Had to start a new thread, because there will be spoilers. Ironic that the first match of Leagues Cup was between the 2 leagues' Wooden Spoon leaders, Miami and Cruz Azul. But wow, Hollywood ending! Cruz Azul was the better team in the first half, but just couldn't finish. Feel terrible for Ian Fray, who went down with what looked like an ACL tear. If so, it would be his 3rd in 3 years, and he is only 20 years old. Robert Taylor with a moment of brilliance gave MIA the lead in the 44' against the run of play. Messi, Busquets and Martinez all came on in the 55', and the game changed. Defense went out the window, expect MIA keeper Drake Callendar, who had a big game, but probably would want a do-over on Antuna's goal that tied the game in the 65'. Just when it looked like it would go to PKs, MIA earned a free kick in 90+2' just outside the box, which Messi buried in the upper left corner to win the game with a storybook finish. MLS fans will always remember Zlatan's long range strike in his debut. This is another of those moments that will go down in MLS history.
Nitpicks: The crowd mic kept going in and out, which was annoying. The Leagues Cup patches on the kit sleeves were stickers and kept coming halfway off and flapping around. Just a bad look.
CLT victimized by the "Revs VAR" play (long distance goal disallowed due to offside player blocking the goalkeepers view), but fought back to score the tying goal in stoppage time and come away with 2 points.
And the logo itself is beyond amateurish. Messi is really something to see. The hype (and, oh, the hype!) is actually deserved in his case. The interesting thing to me is that he seemed to be alone in not having to wear the tracking bra. Maybe that is the ultimate soccer status symbol.
I'm a glutton for this stuff. After the Miami match I stayed up to watch Vancouver vs Leon. Great match followed by a 16-15 penalty shootout. Both keepers converted. Not as compelling as Messi & co but worth staying up for.
What a disappointing performance by the Rev's, they seemed stale and lackadaisical with their play. The team was playing their First team, but never really got moving, passing was very poor, in the end, they didn't deserve to win on the sole skill of Petro.
What a terrible game. Pretty much every player but Petro had a bad/off night including Gil. I'm rooting for Vrioni but that PK was just embarrassingly bad. Hope the real Revs show up on Wednesday.
That was a really weird game. It almost seemed like the players weren't sure how much they were supposed to care about it - which is exactly how I felt as a fan, too. I kind of wish we'd opened against San Luis. At least the novelty of playing a Mexican team would've made it more obvious what the game was all about. But playing NYRB in front of a few thousand fans...and to lose in penalties...and to still get a point? My "soccer emotional meter" isn't calibrated to make sense of that! So far, the format with the 3-team groups and weird tie-break rules (2 points for PK winner, 1 point for PK loser, etc) isn't agreeing with me. It's too hard to decide what's a good result and what isn't. As far as the game itself goes, we were super disjointed - but that's kind of what NYRB do to teams. They press really well, and we weren't able to cope, despite having a lot of our better passers in the starting lineup. I think it's safe to say San Luis will bring a VERY different challenge, tactically speaking. And if I've got it figured out right, a win puts us through, and a tie-plus-penalty-win probably puts us through... unless San Luis goes on to beat NYRB on penalties, in which case there'd be a 3-way tie and the teams with the most goals scored would go through - meaning it would all come down to whether our regular-time tie with San Luis was higher scoring than NYRB's regular-time tie with San Luis. Ugh. I think I like my soccer a little bit simpler!
I’ve noticed the players wearing ‘under-bras’ and thought that was a weird look. I thought maybe there is some physical workout benefit to it or something (I’m not exactly a fitness guru), but you are saying it’s mandated for tracking purposes….so the league can do cool graphics?
Interesting that Polster didn’t dress for last night’s match. Nice to have Buck back, but he wasn’t terribly effective.
I almost forgot that Woods was up front, barely noticed him for long periods, I saw very little action from him, there seemed to be little desire for most of the team to hustle, or play at the same level as NY/NJ
It's something like this. It provides data used by the coaching staff for player analysis -- how far and fast you've run, where you are on the field at a given moment, etc. They seem universal these days in pro soccer. Except for Messi.
Wood was terrible - that might have been his worst game as a Rev. The RB press really bothered the Revs, which was surprising. They didn't really get an attack going until Bruce was thinking bringing on Rennicks and Spaulding and then things started to click a little, but not enough to break through. Red Bull's fan support is an absolute disgrace. RB needs to either invest in some marketing or sell the team.
Their support is worse now because a lot of their fans are boycotting. They're furious the team kept the racist player, they're upset the team isn't spending money, and they know that basically RBNY is built to basically be an Academy for the RB squad in Europe. To the game itself, I was screaming to pull Wood early. The more I watched of the game, I was ready to pull everyone. They seemed lackluster. Gil's worst game as a Rev, and it wasn't even close.
It was an ugly performance, no doubt about it. I think Bruce tinkered with the lineup/personnel too much for a game where the players really need to be in sync to break that stifling press. Every game we play @RB is just an ugly tractor pull. We have to play them one more time (oh, joy), but at least it's at our house. Thought Kaye was okay (no pun intended), but wasn't in great sync with teammates. Harkes was in a different role and was much less effective. Probably it was just rust, but Buck didn't really influence the game much. I think it's probably the worst performance I've seen from Gil - RB seems to really good at squeezing the gaps he's trying to play through. Wood was really ineffective in a game where we really needed some hold-up game. He was gifted one beautiful pass and totally flubbed what was our best chance all game. DuJuan Jones was very underwhelming. I think it's a fair question as to why he's looked so much better with the USNT than he has with us this year. He was incredibly unlucky on his PK - what did he need, another 1/4" left - or even less? Bye was also atypically sloppy and erratic. I blame the braiding. Petro was pretty amazing. Too bad his teammates couldn't reward him. What a generous gift to give RB two home games in this round. And, what a flawed tournament structure. They really couldn't figure out a better way?
I agree with just about all of this, though I thought Jones was very good up till the time he left for national team duty. I do think that Bruce made too many changes given the opponent. When you think about it the tournament is really unfair to the Mexican teams. Send MLS teams down there for a game and I think most of them are struggling to take a point. However I also think that this tournament will get better as it moves along. Hopefully the Revs can stay in it for a while.
Any setup with 3-team groups is terrible! The World Cup got rid of them after 1978, when there was a lot of funny business of teams needing a specific result, and lo-and-behold, that was the result they got! It took them another 4 years to figure out that the last group games should be played at the same time. With all these groups and teams involved, you think they could even it up to make 4-team groups, but... So yeah, we pretty much have to win Wednesday, and unless we want to tempt fate that somehow the next game goes our way, even if we're done playing. And we always seem to have a terrible game vs. the Mutts. Everyone else seems to be able to handle them, so why is it that we can't figure it out. Oh well, at least it's unlikely we'll see them in the playoffs.
Seems like the Red Bull have an advantage with the schedule. They play a week apart while the other two don't and they play both of those at home. Revs play on short turnaround and one game with only one home game and San Luis plays on a short turnaround with both games away. Seems like the US based team with the short turnaround should have had the two home games.
The team that gets two homes games was determined by regular season finish last year so we only have ourselves to blame for that. On the rest of it, that probably starts to get difficult to manage around other scheduling factors and really gets into the weeds to tilt the scales even more in favor of the US teams. Not being able to take care of business on Saturday really isn't the fault of the schedule makers since both teams were in the same boat and as mentioned it was only a road game because we sucked last year.
I think their style is the perfect antidote to our game. Teams that high press effectively give us the most trouble, and they are about the best at it - very well coordinated. I think the addition of Harkes should make a big difference in helping us break presses (Blessing's turnovers and positioning weren't doing us any favors in that respect), but that is where Bruce kind of shot himself in the foot - moving Harkes out of the position where he was being very effective and not pairing him with Polster, who he clearly had some chemistry with (though we don't know if Polster was unavailable for some reason, since he wasn't on the game-day roster). And then, picking this game to work Kaye in made it even more of a challenge. Hopefully Chancalay can help as well, if he can provide a dangerous attacking option. That's what Tajon did for us in 2021 - he was always someone who could create an attack all on his own when we could spring him from deep in our own end. In this game, Wood, Vrioni and Bou combined were pretty dismal at holding the ball when we tried to play direct, so we have to be better at that, otherwise we'll be seeing this tactic over and over again.
Atlanta provided no resistance whatsoever though. I counted one hard tackle by them the entire match and it came around the 60 minute mark. They treated it like a friendly.
Seriously, I thought they played like they were in awe of being on the same field as Messi and weren't playing with any bite. OK, he's here. Awesome. But he doesn't play for everyone, he plays for Miami, and screw those guys. Now someone put a boot up his ass...drag Adrian Serioux out of retirement.