It's absurd for you to write off the consistency and depth of high level prospects that we are creating now as compared to previous generations as the "first step." We have had some good players and teams at this level in the past, but there has never been anything close to the player production that we are seeing. It's been trending heavily in this direction for a few years, now, and that is plain as day.
Even McGlynn is a better athlete. Plus McGlynn is not literally the last line of defense. I wish this is true but I don’t see it unless Craig finds another gear.
I find your hyping up our players absurd. They are finally developing ok players in numbers. This has raised our floor. It is very nice first step. They still have a long, long way to go. Outside of the CB distribution, I didn't see anything from individual players I havent seen before. The major difference is there weren't any major weak links and the team played better as a whole.
I am saying similar things with regard to the fact that we have a long way to go. I guess the disagreement is over how far we've come, and it seems like your opinion of where we were is a lot higher than my opinion is. I never read too much into our 2002 success or intermittent youth successes because they clearly were not sustainable. How much good is it to have those random high points if we were just going to be back at the bottom of the pack the next time out? Maybe you saw those high points as actual markers of how good we were. I did not. That is why sustained success, which we started to see with the youth teams in the late 2010s is such a big deal to me. We aren't a top team in the world, but showing that we can compete with those teams and consistently and predictably beat the teams that we "should" beat (including Mexico) is a huge and significant step. If we are talking about the national team, the pool that we are working with is about 1/3 of a full pool if you consider that our best players are 24 years old and younger. That pool is going to grow stronger over the next several years. The reason for this is clear: we are consistently developing better players now than we were before this days of Pulisic and Co. If we are talking about our youth teams, that pool is also growing stronger and stronger. The youth development landscape is light years ahead of where it was a decade ago, but there are still major improvements being made as our culture gets stronger and the opportunities for young players become more and more common. It's not just that you are more tempered than others who you believe are overhyping players. You continually talk about how poor MLS is at developing players. You talk shit to posters who are positive about how far things have progressed. It's clear that you simply don't have an accurate picture of the landscape and how it has evolved. That would be fine since it's completely understandable that most people wouldn't understand these things, but then you come at people and make absurd statements about lagging progress, and that's not as cool.
Psst, I know you know this, but it has nothing to do with soccer with this guy. It’s other stuff and an anonymous soccer board is just the outlet.
Why do you keep saying this? They aren't better. There is just more of them. There was nobody on this team at Pulisic's level. Or LD, or Claudio, etc. They have yet to systematically develop top end players for us (which is still below the goal). All of our top end players have at least one of three things in common. They come from a soccer family, were exposed to a real soccer culture at a young age, and/or be elite physically.
On the whole, they are definitely better. And, there are no gaps either. We are swinging wildly from a talented group to a weak group because the system is reliably developing talent that is the best in the region and competitive at high levels of the global game. You didn't mention Reyna, who barely misses this U20 age group. It will also be interesting to see how Pepi develops over these next couple of years. His ceiling is extremely high. Tony Leone could end up being a world class center back -- we don't know. Slonina? I'm not as high on him as others are, but who knows what he will be in five years. Why does it matter if they come from a "soccer family" or not? That is a big part of our cultural growth. I guarantee you won't find a lot of top players from South America or Europe who came from anything other than a soccer family.
Unfortunately the worst 2 players on the team happened to be Cowell and Luna and that makes very difficult to properly evaluate the rest.
You are helpless. I wouldn't be surprised if Slonina is the only guy from this group that has much of USMNT career. When was this team competitive with high level competition. It got run off the field by France, England, Japan, and Uruguay. The bottom half of this roster was better, but I dont think the top of the roster is better than what we have had for a long time. Why would i bring up someone who isnt in the group? Of course you are slinging around phrases like "world class". A delusional soccer Dad. It is important because it is much more important than than anything they receive from the academy. Reyna didnt need the academy to get to Dortmund. They aren't developing high end players. It is a decent spot for our highest potential players to spend time until they can get abroad.
Half of your sentences are unintelligible, which makes it hard to converse with you. Reyna is relevant because he is clearly part of the same generation as these guys. He missed an arbitrary cutout by six weeks..... You wouldn't be surprised if only Slonina has a career with the senior team? That's kind of crazy because Pepi has already played in big games and scored big goals for the US. There is a good chance that Paxten Aaronson is better than his brother, who just played in a World Cup. You probably aren't counting Leone because he originally chose to play for Mexico, but he has huge potential. If not him, at least one of these other center backs is very likely to have a significant career with the senior team. Our central midfield had tons of talent that is likely to produce some impact on the senior team. You discount the significance of the youth ranks, and that is -- again -- completely ridiculous. It makes total sense, though, because it shows that you are making these false judgements based on a lack of actual understanding.
Well, Uruguay are virtually dominating Italy. Unlucky to not be up at half. Italy's keeper made a brilliant save to keep a header out. There were a few other near misses. Italy's only been mildly threatening the other way. We'll have to see how the 2nd half goes. But we played Uruguay tougher, when they had a virtual homefield advantage. If it keeps going this way, regardless if Italy pulls a fluke goal, this should change some narratives about our performance.
Appreciating our team better watching this game. Uruguay looks like a team full of highly skilled Adamses.
You can't understand what I write and keep accusing me of not understanding what is going on. I think you don't have a clue about this sport and are just another dad that had to pick up the sport because theyr kids play. You do what what American fans have done for ages in hyping up young players. We are getting better but nothing about this group gets us to another level. I look forward to seeing you hype the quality of MLS academies as we exit tournaments with opposing teams being significantly more talented than our players. If only I could be as knowledgeable about US soccer as you.
Looking at Uruguay's energy in this game compared to the US game, it reinforces the massive rest advantage we had when we played them.
You've created a no-win situation for the US. If Uruguay out-plays other teams by even more, it's because they had more energy. If they get out-played, then that validates the US weren't one of the better teams of the tourney. We can just go by what we know - Uruguay are the best team in this tourney. Losing to them, competitively, is no shame.
I was very happy with what I saw from the US during this U20 WC. This is probably the best collection of technical quality I have seen from a US U20. The ball movement was also very impressive. I am just not a big fan of "we did not get out played as much as that other team" type of argument when every game has different variables. And the variables were very much in our favor in our game against Uruguay.
It was the same amount of rest as teams got in the group stage. It may have still impeded them some. We can only speculate. They had the favor of virtual homefield advantage, and may have on releases. I'm not familiar w/ their situation. So they had the benefit of a significant variable or two. And there was a gap between Italy's relative performance in comparison to ours. Even if I concede Uruguay were diminished in our match, it would at best level out. So we're only about as good as Italy, by this metric of u-20 WC performance (which I'll grant isn't the best indicator). That's not just the best collection of technical quality. That's an overall evolution to compete w/ the elite, at this level. We'll see how it translates now.
Uruguay win the title by defeating Italy 1-0. It should have been more. Here are your peripheral stats: Shots: Uruguay 14, Italy 3 On goal: 4, 0 Compare to the US: Shots: Uruguay 11, US 11 On goal: 3, 3 Italy got dominated. The US were at least competitive. Take that fwiw, but some of the confirmation bias/reactionaryism about our developmental system compared to many other nations' were bunk.
Again, I am not a big fan of comparing different games like this, but if you want to, we could conclude that we are not as good as Italy as Italy only lost 1-0. Israel, the Gambia, and Tunisia also had better scorelines against Uruguay than we did. Hopefully we can catch up with Israel, the Gambia, and Tunisia someday . This is a silly game not worth playing. We put up a decent fight against the best team in the tournament. How others did against Uruguay is not that relevant.
Italy was totally outplayed by Uruguay and deserved to lose. They were completely flat but hats off to Uruguay in winning the WYC! Congratulations to them!