Juvechelsea,…your problem isn’t that you have good ideas. Sometimes you do (though your constant negativity and player/GM/Coach bashing is difficult to take.) It’s that you seem oblivious to how your long and frequent postings and your chest puffing impact this forum. You smother all differing ideas and opinions with your excessively long, multiple posts, effectively turning this community forum into your own blogpost,...which it is not. And because we're just fans, your excessive postings aren't going to change the roster, the coach, formations, transfers, or new player acquisitions,... no matter how many times you try to beat it into OUR heads. So, please heed your fellow Dynamo fans' requests for less frequent, more concise postings that will make us want to read your posts. Otherwise, you'll risk further muting and then nobody will read your opinions. And,...since you have so much to say, and vast experience and soccer knowledge, maybe you should set up a meeting with Pat or Asher. Or write them a letter. I'm sure they'd welcome and appreciate your wisdom.
Holy crap, I log in and it says I have two pages of posts to get caught up on in this thread. Turns out to only be like 5 posts. The magic of having Juve on block. That's getting absurd.
Speaking of USMNT plays, always thought Aron Jóhannsson would be a good target for the Dynamo. But his USMNT career was short lived and then I lost track of him. The Houston heat might be too much for a guy from Iceland.
Back on topic According to this report from Colombia, @HoustonDynamo inquired about @oncecaldas 19-year-old winger Nelson Quiñones but no offer made. @MLS transfer window closes on August 4 #HoldItDown https://t.co/b9F04lDXot— Victor Araiza (@victoraraiza) July 19, 2022
if you don't want several posts then maybe go ahead and cut me some slack and say ideas B, C, and D are ok and the rest you disagree with. spending time assembling a candidate list, that at this point you know 2 MLS teams have chosen from, that no one else is offering counter-suggestions to, and getting an initial hyperbolic "are you an idiot, none" response, feels hyperbolic to the point of trolling and as though designed to provoke cranky response(s). several posts later it's like, ok, maybe this guy, maybe that one. maybe start there and save us all some time. the fact that after a few the discussion gets more reasonable and rational suggests i should push back the way i do.
reminds me of lassiter. speed guy with inconsistent skill/ ability to do anything productive with it. would not feed sebas what he needs -- a lot of his crosses on his video are behind the target -- and hasn't shown he can do it on his own, ie, no first team G or A, barely any second team. i am sure people will like the two goals his video shows which best i can tell are all he has done in 2 years. the idea is to be better than some option on hand and give us a fighting playoff chance. the idea is also not to replicate existing problems in terms of either wing productivity or ability to serve sebas. this will not help sebas. he then needs to be an elis who does it on his own. to be clear, i wouldn't even mind the "type," broadly speaking, if we wanted to defend and counter. but it would need more polish. this to me looks like lassiter give or take a seeming penchant for inverting ie cutting across. to be fair, less useless than thiago probably. but that's like a 60 year old masters high jump competition starting with the bar at the height of the landing pad.
i was an AJ fan myself. technical sniper. people forget him in that panama game before 2014 and the injuries, i suggested him previous windows. 2 years ago he had 15 goals in sweden. i thought he was hard done by to not get a chance this cycle, though he's "old." 31. he is playing in the icelandic first division right now, semi productive, but i don't know if that's basically a retirement move. like i'd move here if i was still trying to make the NT but is he even. i do think if he didn't fall apart, which is the risk on him, part of what we need is someone who puts the ball in net corners he means to do. it would be interesting to have him and thor at one time. i like the random pipelines. he actually was born in alabama hence we could use him but yeah he has played in northern europe his whole career and lived in that climate his whole life. thor has a few duke years between him and there.
to underline part of my holden point, a former U20 starter in a rough first club situation is not a complete guess, as they may have showed with the U20s, where some no-YNT no-club stats foreign kid is basically a hopeful dice roll. like i can point you to MNT or YNT tape for why to pick some of the kids i suggested. gold cup goals, MNT friendly goals, concacaf U20 goals, world U20 goals. the reality is to chase affordable young talent it's generally going to have some degree of unproven-ness and 2 years later is an exaggeration to say has-been or overrated. as of when we signed him holden's objective resume would have been EPL washout with no first team league games. the safeguard against absolute guesswork is look for some degree of productivity at some important juncture. when weah was rotting on PSG's reserve team or on loan he was scoring for the MNT under sarachan, a key part of the U20 team, and otherwise showing signs. he would even often score when PSG or celtic could be bothered to sub him in. goals per 90, sh*t like that. vs quinones is not YNT -- no colombiawide stamp of approval, no productive role for the YNT -- and hasn't done it for club either. like you have to hang your hat on "something."
if i wanted to be conciliatory, quinones' raw play might be interesting for HD2 to take sandpaper to. he has raw speed, he just trips over the ball and looks inaccurate. but on present ability that would be a backwards first team signing that wouldn't help us make the playoffs. and a couple years ago a player like him would go to RGV not here. can we do a loan direct to HD2?
I hope this is not true. Soccer seems rife with guys who can fly but can't put the ball in the net and he looks the part. Lassiter for instance, I judge him unfairly but that's because he could get open, get great looks and then send the ball to the upper deck or get stripped easily by a defender. But he looked great flying down the field. It was so frustrating watching him go into a game. This guy reminds me of Lassiter. If the guy can't score then what is the point of buying him and using valuable cap space? The last thing we need is a speedster who can't finish.
Speaking of which, Thiago is like the opposite of this it seems. I watched a video of him hitting beautiful left footed curlers to the back post, but also seems like he can’t dribble, pass, or get open lol.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CgPQMAnIjwW/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= MLSPA released the free agency list for this offseason. The context is free agency between MLS teams as part of the CBA. Anyway the list for Dynamo players includes options for Baird, Lundqvist, Picault, Quintero, Memo and Valentin. Out of contract is Steres and Ceren.
re positivity, when they run out a 2017 team they will get it. that team i was excited about. i don't have faith in this bunch to be a playoff team. i don't do blind faith, particularly in this bunch after a decade of reboots. my confidence is earned. a proxy for my confidence is make some serious moves that turn this into a playoff team. i can then get pre-excited. quinones is not a confidence proxy. quinones tells me this team remains as cheap? incrementalist? arrogant? as ever. they had a bunch of money, they threw it around like at a strip club, and now we're broke again and still 11th. unless they go right back after the core and redo the team i don't see it in the near future either, as they have spent their DPs and committed to key players for 2-3 more years. to me this is 2017 if 2017 hadn't worked. you then have a bunch of 30 year olds sitting around getting even older. some of this is i lack people's faith on here. some is i am not trying to be socially acceptable by bending my beliefs. i say what i think and not what you approve or think. and then some of this, i fear, is the team wanting to pander and some fans wanting to say we shouldn't expect a thing and just back it anyway. i lack basic confidence in this leadership to build a competitive team and so they aren't getting a free pass, they are getting an expression of years of frustration. my heart wants something to root for. my brain is not going to fake it and doesn't see it. my brain is telling me to run because this thing is just broken and won't get it anytime soon. to give a fundamental example, we didn't sign 2-3 attacking DPs to address that problem, which remains a weakness, and while we did sign 2 players to fairly defensive positions, as a matter of either formation or personnel we do not seem to be making an effort to build around that as a particular strength. our system doesn't seem to make this better than the sum of the parts. i don't get what we're trying to do. and that speaks to i think that the smart adult leadership around here ended when kinnear quit. the system got cute and the personnel work somewhere between inconsistent and shoddy. you wanna be an 11th place team, make 11th place decisions. the players i suggested are being grabbed by playoff level teams. the player we are looking at is some random colombian teen wing with skill issues and no proven production. that's more 11th place choices. you want me excited? make playoff team choices. otherwise i refuse to fake it to be sociable or give the gullible a couple happy months before they see reality. not my job. someone else can be your dedicated provider of false hope. i want to show reality SO IT GETS FIXED SOONER RATHER THAN LATER.
re "jordan," i get the last 2 years were abysmal. i get i was no jordan fan. but the past 2 years the team was being gutted and rebuilt. if you go back to full-roster jordan, he sucked, but he had a lot of 9th, 10th, and a playoff year. onstad is full-roster resourced. i expect better than 11th with that backing. what he to date improved on, is the peak bad jordan team that sold elis and manotas and basically dismantled. that is a low low bar. i kind of hoped for better than coyle's "almost" team. having been through these build and optimism cycles, i know y'all feel something else, but that is what this feels like to me. experience then tells me coyle year 2, cabrera year 2, ramos year 2, were not the further building the optimists hoped. i think you tend to get your big improvement that first year. i was hoping for a GM i quit having to compare to his predecessor. like goofy people on here chat up bruin periodically but let's be real, elis and manotas was another planet. i'd hoped for that kind of "no comparison" transition. same thing coaching. he "gets it" slightly more than ramos but not enough that discussion is over. same thing roster. same thing owner. when they said resources i expected something more emphatic. i realize there is continuity from last year but most of that is by choice and many of the same names are being offered as the 2023 optimism. that could have been fixed last november and was generally pat's choice and not matt's. they simply underestimated what churn this would take and i think did so based on laying last year at ramos' feet. thus last year's potential for change becomes this year's potential change. to me they will "get it" if they all go. if several come back we have not gotten rid of the incremental virus. i expect at least adam back because we have no clarity why we lose games. the team is more worried about empty roster space than bringing back too much of a non playoff team, which should be seen as it own risk.
re thiago, first, i have seen him hit literally one decent pass in game play, which was just playing the ball behind the defense to the great run of zeca. that a good U16 select kid could probably do. i haven't even seen a hint of whatever it is you thought you saw in warmups, and this sort of "practice player" thing has been a recent point of discussion where several of you came down on how much it mattered how practice looked. so what if i never see it once in a game when he has some space. which he has had. second, i am skeptical of the assessment because usually a brad davis that can drop a cross on a dime also has jukes -- even if i's one-footed ones -- to create at least a moment's separation. maybe he's nervous or something but to me he just diidn't look energetic. and i think people are just being hopeful. when he was in serie B brazil he (like this colombian) played about a half season and had 2 assists to show for it. he has been loaned around like mad. i think he's just a bad penny and assume onstad saw him in youth ball and never updated his evaluation to adult play. there is kind of a pattern where pat talks about zeca like someone he watched for years. do that enough i start to question your eye or at least whether you are updating youth scouting to 2022 adult acquisitions. people are giving me grief over my list but most of them have at least some adult numbers at someplace like schalke or norwich or werder or PSV or something like that. that's further down the road than "saw and loved them at U16 dallas cup" or whatever pat has going, all due respect. last point, if you really and truly had some amazing crosser trapped in a slow body, (a) he'd get subbed in late to do it and (b) the way to get him open is send a fast, or at least dangerous, player right at the wingback, commit him, pass last second, then play thiago behind the wingback into space. if that doesn't happen maybe it's not real. but then the dynamo tend to make their passes very early and obviously and not try to commit defenders except when playing from the back. which is like backwards. i want my backs off the ball quickly, and then my attackers to commit defenders and get players and passes behind them. i'd also think that a technical player often used on the wing, with any foot skills, would get a midfield look. alex lopez. brad gave it a go. if you can hit a nice cross you usually have deft feet in close spaces. holden did. my personal opinion what is often really happening here is a player is fairly skilled but not amazing -- but so is a lot of MLS -- and then semi-skilled but slow doesn't work in MLS. that's really a USL formula.
long and salloi would be decent free agents. but in the abstract you would pay for the privilege and in the concrete they might want off to europe anyway. if you think outside the box, the future FA list might be an interesting shopping list for half season rentals right now. they know they lose x this offseason anyway. you offer something for their trouble. some of the older players on the list who i wouldn't recommend long term might be worth a half season rental to try and make this competitive "enough" this year. the dynamo used to occasionally do decent getting a chunk of time out of jaqua or ngwenya before they bounced to the next one. joevin jones sure didn't come back the same, did he? noticed he's on the FA list. dude was a dominant wingback, took off to germany, isn't as dominant anymore. any idea what the heck?
https://www.mlssoccer.com/news/philadelphia-union-transfer-stuart-findlay-to-oxford-united we could also sell our players back to their home countries' teams, or second or third tier leagues. if you don't believe our players have any trade value -- which is ridiculous when andrew driver was once worth joe willis -- we could sell players to sweden, turkey, eln salvador, etc. https://www.mlssoccer.com/news/joe-corona-departs-houston-dynamo-fc-after-contract-buyout doubt me? well, even joe corona was loanable in sweden. i think one reason we don't do it is systematic underestimation what playoffs will require paired with a team that acts like they are playoff regulars not wanting to mess with "success" when they are the exact opposite and should see that as the most dangerous risk of all. a good team taking personnel risks has something to actually lose. we don't. the mentality where "we can squeak this" is absolutely the wrong approach and leaves things up to chance and subjective optimism. my personal experience in my sports is you make your goals by over-preparation that leaves no doubt. you are so ready you are destroying your personal best in practice every time. the formal competition is then a formality and the only question is the margin of the new record. in terms of the dynamo, in 2017 the reboot team was 3rd in april, 1st in may, 2nd in june, struggled through harvey, and finished 4th. the playoffs were clinched before decision day. if some of you think HH and co. can fix the 12th place this got to, well, to me you should be less naive and more demanding. ask for more players. demand more than quinones.
While I understand he has to say this, I get so tired of these canned responses. "I like the guys we have". Great, so you like them, can they play? I like them too, but I sure wish we had more guys like LAFC. We have no RW, no depth. I like all the guys, except Baird who is stealing money, but I love winners more.
I hear you, but he also did say a few weeks ago that they need one or two more attacking pieces. So it's not like he's saying "what we have is great and we need no more help".
Taking into consideration likely salaries and players ready to step into the positions these guys fill, the only ones I'd maybe want back would be Lundqvist and then as depth at the right price Steres and Quintero. I'd be fine with Picault as depth too, but his price is current contract price is way too high for that and I don't see him being content with a paycut and a depth role.