Bruce's strategy...(r)

This tournament means jack and he was trying out different combinations of players in a fairly competitive situation to have a deeper understanding for when the matches do matter? Just guessing here.

 

The goal of the tournament is to get youngsters some experience at international tournaments.

Convey was in which is good. Califf got some good time. LD and DMB are already grizzled veterans.

The secondary goal of this tournament is to test some of our other players. From what I heard Kirovski was ok, but less than stellar. Vanney was bad from what I heard. Berhalter was bad from what I heard.

New lessons regarding teh USMNT: We are weak in defense. Missing Pope hurts us tremendously in the center. We still don't have a viable option at LB sans O'Brien.

So hey we lost to Turkey with some controversial officiating. The match was important. But in the end, we accomplished some good things.

The less we see of Vanney and Kirovski from here on out, the happier we all will be.

JOB to left back. (haha)

 

seconded

And I think we have a better shot at taking points off of Brazil than Turkey in this tournament.

 

Absolutely right. I know people are excited seeing us play in an International tournament - but its a complete sham of an event. These are NOT tense Internationals - they are glorified friendlies. I doubt Bruce sees them any differently than any other - just that he had to spend two weeks in France doing it.

 

I'm just annoyed by this entire tournement; it's a chance to try out players for the Gold Cup. Period. I could care less about how the ROTW rates our performance; I do care that our league season is broken up by 2 international tournements.

Landon clearly needs rest -- mentally and physically. He's admitted as much himself. With MLS, the Confed, and the GC all stacked up this summer he'll be a zombie by September --about the time Eddie Pope should be back in form, probably Reyna, too. We have too many players in and out of form right now.

Maybe I'm turning into a league creature, but I wish the international schedule could be limited to the WC (and qualifiers) and the Gold Cup.

 

They were NOT going up Vanney's side. They were going up Hedjuk's side.


Kiro's not to be blamed for being put at target.

 

Not to mention, the more games we win in these mini tournys, the more games we play.


Turkey put a U-21 team out there according to one supporter on these boards, and we should've taken advantage of that.

This game really showed how far we have to go, tactically.

 

Meaning Cherundolo and Bocanegra? And Gibbs is supposed to have a lot of skill on the ball also.

 

Who had 25 minutes after the game ended on jri starting this thread?

Are you Steve Sampson?
Are you Steve Sampson?
Are you Steve Sampson
In disguise?

 

The trouble with JOB at LB is that we need him too much in the middle.

 

Hopefully someone like Dunivant or Gbandi will step up and take that position. JOB is too talented to have as a wing back, IMO.

 

Well, I agree that we need JOB in the middle, but it's not because he is so extraordinarily talented by international standards.

The issue is, the rest of our team is too untalented. Out of 300 million people in the U.S., we appear to have exactly two -- JOB and Reyna -- who can hold the ball in center midfield against top opposition.

Head to Holland and you can probably find 20 guys who can fit that description. But in the U.S., two.

Well, thankfully we do better with keepers, forwards, speedy wing players, and so forth. As well as with coaching.

 

Haha. This is funny, sad, and true all at the same time. I am still holding out hope for Bobby Convey. This was his first major Inernational tournament with the Sr side. Let's hope he gets better from here on out.

 

Landon pulled the disappearing act all the time last spring (2002).


The thing is, without distribution out of the backline, every one in front of them looks bad. Like I said in another thread, Convey can't be all to blame for his disappearing act today. He's going to be good. I'm not worried about him.

 

Not starting Mathis was a mistake. From what little I ahve read, he was able to create some chances for other players. 9 minutes for Twellman does not help him or the National team. Convey seems to work better as a sub. I cannot understand Vanney. He plays so well sometimes and terrible others. Hejduk is good for a penalty once every four to five games. I do not count Uruguayan referees as being too good, but all that aside, 6 corners to 2, a goal should be scored by the US. Kirovski had a disappearing act today, as usual. It would have been better if he had that act against the Kiwis. That way, he would have been stellar today. I am not a Cailiff fan, and probably never will be. Boca should start. Armas is not ready yet, Maestro should have started, but he'll have his chance on saturday. Hopefully, the US can pull another upset of Brazil for the ages.

 

Yeah, I'm not worried about Convey or Donovan, or any of the mids and front runners really. It's the backline that's frightening.

 

I am not whole-heartedly disagreeing with your assessment of Frankie - but some very good MLB pitchers don't strike out many batters but instead get outs by not allowing them to get good "wood" on the ball. Although they are showing their age: Greg Maddux and Kevin Brown are not "power pitchers" think randy johnson. they are more finesse. But, I would never use finesse as my first (or second or third) adjective to describe Frankie.

I guess the analogy is that a finesse pitcher kind of has a mentality like a "destroyer" d-mid. Step in the passing lanes, tackle hard as people receive the ball and hopefully as the ball is squirting around it serendipitously lands at the foot of one of your players. Or in the pitcher's case let the infield do the work to get most of the outs. It should be mentioned that closers are rarely if ever finesse pitchers - the team needs a closer with high velocity stuff to squelch the opponent's momentum. I think that the mentality of a wing defender is more that of a closer.

Maybe it is too much MLB talk but we probably agree that the "annoying gnat" style of defense with little offensive capabilities is not well-suited for international competition in the wing defense. but that you can have some success at the d-mid position with it (abmod and armas). But, somehow Frankie's athleticism compensates. My dream is that in the not-so-distant future we will not have anyone on the field with ball skills (trapping/passing in traffic) less than those of say Eddie Lewis' caliber. Which would mean current nats who have trouble keeping the ball real close in tight spaces (Cunningham, most of the defenders, Pablo, and I hate to say it but DMB) would have to evolve.

 

Bruce strategy?

Da Bruce is indeed inscrutable, but perhaps this is the method to his madness. If this tournament is a way to evaluate players, and your first two opponents are Turkey and Brazil, how do you distribute the personnel? I'd say Turkey has the best defence of the two with IIRC its WC02 back four (or at least available to play). So you play your best offence against Turkey and a weaker defence. Against Brazil with stronger offence (duh) you play your stronger defenders and less skilled forwards. Mathis doesn't fit this scenario, but seemed very effective as a sub and we know what a healthy Mathis brings anyway.

So did Donovan just have a bad day, or do you start building the team around DMB?

 

There are certain guys you want on the field in the last 30 minutes if you want to catch up.

Convey as a left back to work with Beasily on the left flank, Donovan Forward, Beasily, Mathis at attacking mid alternating positions with Donovan f and mids, and Cunningham.

Everyone but Cunningham was on the field. Leaving off Cunningham was a mistake in my view at a forwards spot.

That would have been a lot of Turkey to thiink about.

 

Bruce "strategy" was fine, the game was pretty even despite a sluggish performance from much of the team, he just did not even an adequate performance from his central backs. Some goes to the players, and a lot goes to Bruce for selecting the two and not getting them prepared to work well together.

 

To be honest, I don't see that much wrong with Arena's strategy so far. I think he looked at the rosters of the teams and saw that Turkey had a lot of young and untested players -- he played the same *kind* of players against them while giving some of our more experienced players (Mathis, Stewart) some time on the field. He paired an experienced defender in Berhalter with a young defender in Calliff. I don't see anything wrong with that. Especially with so many games in such a short period of time, he has to balance the teams somehow.

The problem is, he didn't expect a howler of a game from Armas (who, IMO had the worst game of his Nats career and it affected the defense AND offense) and such a quiet game from Donovan (albeit hitting a fantastic cross to Beasley.) Some of the players had a worse than average game and it was magnified in the collective play of our team. Arena can't play the game for them, they still have to show up to play. If not for a bad call on a pk and a clearance off the line of a Mathis shot, we could have taken at least a point from this game.

For the Brasil game -- with a much more experienced and high-quality team, I expect Arena wants to match it with a much more experienced team of our own with a newbie or two (Gibbs, Twellman) thrown in. Once again, nothing wrong with matching experience with experience. I expect Mathis and Twellman up top and Mastroeni ahead of Bocanegra and Gibbs. I assume the rest of the lineup will be filled in with players with more experience. We'll see how this game goes.

The real question mark is the Cameroon game. I guess we'll go with physically strong and athletic players for that game and see how we match up. For this game we also have to take into consideration the play of the players tournament-to-date, and the physical condition they are in. It doesn't make sense to put someone on the field if they are hurting. I also expect this to be a game where we play the players who have been the most productive in the first two games -- maybe as a sort of reward for their play.

As far as game management, Arena used all of his subs in the first game and I expect him to continue this strategy in the following two games to keep as many players fresh as possible. So ... in light of the situation, I don't think Arena's strategy (as I read it) has been bad -- we'll see how it works going forward ...