Really? I must have had my rose-colored glasses on, cause I thought he was terrific. That quick tricky little winger beat him once or twice, but overall he adjusted and contained well, and he had a terrible cross towards the end, but years of watching the US makes me almost expect it from that position. He had a huge save in the box at one point. Anyway, maybe I'll watch again. Has anyone done an analysis scorecard on this game? That system that ??? that one poster whose name escapes me used to do was always illustrative.
I really had no huge problems with this game other than Bornstein boneheading out there, but to me, the overriding theme is that depth is still a real issue with this team.
Spector was taken for a ride by Elia. As he was by Lennon. And Valencia. As he will be by whoever lines up against him in the England match.
I think any outside back that doesn't have the same speed as the aforementioed will have the "get in behind" situation. Where Spector makes up for that is his ability to disrupt the cross. The only guy who can match pace with the aforementioned is Wynne and he has his own haunted house of issues.
Cherundolo trained with the squad in Amsterdam. He has likely already been forgotten by the "only play the yougsters" crowd, but Cherundolo has been the best right back the US team has had to offer for years.
Both Spector and Bornstein were beaten 1v1 for a good number of crosses. In this regard I was dissapointed with Bornstein; he was supposed to be the nimble, fast guy after all. I will say that these 1v1 duels were not so bad because: 1. the crosses tended to come late from near the endline 2. as a result the defense was already in place 3. the defense including the keeper is actually(according to the Castrol) among the best in the world at dealing with crosses and heading opportunities. Much worse would be giving the early cross on a break as happened against Czechia in '06 and Brasil in a number of games. Spector and Bornstein also did a good job of not getting turned and allowing easy dribbling into the box. The bigger problem from a defensive standpoint was central midfield.
Well, I agree except for... it's the team defending that produced the issue you have. The midfield was awful defensively apart from LD. The Dutch were able to run forward and collect the ball with absolutely no pressure what so ever behind them. The often had 2-3 meters of space in which to turn find an open player and slot him the ball. Why were we waiting so far back? Meanwhile our forwards were tiring themselves out chasing the ball for no reason because the Dutch back line always had an open pass. When there was the odd turnover, then our forwards were so far away from our midfield it was almost impossible to link with them and go forwards. That is why our movement seemed non existent. We will lose every game if we play like that in SA. It's not even about giving them respect, it's about being tactically astute and having a desire to get the ball back. Really - very very naive and it's no wonder Europeans think we don't know what we're doing because we obviously don't.
Well actually I was upset at our midfield for not defending. But if our defensive tactic is to lay off them like the midfield did, then no. Two forwards should not chase the ball relentlessly on their 3rd of the pitch when our midfield is laying so far back they are giving them a free pass. It's stupid. If you want to squeeze and counter then you wait for them to bring the ball up to about the midway line or close to it and condense the part of the pitch you are contesting. You do it as a team, then you play like demons. You also nullify any speed advantage they might have by doing this as you have effectively shortened the field. Alternatively if you want your forwards to go balls out and defend from the top from the second they have the ball then this is fine if you midfield is shutting down the middle of the pitch. The whole idea is to force a long ball or lower percentage pass which will result in a turnover.
I don't care what Castrol says, Tim Howard's still not strong on crosses, and if we give up a lot of them vs England, we will get hurt.
After watching us for a couple of years now; it is safe to say that this is a Bob Bradley tactic. One that I disagree with but nontheless his system. Unless you are going to do it once or twice and they should be close to their half of the field when the others are attacking otherwise the space allows for the deffense to surrond and cause the other team to lose possession as quickly as they got it back. Unless of course you have the outside backs like van Bronckhorst who will push the ball down the wings filled with pace effectively cutting off the need for play through the middle which you saw in the latter part of this game. We did do a good shut down of Snejider in the first part with the only mistake comming from Torres but even there Wesley had to find a way to cut back because how fast we closed on them and if it wasn't for a Bornstein brainfart most likely no shot would of gotten off or it would be a high chance for a save.
At some point in the match the statistic appeared showing that the Orange team completed 75% of their passes and the US 50 or 55%. If the coach wants to improve the impact of the team on a match he should strive to get the players to at least get 65% completed, as it makes aheck of a difference in wasted energy and keeps the opposing team less threatening as you can only be so if you get the ball.
Or he could get his players to space themselves better. I think a big problem was that the American team was completely out of synch, and that the Dutch players all seemed much more used to each other on the pitch. The US had no chemistry out there.
Very true. But this is difficult to do when facing superior opposition, especially for the US, which is built to move forward at speed once it does have the ball. (I'd like to see that change in the long term, but I'm not convinced that it best fits our player pool--or even our potential player pool--very well at the moment.) A team like Mexico, roughly as talented as we are, can do it better than we can but largely because (at least historically) they've been content to maintain a lot of possession around midfield. This allows them to conserve energy, but it also allows the team they're playing to conserve energy. And it means that they're not likely to score very often, which in turn means that a couple counterattack goals can often put them away. 2-0, usually.
Yeah, that did concern me. Some of Bradley's most vociferous critics were right on that point at least--the US didn't do a good job spacing (especially in terms of providing support options). On a purely speculative note, I wonder if this isn't partially the result of the US' being in transition from the 1990s teams where we had a cohesive, if sucky, national style with a few more sophisticated players sprinkled in to some future teams (2020s?) when we'll have a more sophisticated but still cohesive national style. Right now, so many of our best players learn more of their game abroad than the elite nations' players. Nations like Brazil, Argentina, the Netherlands, etc. often have a lot of their best players playing abroad, but I don't think they develop abroad once they get there as much Americans do. I kinda suspect that they're more intuitively on the same page with each other because they went through the same system as youth players and came out largely ready to play professionally at a high level. (I'm guessing that's especially true of the Dutch players because development there strikes me as more formalized than it is in Argentina or Brazil, though I could easily be wrong on that one.) Sometimes I wonder if a similar dynamic isn't part of why African teams with so much talent often underperform in the World Cup--half their players are usually developed in different foreign countries, so they're not as intuitively on the same page with each other or their players at home. But, again, I could be talking out of my ass on that one. Just speculating.
It's pretty relevant and interesting IMO. I would imagine you could take 11 random Dutch professionals and they'd look comfortable playing together - they all grew up playing the same style of soccer after all. there is no real American style, and perhaps that's an issue when we have these short turn around matches. Possibly the same with the African nations. I don't think it's an excuse in a world cup though - that's why we have camp.
No. That's not how the US plays. Even against weak CONCACAF powers the US doesn't have much of possession advantage if any. Frankly the US is least threatening when it has the ball passing it around in midfield; someone is bound to make a stupid mistake leading to the counter.
Don't think extentialism is needed to explain the performance. 1. The forwards are a huge part of the US's attack as they need to be able to handle the ball and initiate the attack. Robbie Findley was a black hole in such regards. 2. Landon Donovan had a very subdued performance. 3. The central midfield didn't offer enough in defense and attack. Torres and Bradley aren't compatible and Bradley been having a poor run of form.
Oh, I really don't think we learned too many lessons from that match. I'd offer up these: 1. We play better when our best players aren't hurt. 2. We score more goals when Clint Dempsey is on the field for us. 3. None of our "fast" guys are as good as Charlie Davies was. 4. If we are going to play this defend and counter style in the WC, we have no room to make mistakes. Mistakes kill at this level and we can't afford them.
This is a good point, and goes back to something Donovan said about Brazil in the confed cup final during his podcast with Bill Simmons. He said that the reason Brazil is so hard to play against is that they know they're going to play a certain way, and they've done it that way since they started learning the game. When they turn up the intensity, there's no stopping them because they're telepathic on the pitch. I do think that's something our players simply lack.
Yea, they all learned it through futsal or as we call it in bolivia Fulbito'. Teaches you how to dribble and how to do nice 1-2 passing. USA lacks that 'chemistry' and socer IQ to see runs before hand, and how to play 'smart' like that, which even a central defender like lucio has, or Cafu for example/ All players are smart with teh ball at their feet, from keeper to forward.
Futsal is massively overrated. It's indoor soccer played on a friggin' basketball court with a slightly heavier ball. Good grief.
I'll add one more, although it's not a lesson technically "learned" from the Holland match, but I think it's implied-- 5. When Dempsey is on the field for us, any team that doubles Landon constantly (like Holland did) will be taking a significant risk. With the US, I really think you can easily mark one player (like Landon) out of the game. A good team (like Holland) can mark two (like Landon and Jozy). In these situations, it's up to the rest of the team to do something. When we add Dempsey to the mix, it gets to be a "pick your poison" situation for opposing teams. This was the reason I was starting to get excited about Charlie Davies-- the USA has never had four players all being legitmate, international-level threats to score from the run of play.
But no walls, and forces all players how to learn to keep the possession of the ball without slamming it down the field and beinog dependent on it banging off a wall as there are basically no outs in 'our' indoor game with walls. In futsal its about 1 touch passing, and the ability to play in small spaces, something that we are not really good at soccer wise in the MLS and seen at the highest level with our US team.