Houston Dynamo v. Austin FC, Saturday, September 11

losing at home to a first year team is gonna be a special kind of experience

 

Wouldn't be the first time

 

Austin is terrible. But so are we. 0 - 1 loss in which fans fall asleep until the 87th minute winner.

 

The Dynamo is my club, my glorious Houston Dynamo, the team I follow closest and support. It was not enough punishment to me to have my club crumble before me and become a burning hulk of its former glory. The gods gave me a second team to follow in my home town, Austin FC, with a wonderful new stadium built the way I told Luck and Canetti you had to build a stadium in Texas. (As if to tease me.). They gave me that team to watch and follow as well and they suck as well. The gods I surely have offended.

So I will leave Texas for this game and go sulk in Florida, the one place with more COVID stupidity than Texas. This I do to appease the soccer Gods. A sacrifice I offer.

 

DonJuego just can’t avoid the liberal virtue signaling with a Covid crack on Texas and Florida. BTW, you forgot to cite the death per capita rate which Texas is 25th and the leader is New Jersey at 150% of the Texas rate. Loser stuff from the loser Juego

 

C'mon Westie.
Don is genuine.

Correct.

We still have better football than the Texans!
I mean they are on track to end up dead last in style all while shipping the league leader in passing yards to another team. They just named Tyrod Taylor as the starting QB and Deshaun Watson will remain on the team roster but will not play!!!

 

I don’t care what he is, he started the Covid nonsense stuff - I guess he would be better off in Australia or New Zealand if he thinks Texas and Florida aren’t “following the science”.

 

This is our U-13 Starting XI from this past weekend in their win away to San Antonio. These players are all younger than our Houston Dynamo club itself! Think on that cool stat.
I have heard good things about several of our younger age group players so we can focus on what is going good for our club in a time of the first team struggling so bad. Marry this mindset with our new owner and his stated commitment to funding the club. Hope is there for all.

Ok, even if you are right, just send him a private message so that if his Covid-19 takes were off the reservation for you, at least you save the rest of us the Covid debate grind on the weekly Game Day thread.
Look amigo, in this hour of discontent for so many of us that care for our club and our people, I was just going more for the "perhaps we don't eat our own" mindset on such a public forum.

 

When our players play quick touch and run off the ball for each other we are a totally different soccer team than our last place status says. More so when Quintero is given a starting role. Which still frustrates me, he is class and finds his teammates on the run.
3-0 is no accident, our coach and players finally RODEO the fuc{ up and we win. Shocking I know.

Road test midweek away to LAEG!

DALE ETERNO BI-CAMPEON!!!

 

Ladies and gentlemen....a win.

 

https://foreverorangeblog.blogspot.com/2021/09/what-team-is-this-houston-dynamo-30.html

Forever Blogging The Orange: Dynamo - AFC Recap.

 

important for team history and fan morale that we won and avoided the record

 

Not sure its fair to compare the excitement of a first year club vs a beat down fan base due to neglect from a front office that at times has outright criticized it's own fans and a very poor product on the field over the last 7 years.

2006 to 2013 was much different in fan support. While the location of the new stadium is great, its never captured the same organic fan driven atmosphere of the Rob. The atmosphere at the Rob was a site to be seen and intimidating for other teams. Not to mention the fans had greater access to the players as they walked to/from the locker room. (The first match was played at the new stadium on May 12, 2012)

Excluding the 2017 season we've missed the MLS playoffs from 2014 to 2020.

You could probably write multiple articles on how and when support started to drop off.

 

I think it's perfectly fair to expect a team that's been in this city for this long, and done what it's done in the past, to have more die-hard fans than a team that just started. I think it's fair to expect our supporter's section, at a home game, to outdraw their supporter's section who drove 184 miles to get here. If your team has to win to be a supporter, are you really a supporter of the team, or are you a supporter of winning?

 

I guess that's one way to look at it. The front office alienated and turned off quite a few long time diehard supporters....which had nothing to do with winning. The front office has also jerked our support group around (I'm no a part of) but I would assume that's also decreased their membership. You couple that with 7 years of bad soccer then you see a fan base that starts to lose interest. It's not tied just to winning.....there is more there you're not considering.

 

Brian, you speak on the turnout at a Houston home game and I hear your points. However amigo you do need to have optics on what is going on with the state of our entire club. As I think you know, certainly a supporter is there for the players down on the field and not the wins and loses in the table, for if that was the case, clubs like Burnley or Osasuna would not have any fans right.
The tradition in association football as handed down from the generations of fans and supporters around the globe is that the fans and certainly supporters know full well different players come and go and so does the good times and the bad as far as winning. However, the jersey remains the same. So the mindset is back the players currently wearing your club's colors regardless. And yet an owner can sink his or her club into debt or just not respect the past traditions and the fans and supporters will view their club as something different than what they knew. Actions from up top will have a tremendous effect on the folks in the stands. This is true the world over right?

I agree.
With this in mind Brian, there was a complete shift for us supporters when our club finally moved from the Rob to downtown and this manifested in where we were instructed to stand in the new BBVA, down in a corner endline section. Our FO old regime demanded season ticket sales from everyone in the lower bowl and thus effectively split our two groups into two new sections as not everyone purchases season tickets when at the Rob. With many being of a modest income the demand was of poor judgment and was topped of with a "or else" tag as if our FO were ready to place the supporters section in the parking lot if season ticket sales quotas are not met. This made even singing in unison a task unlike just a season earlier when at the Rob we all had united to stand together again and the players always spoke on soccer game nights at the Rob. Compound this thinking with the fact that our old FO regime had the stadium designers build a freakin patio deck smack dab in the middle of the North End of BBVA which is akin to baseball parks not football parks. More so when downtown there are many bars and pubs to hang out at before and after the game. Where the soccer inside the ground has no timeouts, making the sport so appeasing to the spectator, the concept is to focus on the run of play down on the field over standing in line in a beer deck to order $10 domestic beers. After seasons of asking to be moved out of the corner flag section and as well mentioning over and over to our FO to get adidas to create/sell a Raven Black Dynamo jersey that will make lots of money for our club, our FO finally listened on both fronts!
Credit is always due to a town that goes long on their MLS team. And shows well on the road. If you can believe it, the New England Revs used to be the league leader in average attendance. Decades on and their own FO still does not have the wits to get their numbers back to those league leading levels. You see my friend, in each MLS market there are driving factors on why an MLS team might be struggling when years earlier they were tops of the league. With our nation, and Canada, the culture for the sport is so vast in its range of type of soccer aficionados that each market must be looked at with a need for optics I wrote on earlier. Please understand the detrimental impact that any Front Office can and will have on their own supporters section if they just don't care. Austin FC with owners like a McConaughey are totally invested in their fans and supporter section and stadium design and it shows right!
Compound this not caring attitude with when say our own FO, like Dynamo Forever and others have spoken on, where our own FO literally takes to task Houston Dynamo fans for the reason our club has dropped off in form. Us fans and supporters were put on the hook for shit that was directly at the hands of our own GM, FO and head coach. Shocking as it may sound to you, this drove many people away and it shows. Losing seasons be damned, just don't have a dig at your own fan base but our FO sure did. This the ticket sales and marketing staff not our accounting or charities staff mind you. The specific people that relish in what soccer fans bring to MLS and yet the ones in our town that thought taking shots at their own fans was the way to go. People have and will continue to speak with their feet.

 

While I see your point, and I get it (I've been a fan of some really bad sports teams in my life) it;s up to you to go or not. I'd have to think there should be more than a couple of handfuls of people who will show up and support the guys in orange. We can't use the ownership excuse anymore. There's a new guy. We can't use the GM excuse anymore, he's gone. People aren't showing up because they choose not to. We need more people to choose to.

 

is there any reason not to play Quintero now??

will Maric make it back or does Nelson have his job now?

What happened with Derrick Jones?

is Carasqullia done for the year?

PS

Can we play Austin every game??

 

what positive "essence" am i supporting? strip it down, what am i showing up to root on?

have they encouraged and promoted or discouraged, regulated, and moved around the SGs you're chastizing?

i think there is some naivete about the european supporter notion. when i lived in london i had chelsea QPR fulham all within about 1 mile walking distance. it's not just our team in some vague civic sense, it's literally the local team where i live. i can go watch a game for a few quid in 20 minutes of walking. in that case, 3 teams. that's how local support is.

and shhhhh you had choices. not just those 3, but about a dozen across the pyramid within an hour london tube ride. similar patterns hold across most major european cities. do you know there is paris FC also? yeah, pretty well no one does, because they suck. that rayo vallecano is in madrid? the normal fate of teams in big cities that try less hard is a local or novelty item. and they aren't like almost out to antagonize the fans that do show up.

fwiw Vallecano has a 14k capacity, averages about 6k when relegated, 11k when in la liga. and dark secret as you go down the effort meter the stadiums get smaller and also less full. we treat it like natural but there is a reason barnet FC plays to 6500 people max while chelsea plays to 40k. and there is a list of teams i could rattle off including wimbledon that have blown up after ceasing to be fun to follow.

in europe the dynamo would be supported by people from midtown, downtown, and the eastside, or those attracted by the team's feel or sense of effort. and if they lost like this year after year they'd be out of business.

this is all not getting into the basic problems the dynamo have in terms of getting along with the SG and the fans which pile atop the competitiveness problem. and your "winning" argument is strained. the fans are owed the sense that they might win the home game they are attending and that we will compete to get in the playoffs. that is the basic pro sports social contract. 8 wins in 2 years is not, if you come watch, there's a fair chance you go home happy, and 1 playoff season since 2014 is not, you're rooting for something competitive you can take some pride in. which then goes back to the essence question. if the team ceases to be competitive, what am i rooting for? they moved the team, changed the brand, antagonized the fans, and then offered a subpar product. what am i paying for? the more it turns into something vague like "houston soccer" the less magnetism there is.

fwiw the teams that came in the generation after us concentrated more on total fan involvement and experience which leaves an essence in a rough year.

i had a plan for last year that got mostly wiped for the pandemic after watching 1 game, punted to this year, and punted to next. i haven't heard from anyone in months.

i think a side effect of conservative houston meets MBA FO is everything feels like it's about milking the fans for $. the more it feels transactional the more i am like, ok, what kind of a team are you planning to send out. you want for me to root for the underdog, where is the soul of the thing?

 

Quintero has to be included away to LAEG for his effort on Saturday was sublime in link up with teammates and shear emotion in run of play!

Nelson sure has acquitted himself well.

I have no clue what happened with Coach Ramos and Derrick Jones. He seemed to be like Parker a lock starter and yet he sits many nights nowadays.

Carasquilla showed very well but perhaps needed rest from the three WCQ in a week for Panama duty.

There is this sentiment in our club's boot room as well. Good call Juve.

People also have other sports teams in our market to follow and when gridiron comes around some Dynamo fans might be inclined to go to a watch party for their college alumni or just have their fix of late season Astros fun. Or just want to spend more time with their wags! HA!

 

"Out with the old boss, in with the new boss, same as the old boss" is likely their view on things. When he shows real, structural change folk will come back. When he turns things around, new folk will show up.

Firing Jordan is a good first step. But it was never going to be enough in itself.