños, Mago 🪄#Crew96 | #VamosColumbus pic.twitter.com/ppnGptHWko— The Crew (@ColumbusCrew) June 20, 2022 Dude is 30? So oooooold.
MLS Skills Challenge Last night featured Z's highlights from last year. Both Liga MX and MLS All Stars consistently looked talentless last night to the point that Twellman (I think it was him) lamented that Lucas broke all the records last year and then wasn't invited back. Don't get me wrong - I'm glad he's not there so he can catch a little bit of a break and not get hurt... But as semi-entertaining as the skills challenge was last night... it was particularly underwhelming in terms of actual... you know... skills...
To do a skills contest with players from fringe top 10 leagues worldwide seems like a bad idea to begin with.
I'm just salty they have no events which showcase Nagbe's talents. Next year there needs to be a "Pass Lazily Backwards" competition. Has there ever been an all-star midfielder with 0 assists?
Data via https://fbref.com/en/players/6219c704/scout/365_mls/Darlington-Nagbe-Scouting-Report Passing Accuracy 92.5% (Top 99th percentile of the league!) Passes Completed (Per 90) - 48.53 (77th Percentile of the league) Total Passing Distance (In Yards Per 90) - 937.2 Yards! He's A Monster Until you consider the other stats relating to his passing... Progressive Passing Distance (Passes, in yards per game, TOWARD the opponents Goal) - 176.2 yards yeah... less than 20% of his passes are forward... Key Passes (Passes per game that lead directly to a shot) - 0.72 per game - WOW! Zero Assists this year And here folks is probably the most telling stat of all if you want to defend this guy Don't get me wrong... Nagbe is a key part of our team... But his passing stats are wildly inflated by the fact that he keeps the ball on the ground playing predominantly short balls back toward our defensive line.