Yep. And I want to say again that I think we should be proud of how our guys played against the Netherlands. We outplayed them in midfield, even without being at our best. They were just better inside the penalty area, which is obviously what determines who wins.
I love Dike's potential (and also that he's just obviously a very intelligent and honest-to-goodness nice guy). He's got plenty of room to improve, but his basic underlying abilities are really, really good. I've got high hopes that, given his general intellect, he'll be able to improve in his understanding of the game over time. He's the kind of striker that I could see continuing to improve incrementally throughout his career--barring further injury problems (!)-- and playing his best football at 30. He's got some serious raw power and wherewithal. An improved touch will help immensely.
I don't think we outplayed them in midfield--they sat back and prevented us from moving the ball through midfield--though the Dutch likely lined up like that because they couldn't beat us in midfield, so they didn't try to.
bale isnt an "MLS" player, at least not the way a domestic "MLS lifer" is an MLS player. I dont know why this is so hard for people to understand. there are multiple tiers and streams of player in MLS that basically have nothing to do with each other, unlike other leagues where there isnt such a bifurcation. MLS salary structure is a pyramid. pay a lot (or actual market value) for a few players and try to go budget on the rest. So those few high priced stars are an entriely different animal than most of the other players in MLS. ignoring that reality is absurd. Trying to say ..."well MLS player just did XYZ" (talking about Bale) as some sort of rebuttal to people who diss MLS and its players is asinine and disingenuous. Same thing with calling Zlatan an MLS player as well. prert soon when ronaldo plays in saudi for 200m/year....is he going to be a "saudi player"?? no. he never will be. would anyone in their right mind try to equate zardes or brian white with bale because they all play in MLS? FURTHERMORE, talking about an MLS player snatching two point from the US in Qatar is effing ridiculous IN THIS THREAD as it relates to the Netherlands game.....because the MLS players on the USMNT roster ONLY cost the team points and were negatives....AN MLS PLAYER GIFTED WALES 2 POINTS IN QATAR as well! None of the USMNT players from MLS did anything of note or anything positive in any way in Qatar. so why even bring that up?? just to troll? or be cute?? what are you saying? do you think it is wrong to diss the USMNTers that play in MLS? were you satisified with their performances in Qatar? as for the strikers - again - without chance creators it wont matter who the strikers are.....lewandowski looks pretty pathetic for Poland IMO.....a shell of his self when surrounded by top tier talent at barc or bayern.....same with US strikers who get nothing created for them. yes, the strikers could be better but the MMA midfield is the problem for chance creation.
This is my issue with Dike. If he had better touch, I'd expect big things from him. As he is, I feel like he's a decent option if we're just throwing the ball forward and want someone to barge through people. Then again, with the number of crosses we sent over in Qatar, having a bruiser in the box would have made sense.
Friends - it was a quip! lol. Be well. Heading to (slightly) saner pastures to debate whether Pierie was really ever all that!
I'm giving it to him. He had two scoring chances in that game and put one in, a ridiculous, lucky one, but Donovan bounced a cross off the back of a Portugal Defender, they still count. And the one he scored was far harder than the one he didn't (though both were lower percentage than people presume, if it was so easy, why was our xG so low despite 6 shots on goal?). Basically, Wright wasn't the Turkish version of Right, he wasn't as clean on the ball, at all, but he was better as a target option, he was borderline competent, and scored a ridiculous goal. If you score a goal, any goal, as a striker, it basically deletes everything else as long as you don't do what Ferreira did (help gift the other team a goal and basically help unravel the entire game plan by being a black hole/Bermuda triangle level of invisibility when not actively screwing up). Wright was "okay". My verdict on him is pretty straight forward in the fact that I have put Sargent and Pepi a tier above him after this, and lumped Wright in with Pefok, Vasquez and Dike as depth, and/or long shot options (I think Wright's usable though, not worthless or anything). It's worth noting, the guys career was rock bottom just 2.5 years ago after a failed loan to VVV Venlo. He was basically a blown prospect, like Carleton, and other guys of his ilk. Wright's built up his career from scratch the past few years, approaching 50 goals since August 2020 in Denmark and Turkey. He's a legit European based striker now. Was he a fit for Berhalter's system? NOPE which we all knew. And for the record NOBODY IS. Sargent is scoring in England, Wright is scoring in Turkey, Pefok was scoring in Switzerland, Vasquez was scoring in MLS, Pepi is scoring in the Netherlands? We have more strikers actually doing thins in Europe since '21 than at any other time in Europe EVER and it's not close, and yet in this time when these things slowly came together, we haven't produced a striker that's scored more than 3 goals in a calendar year since what, 2018 or 2019? So, um, it's the system guys. Period. Does that mean any of these guys are great? Nope. I wouldn't argue that, ever. Pepi and Sargent are prospects, Pefok and Wright and Vasquez are high floor guys seemingly, but not high ceiling guys, and guys with clear limitations. That being said, they've all proven very capable of scoring. What hasn't proven to be very capable of scoring is any forward with any name playing in the US shirt for Berhalter EVER.
Wright's goal is a goal. Good for him, lucky or not (lucky). But much like Julian Green's, it doesn't mean much for the future. I don't think Wright was very good, and I greatly suspect he will need to improve pretty significantly to be back in 4 years.
Pre-injury Mathis is like the dream of Steve Snow in terms of might have beens, probably should add O'Brien too (and I'm partial to Gyau/Renken Hoffenheim dream ruined by knee injuries). Holden would have been HUGE for '10 and '14 if he could have been healthy. But yeah, Mathis, Mathis was something else. If only he had the mentality of Dempsey, and had stayed healthy, OMG, he might have been our best player ever until this generation for sure.
Klinsy was screaming to push up and put pressure on the ball, he threw a helter skelter Omar on to, "help" I guess. I'm not exculpating Bradley AT ALL. #1 cause is Bradley. All he had to do was kick the ball straight up into the air as high as he could, and the goal doesn't happen. However, if he does lose the ball, the fact that we have everyone being thrown forward to pressure the ball, guess whose coming down our throat? Full speed Ronaldo, and that other giant striker, and who do we have to defend it? 40 year old Beasley?!?! I could take your counter argument more seriously if he was demanding we pressure the ball in the 75th-80th minute or whatever, but this was the 93rd or 94th minute, the only thing we needed to do at that point, was defend and #'s and/or in Bradley's case, Boot the ball straight up and toward the general viscinity of the Portugal net, instead of controling it. I don't want this page monopolized by something from 8.5 years ago, but pushing forward, to close down Portugal with inferior and very tired players (we had to come back from down, it was the Manaus game, the hottest and most humid of that Cup), we got disorganized, and they sliced and diced us in literally seconds. I would take an organized bunker, with 5-10 seconds left any day of the week over helter skelter, "wtf are we supposed to be doing again?" defending in a humid swamp in June in the 94th minute with exhausted players, made worse by haphazard emergency subs. Was it on Bradley? Yep. Should it have been fine, even w/the Bradley error? Yep. Was it? Not even close. If you have a 40 year old Beasley defending a racing in his prime Ronaldo in the 94th minute, down a goal, and like all of 2 guys to defend the rest of the Portugal attack flying right up our backside, you kinda screwed something up beyond just Bradley's technical skill confidence.
Im overreacting to his more recent stupid red. I can't remember when it was. I can never remember what guys are the card risks and which aren't. Consider me corrected, as I am right at this minute, I guess it was just a rare rash challenge (I can't remember what he did back in youth too.). Thanks for the correction.
For years people have given Zardes crap for scoring weirdo goals. I say the Wright goal was every bit as weird as any Zardes scored. Kudos for him being in the right position but his "heel shot" was pretty Zardes like imo.
I think Arena rated him a lot. I think he came back from the ACL with a middling workout, rehab regimen. Arena started him in that much beloved (by me) defenestration of Honduras 4-0 where he and Donovan got a brace and were magical together. He saw what Mathis did in the cup in spare minutes (Goal vs S. Korea out of nothing beyond beautiful ball O'Brien dropped in, hit post against Poland, served up a game tying perfect cross/pass to Sanneh's head with like 5 minutes left that Sanneh flashed just to the left of the post). Arena wasn't wrong. Mathis was super talented, I think he knew it, based on the fact he kept trying to use him, he just also knew Mathis wasn't 100% match fit because he could be lazy and had terrible nutrition habits, and not an ideal mental make up. Reminds me a little of that Dutch Player Wesley Sneijder from the aughts through 2014 era, who was a wonderful player, never reached his full potential, and hilariously mentioned a few years ago, "Sure, I could have maybe been up there with Ronaldo, and Messi, but I liked my wine, I liked going to parties and having fun, I liked life too." To paraphrase, kind of what happened to Ronaldinho too. I think if Messi gets injured today, the knee deal isn't as big of a problem, and he probably has his head more straight on in terms of work habits. Maybe not, but probably, its a more professional game for most Americans today, but there are still some falling between the cracks. I think he'd make it, but not sure. HUGE CEILING though. HUGE. If MLS had his head on straight, he actually moves to Bayern Munich and HOLY ----!. But otoh, Bayern wouldn't have accepted his nonsense in terms of nutrition, coaching, attitude etc, but maybe his attitude changes at a club as big as that? He's a might have been, like O'Brien and like O'Brien, I'm just glad we had him when we did. 2000 early 2001 even better, but 2002 he still, rehabbing, produced multiple sublime moments in paltry minutes that cup. And again, I think Arena called it w/regards to his habits, mental makeup, commitment.
yes, people were polite and complimentary, including van gaal...who immediately afterwards noted how incredibly simple it was to break down and tear apart greggs entire system.
I dont think we outplayed them in the midfield. I think we did well with chance generating, honestly I think our exhausted midfield, along w/them noticing that thing I saw with Weah, and others saw with Jedi and Dest were primarily to blame. Our CM's were too tired this game, and they picked out massive gaping holes in our approach on the wings (noticed that w/Weah against, I think Wales, huge gaps between him and Dest/LB in general just wide open, but not exploited). We had our chances though, it was closer than the score looked, as shown by xG. Probably more fair results is 2-1 or 3-2. But they deserved to win from the mistakes we made and didn't learn enough from (resting, rotating, fixing that hole in our defense etc).
That’s mostly fair, I’d say. I guess I would say that our midfield quality dictated how the game was played. And I think very few of the non-uefa/conmebol teams can say that about themselves when lining up against an elite uefa team in the knockouts. That’s not something to pat ourselves on the back for, but it’s a very nice sign of progress.
Probably not, but Wright's already proven he's a capable starting Forward in Europe. Hell he's tops in scoring in Turkey in terms of non-PK goals. He's very useful, just doesn't fit our system. The fact that he's now going to have a third straight double digit scoring season barring injury tells us he's legit. Is he good enough for what we do, and what we need? Doesn't look like it. But he is good. I expect our strikers in '26 to be Pepi, Sargent and mystery guy(s). Maybe its Wright, more likely someone else.
so wait, let me get this straight- youre saying that no other manager we faced had the brilliant tactical nous to instruct players to just run right by tyler adams? that exhaustion due to literal mis-management on our part contributed to our loss? i dunno, man, that seems like a stretch...
Yup it's possible to keep Jedi back. Have Pulisic stay wide and let Musah go forward. Even easier if Aaronson or Reyna start in midfield to initiate the attack centrally instead of Puli.
I posted the link with full minute by minute breakdown with supporting pictures of what really happened and it is nothing like you described. Perhaps you should look at the actual facts. https://www.businessinsider.com/usa-world-cup-loss-portugal-2014-6
I don't think Wright's game translates upward at all. I think he gets a lot of his goals right now off of physical domination in Turkey (not all, but a big %) and as we saw in the WC, at the higher levels, he gets pushed around. He also just won't do the little things ... maybe he changes but I suspect if he ends up at a Bundesliga club, they'll realize that he's too one dimensional to hang. Could be wrong. I think Vazquez has a better shot than Wright.
A postmortem thought that I'm not sure where to put: the order of the group matches probably made life much harder for us in the knockout stage. In 2006, we had the misfortune of being the first team to play a talented but aging Czech Republic squad. They thrashed us, then ran out of gas against Ghana and Italy. Had we played them later, it seems likely in retrospect that they would have unloaded on someone else, and then played us with a half-empty tank. In 2022, the Wales attack relied heavily on Bale and Ramsey; neither was fully fit and both were on the wrong side of 30. Both players seemed to run out of gas against both Iran and England. Perhaps we played them in the only game where they were ever likely to score; had we played them later, they probably would have been much less dangerous in the second half and we might have had the opportunity to rest players.
Remember this. We were one Zimmerman mistake from having a more rested team coming out of the group play. We were one poor touch away from tieing Holland 2-2.