You should absolutely not always be in the center of goal. I'm not saying that. And a keeper must always move their feet. Movement is the essence of goalkeeping. Of course, it was a goalkeeper mistake, everyone sees that. But with that acute angle and a covering player, I'm thinking cross, not shot. And that's why I stay center, but turned toward the ball. You move to cut off angles and shrink the target, but players can always go near post or far post. Do you see what happens in this clip when you go too far on the ball side? Clint Dempsey floats it far post. That's why you don't overcommit, but you can cheat a little to one side. The modern players are much better at finding the far post than they were 20, 30, 40 years ago. The curving far post shot is so common these days. Clarin's shot was an easy floater. It should have been no problem, but Horvath froze. This is no "near post Tony Meola" mistake. This is a player who did not react to the ball. He was hypnotized. Now look at Chiesa's goal against Spain.
I don't accept the premise that a "perfect" midfield couple is having one who likes to go forward and another who is first and foremost a defender. A complimentary duo doesn't necessarily produce results. It just means they compliment each other in a certain aspect or moment of play or on a certain part of the pitch. There are eight other field players who need to be incorporated into a cohesive unit. I don't think you can view an individual player's value to a side through only a two-person optic. Whether Adams brings optimal value to a side should depend on our lineup, tactics and opponent.
Than I've missed it. I also hoped that Horvath is passed that stage. SJ scares me, he always waits for the worst moment to make a huge error. Without those critical moments he is great. It's probably too late to get Frei who is great at critical moments and just good otherwise on the team.
i think the thing is, until this window, you could really look at adams as part of the defense as much (if not more) than the midfield. i disagree with the characterization (not yours, speaking in general) of how weve played this window as a double pivot because thats a specific partnership of shared/alternating/interchanging responsibilities between two cms (with one or more cms ahead of them)- what weve done is drop musah/one of our 8s deeper. that doesnt fundamentally change anything other than spacing. adams' function, though, changes substantially. hes not starting a lot higher but he is starting off wider and (more importantly) not dropping into the backline. that raises two big questions- is adams better suited playing as more of a "true" cm rather than a vaguely hybrid dm/cb, and how does that affect the defense? i would say definitely not and negatively. even with miles and zim we didnt have close to an elite cb pair- but with adams i think we had a close to an elite defense (and yall, dont get hung up on the word elite). the tradeoff to get an offensive cm by having the other two play (or one more in our case) deeper isnt a binary choice, its simply how berhalter has gone. i think two of mckennie/musah/ldlt in those two deeper positions are, in how weve set up, as viable as adams. i think it even gives a little more value to acosta in not exposing us to his necessarily being on the ball as much as when hes been played as an 8 previously. i think it devalues adams (and it being imperative to have him on the pitch) quite a bit, and i think it exposes our defense (now without our "best" cb pairing available). the problem is while that certainly improves our overall offensive ability (primarily our movement individually and as a team/offensive unit) we still dont have a finisher. we are still score by committee. so is that tradeoff (as implemented by berhalter in this window) worth it? sacrificing the biggest strength of the team to this point (its defense) for improved offensive threat, but not necessarily scoring? again, imo- no, its really not. i think the "answer" is right in the middle- i think we should keep adams' role the same (as before this camp), as our de facto fifth defender sitting on top of the backline. i dont believe the addition of aaronson/reyna to the cm necessitates that change in shape/role for the other two cms. i think for berhalter he sees a very clear separation between "offensive" and "defensive" players- in particular not trusting aaronson/reyna to fulfill that "dual 8" role defensively ahead of adams/acosta. i think they can. a couple or three dortmund managers do as well, re reyna. i do think aaronson makes us a bit "softer" in the middle (strictly defensively speaking), but thats not factoring in pressing and coverage. i dont know why anyone would doubt aaronsons willingness/ability to put in the work. the big disconnect is we dont really create turnovers in the middle with tackling, even with mma- its in relentless pressure. jesus (no pun intended), we even dedicate most of our strikers role to working back to that same end. to finally sum up i dont think adding offense to the cm requires foundational change while berhalter seemingly does. i think this dropping one of the 8s deeper- which in turn lessens adams' positioning/ability to cover and drop into the backline- is paying a tax no one levied. its too precious. as they say in 'remember the titans', "youre overcooking my grits, coach".
I saw a photo floating around on twitter of when the shot was taken. The ad board behind the shot was white. Ball was white. Could have contributed to how quickly he was able to pick up on the spin/trajectory of the ball. By the time he could register what the ball was doing it was too late. Positioning doesn't look good in the photo. But I don't know how keepers are trained to position themselves in that situation. Larin said he was attempting to cross the ball, not shoot it. thoughts on horvath cuttin down the angles? pic.twitter.com/XTubDs1yRL— RGF (@rgfray1) June 15, 2022
My take from this match. 1. So the field sucked as did the ref. Some say can't take anything from this match to which I say nonsense. If nothing else what you saw was that this team has a ton of heart and love to play for each other. This will go a long ways toward getting them out of group play come Qatar. 2. Ok Arriola maybe didn't have the best game against ES. But give him a break. There is no freaking way that is a straight red. Horrific call. 3. Morris just give all he has and he is one guy who does actually finish on occassio 4. Sorry but Wright is out for me. Don't care how he plays for his club. The position requires a lot of effort and he just didn't give it. Team looked so much better with Ferreira in the middle compared to Wright. 5. Musah was MOTM for me. And he is starting to recognize when he has beat enough on the dribble that there is an opening for a teammate and to give the ball up. Well done kid!!!!!
Thanks. The reason I ask is that just pointing to xg as to the GK seems misleading. Most shots at that acute angle aren't going to be great shots. This shot (accidentally apparently) was in a good place and clipped the cross bar as it went in. So while shots from there may be .02 xg, that particular shot seems to me to have a much higher real xg. (Seems to me that xg is more suited to evaluate efficacy of shooters than GKs; while a a larger sample could be meaningful for keepers, still could be misleading if GKs are in appreciably different quality leagues). I'm not arguing Horvath played this well--I'm with those who thing he was too much playing for the cross and not protecting the goal, though I agree with those that say he should be conscious from that location that a cross is the most likely event. I'm a bit ambivalent about the "he didn't even move" argument--with his spacing, I think by the time he picked up where the ball was going it was too late. Whether he could have got there if he was in what I think was a better position is impossible to say. (And to the extent he could see the kick, which is debatable, if the kicker was trying to cross, reading his body language would have reinforced the expectation of a cross and further frozen him till he could read the ball.) (And I have some sympathy for the mud. It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but anyone who thinks it doesn't matter has never played GK in the mud. I played GK in a HS game on a field that was a bit worse than this one. I gave up a goal over my head (rare for me with my height) when I jumped for the ball and my feet literally stuck in the mud and I didn't get off the ground. Again, not a free ticket for Horvath, but it is a real issue for a GK to deal with and it looked like the mud in the GA was bad enough it could have an effect. And somehow I doubt pro GKs practice in those conditions.)
Why is that? Teams have been able to counterattack fairly consistent due to the US losing shape. Now, you could say that we either have been lucky that they were poor at converting (see Morocco) or we did a good job defending. I think that we did "run around" and lose shape against El Salvador...at least early on. They just didn't convert their chances.
Our shape was awful against El Salvador in the first half. This is because we played with something very close to a flat front 4 with Aaronson pushing way up. It looked like the old empty bucket to me. The result was El Salvador getting to most of the second balls in the first half. Second half was different because Aaronson was subbed out and both Ferreira and McKennie have a natural tendency to fill in the space to win those second balls.
xG should not take in to account the quality of the shot or where it's directed. That's not it's point. The whole point is that only 1 of 50 shots attempted from that location will go in. I would think that if this was xG is by definition not supposed to take shot quality in to account. The idea is to nail down where is the best position to shoot from and who are the players that set up those situations better than others. There are a very few players that will shoot better than xG over long periods of time so we usually don't care about that either. All this to say, Larin wasn't in a good position to shoot and he admitted that he wasn't trying to score. I don't think it's a big deal that Horvath didn't position himself to cover near post because that would leave open a lot of territory for the true danger play in that situation: a cross to the back post. At most we can say that his reaction wasn't great. Given the amount of mud at his feet I believe that his own body felt that he couldn't make it there and didn't want to try.
Adams doesn't like other midfielders. He seems to like Musah like a kid brother. This has been a big relief for me watching these games.
He just has very set ideas about how to play and his role. On the positive side, you can see him helping out here (click on twitter link) https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/best-11-right-now.2088273/page-406#post-40559222
This team got that dawg in em. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/PhtuGaXo4h— USMNT Otaku 🇺🇸 (@USMNTOtaku) June 16, 2022
Actually, it seems that even Musah was higher* than Aaronson as was Weah, Pulisic, Wright James Nalton on Twitter: "Tidy average positions from the #USMNT last night, even on a muddy pitch, but the pass map shows the lack of service to Haji Wright ⚽️ https://t.co/PFaVbibxNm" / Twitter *Caveat: I think it was Side foot sitter who used to go ballistic when people refered to these passing charts as "average positions".
One of the weirdest goals I have ever seen. I enjoy the back-and-fort banter about this. There are many "angles" to this play (no pun intended). Horvath wins the "deer in headlights" award, and Clarin wins the "fluke goal" award.
I think more likely than us joining CONMEBOL, is you might in the future see some sort of split within FIFA. You saw the tension between UEFA and FIFA when FIFA tried to jam through an everyone two years World Cup, and more broadly UEFA and CONMEBOL are very much building that relationship. If a split ever comes, it's very likely the North American countries would be invited to join just because of the size of our market. And it's also the case that US Soccer and Infantino seem to be a bit at odds as of late. Specifically Infantino is upset that US Soccer did not bring back Cordeiro as President, and also apparently upset at Garber for not engineering such a result. Infantino gave a somewhat provocative interview that touches on some of this tension. https://milkeninstitute.org/video/gianni-infantino-fifa-president
you bring up a good point- horvath has resting deer-in-the-headlights face. even after he yanked guardados soul out of his body on live tv he looked like he was going to cry if he didnt get to apologize to someone.
We're not far from being on the same page...it comes down to an assessment of gain/loss with an offense-less Adams OR a defense-less Adams. Which one of those scenarios is the lesser of two configurations? Based on our anemic lack of offense, I don't think a stay home Adams is always going to be the best choice.
W right could have done better but he was set up to "fail' this window, esp. in this match. 3Gs clearly has his guy picked out.