It's not a big thing and I like to avoid the endless historical discussions on BS. 'barring injury' - not sure how one does that.
I'm pretty sure USSF had every minute of McKennie's U19 games on tape. I remember watching the playoffs myself. It is your looking in from afar that just sees the 8 minutes. People are paid at USSF to track potential players like McKennie. Two weeks is plenty of time. Would it have been a huge risk to list him on a list of 40 players? Like it said, Arena got almost everything wrong after June 2017.
I don't know where this comes from, either, but people have been saying it on BS for as long as I can remember (and I've been officially a BS member since 2007, and read it for several years before joining).
Would they get that tape directly from Schalke? How does scouting European U-19 teams work? How did you watch Schalke U-19 games?
USSF under Sunil and Klinsmann spent IIRC ~5MM putting together one of the best soccer analytics capability on the planet. There was also full-time regional ( US, SA, Europe +) dedicated scouting resources responsible for managing our player pool. We had the capability of picking any US eligible player and getting detailed analytics and game footage at the press of a button. Arena came in and ignored the analytics team (he did not believe in analytics) and got rid of the scouting team, replacing them with Rongen! Did Rongen know about Mckennie, Adams, Jona Gonzalez? Clearly Arena did not. The rest is history... I may not be a fan of Berhalter but at least GB has put the focus on and is a big user of the analytics capability!
Apples and oranges. Reyna is in a position of need now, we lack creative AMs and that's why it'd be fine to start him, even. Back in 2017 we had a CM pair of Bradley and Acosta, and some here had been clamoring for Acosta for a while too, mad that he wasn't getting minutes in friendlies nor qualifiers. At that point it made perfect sense to try Acosta, who was 21 and looking quite good with Dallas, over the 18 year old McKennie who only had played 13' as a pro and looked as best ok.
Yeah, not sure Acosta was really the problem. Rotating Bradley, on the other hand? Hmmmmm, surely there might have been a few people here recommending that! Rotating Omar with the "45 minute man" Miazga? Hmmmmmm, who was saying that??! An 18 year old Gonzalez starting for Monterrey at DMid, when we were completely soft in the middle building around a past-his-prime MB? Hmmmmmmm... Again, the cartwheels done defending Brucie. It's bizarre. He finished 5th in the Hex with the 2nd best talent. You can roll out every single excuse you want (and we've heard them all on this board), but the guy royally screwed up. Many of us saw what was happening, and said so at the time. The Brucie defenders apparently didn't see what was happening, or if they did, said "welp, this is the best we can do". And that's the disagreement.
Those games were on YouTube I believe. There were four Americans involved, Schalke vs Bayern. They were fun. McKennie completely dominated the games from the #10. He would have probably been with the first team (or U20 team) if it wasn't for Schalke wanting to win the U19 so badly. The games, at least against Dortmund and Bayern, were very high level, and on par with the U20 WC games. But I'm sure there is a way for Federations to get games; they might even be on Y scout. I see people around here and on Twitter are constantly watching these types of games, but like you, I have no idea how. Maybe VPNs and local channels? Schalke is a big club and might stream all this stuff locally. Quite a bit is on Youtube.
Interesting because a huge portion of BS posters seem to have a real issue with the players he has picked. As someone that watches MLS along with other leagues, Baird and Lovitz made sense to me as getting called in. I’m sure the analytics pointed out that they were stand out players in their positions in MLS.
No, I follow MLS closely from a nat'l team standpoint, and had never even heard of Lovitz. He in no way stood out. Baird was one of the better rookies, but Mueller was a superior creator & in possession. That one was defensible but wrong. Lovitz clearly not, let alone how much he's been stuck with. He's a bad athlete, one-footed, can't cross, has no vision, and is a mediocre defender. That's backed up by metrics.
Analytics are fine and good to support decisions, but he could be relying on them too heavily. If you just plug in numbers and run the program, there's no point in even having a coach pick the team. And with our players spread in leagues all over the globe, I think anyone who feels we have analytics good enough to sort through all that and make the right choices is sadly mistaken. Coach gotta earn his pay.
I don't believe that there is any general analytics that one could run that would result in either Baird or Lovitz as the answer to that query. Now, understanding the grandiose, naive, I-am-going-to-re imagine-soccer bullshit that GB spouted at the beginning of his tenure that many clueless fans ate up, I certainly could come up with a set of isolated attributes and an algorithm that could spit out Baird and Lovitz in MLS (though not the entire pool) that could satisfy GB's naive viewpoint. I would stress that that is very poor use of analytics and is in fact the kind of use that Arena rightly poked fun of! Analytics is still just a tool, you first have to formulate the right questions!
I really doubt he's doing that. This always seems to be the positioning of anti-analytics arguments, but every organization that actually uses them at this point uses them as a data point. I can't imagine there's a coach out there that trusts analytics to that level.
I could see using analytics to bring in player that has great numbers. But just as some of us want Reyna to go to a camp and prove what we see with our eyes that he’s a starter it’s not a good look for GB when it’s the other way around. It should have been obvious Lovitz proved he wasn’t a starter or should even be on the team. I think Reyna should easily prove he can start but other players prove that numbers are only a tool to get a look. What you do while their in practice and games is the key. I’m sure Lovitz was thrilled to get called up but was in way over his head.
I completely understand the Baird call-up. I think Mueller is better overall, but Baird absolutely fit the early incarnation of the Berhalter winger. He's really, really good at determining when to make a run behind the defense. Like insanely good for his level. He was just terrible once he had the ball, which defeated the purpose. He also got 25 minutes after March and that was only because he was a literal last minute replacement for Arriola after Paul tore his ACL two days before a match. He also wasn't even at the 2020 January camp. So he's been phased out forever, but we still have the need to talk about him. Lovitz. I don't get Lovitz but I think Berhalter's general thinking early was to get someone to be much more defensive on that said to protect Pulisic and allow the RB to be much more rangey. Lovitz is still a pretty terrible option, but that's not a player like Hollingshead's game, and most of the options suck. But Lovitz is still terrible.
So you're saying that Arena is an incompetent idiot for not calling up McKennie to WCQ based on his dominating a youth league? The same one that Haji Wright dominated and got promoted from around the same time? I guess Arena should've called them both up. Stupid dumb idiot. ROLFFOLFFLLFL.
Sigh. Arena brought McNamara, Roldan, Pontius, and Rowe to the Gold Cup so the cupboard's pretty bare at that point. As you admitted, the USMNT had terrible performances led by Michael Bradley in CM. Is it really so hard to understand how prospects are viewed? Haji is in a completely different camp even as a youth player than Weston, Pulisic, Dest and Reyna. We have the threads here that show that. Even today, our high ceiling prospects are: Uly, Richards, Ledemza and our Haji level guys are Indiana and Mendez. If we were trying to see who could be helpful for qualifying, I don't think it's crazy to look at the first three players even today. They'd be back end of the roster to start with but we've seen with Klinsmann the ability to get value out of non-obvious picks (Green/Brooks in Brazil and Morris afterwards) But hey, we still have posters who would start Lletget over Reyna in an important match.
Lovitz and Baird fit the profiles of the type of players GB states he wants. He wants an LB with a cultured left foot. He wants athletic, physical wide-attackers. GB has dished out caps to Gasper, Lovitz, Ream and Vines to all play LB. Each possesses a sweet left foot. None is likely even C'ship level at the position. But 3G picks there have been consistent.
Jedi isn't as strong a passer as the other 4, but he's obviously the much better leftback. Among MLS options Hollingshead and Kyle Duncan are stronger LBs than are Vines, Gasper, and Lovitz.
As someone that’s a Mueller fan, Baird’s movement off the ball is far superior to Mueller’s. When there’s dangerous spaces to get into, he’s there and at the right time. I didn’t see Lovitz that often but when I did, he was always solid defensively. He somehow stopped much faster opponents with timely tackles. He was the first defender in MLS that I saw shutout Ruan. I’m pretty sure Ruan is one of if not the fastest player in MLS. He’s made simple work of many quality MLS left backs. Lovitz was that same player the other times I watched Montreal. For the record there were other left backs after Lovitz to shutdown Ruan, but Lovitz was the first.
If you want to shutdown Ruan, stand on the touch line, and wait for him to dribble into you. That's pretty much the only place he goes. Fortunate for Lovitz that he has no offensive ability that he has no choice but to stay at home. But then your winger has to sit really deep to cover the rest of the space. Start your build-up from there, Lovitz can't join the attack, and in possession he's a back pass machine because he has no vision + can't use his off foot. He's terrible. And it's reflected in the metrics. As for Mueller vs. Baird, he started in the league scoring off ball goals, just finished off a nice one. Orlando has been a terrible possession team and Mueller is more of a possession player. Good thing for him the US is trying to play that way under Gregg. So he shouldn't utilize a worse possession player in Baird. There's also a dearth of creators when you got guys like Arriola on the field. It's pretty much been Pulisic, more recently Morris has developed that skill on the wings. Cue a Chris Mueller.