JMM's amazing start had dried up before the end of the season when he got injured. Eseentially he did well until people figured him out. Then he was a journeyman. As for Mathis, surely top-class players should be able to play under more than one coach and under more than one system? You make it sound as though Mathis' problems were caused by everyone bar himself.
Ehhh.... What do you want? Landon? He's with BL. Tim Howard? He's in MU. Let's say that he distinguished himself about as well as Lewis, Saneh or JMM and he's playing in Reading. Sounds about right to me.
Per game in MLS, Eddie Lewis was approximately twice as productive as Bobby Convey, as measured by goals & assists. Of course, as we all know, stats are for those who are too stupid to be able to measure Bobby's intangibles. OK, I'm stupid. Let's be smarter. Let's talk about all those MLS title runs that DCU had when Bobby was on the field. Oh, dear.
Amazing to think that were it not for that pesky work permit thing, Convey would be playing with the Spurs in London right now instead of at Reading. Who knows what that would have done for his game? I don't follow Tottenham so I don't know what their left side situation is like. In any case, don't forget Convey's age. 20 is still very young. Zavagnin just became a USMNT regular at age 30, so Convey's got plenty of time to continue improving. It'll come.
Or watching, as the case may be. Although who knows, maybe he would find more opportunities at Tottenham than Reading. It's not as if the Spurs are much better.
I hate to say it, but Spurs are far better than Reading. They'd walk this division with 100+ points. There's not a single team in the championship who'd get over 30 points if they were in the premier. To be honest I fail to see how a player struggling to make an impact in this division would find it easier in a higher one. It's not as if he'd be up against a lower quality of defender.
I dunno about the 100 points but I understand. So when newly promoted teams score 40 points, which they do on occasion, it's because they pick up new players? Or is this year's Colaship crop unusually weak? FYI, Bobby is flunking my Championship Manager test. Managing a Division 1 team, I am permitted by the board to go as high as 1.5 million pounds for a single player but my limit so far has been 450,000. One million is a damn lot of money. That player had better crack the starting lineup by September and be earning 7s and 8s, or I'll be disappointed. Life in the Colaship ain't that easy, you can't just throw out 1 million pounds on the hopes that the guy might be good in a year or two. Who knows, maybe the guys who wrote CM didn't capture Reading's fiscal mindset very well. But I bet they're not too far off with the economics.
interesting comparison between Convey and Lewis. neither brought home an MLS cup, and that goes for a vast majority of players in the league. i don't doubt your goals & assists while in MLS numbers, but since numbers are the topic, here are their respective D.O.B.'s; 05/27/83 and 05/17/74 i'm not here to argue who is the better player (or who will be more effective over their career), but in time it will be interesting to contrast Lewis and Convey in terms of weighing the college route versus MLS developing young players. of course Lewis didn't have the MLS option Convey had at the young age. Lewis, after his UCLA years, did do some fantastic developing in MLS from ages 22-25, while Convey spent ages 17-20 in MLS with no college experience. Lewis was productive in MLS, and garnerned the interest from Europe due to his professional play (as players like Sanneh, McBride, JMM and Olsen did). Convey was picked by and handed to the most successful MLS club and groomed in that environment, as well as with the youth national teams, and never got the college schooling/playing experience. and now both are employed in the Colaship. I don't know where I'm going with this, but it is key to remember that at the 2010WC Convey will be younger than Lewis was when he had that lovely assist to Donovan versus Mexico at the 2002WC. here are their ussoccer bio's: Lewis http://www.ussoccer.com/bio/bio.sps?iBiographyID=1704 Convey http://www.ussoccer.com/bio/bio.sps?iBiographyID=1725
100 points, easy. Teams that go up usually need at least half a dozen new top players to have any chance of staying up. The clubs down the bottom get accused on these boards of playing ugly football etc, and are therefore assumed to be of a poor standard, but they only do that because that's the only way they'll scrape points. Play an open game against the better sides and they'd be ripped to shreds. A club like WBA just doesn't have the quality to create more than a couple of a goals in a game unless they are lucky, so they have to concentrate on stopping the other team. Swindon and Barnsley are two examples of teams who tried staying up by playing good football, but they won a lot of friends and very few points. The simple fact is that if you play an open game against a team who are better than you, then you will usually lose. The field this year is particularly weak though.
tab5g - Your argument about the respective players' ages is well taken. My concern with Convey is that he has had everything handed to him. High school? Penn Charter, fancy expensive private school with a strong sports culture, smack dab in the middle of the Eastern Establishment. Nice work if you can get it. 99.9% of U.S. youth soccer players can't get it, though. Soccer club? FC Delco, of course. What better springboards to become the youngest U17 ever for the U.S. (at the time) and the youngest MLS draftee (ditto)? Got a problem making the senior national team? Nah, not when you live in the house of a good friend of the National team's coach, and the coach lives just a few miles away himself. Earn a passage to Europe via league accomplishments? Nah, that's for the plebes like Eddie Lewis. Just flash the senior national team caps and await the contract. Sandon Milbut wrote a great piece about the difference in Clint Dempsey's background vs. Convey's. Sandon wasn't ripping on Convey, so save the venom for me (he's a nicer guy than I am), but the point remains -- Convey has been cut every possible break by the system, while Clint has had to work his way up from the outside. With the result being that while Clint now appears to be at least as good a player, the English soccer system knows Bobby very well and wouldn't know Dempsey from Eastwood. I seriously wonder how good this player really is. The wheels have been so greased for him that it's tough to know how he would fare in an even competition, when he wasn't already favored coming into the battle.
Yeah, but a Brazilian complimented him in a meaningless friendly. Don't forget to put that on the BC hype sheet. A Brazilian.....complimented him.....in a friendly!!! Sad part is I see that posted constantly as a justification that he could be great. BC = prospect....& now we have quite a few. Going to get tougher and tougher for him if he can't get on the map at all this year for Reading. The statement I always wonder about is BC's need to move on to a bigger "challenge." Never sure he accomplished anything that wonderfull except being an average to sometimes good pro at DC. Flashes at best for the Nats. Your synopsis is very interesting. That's quite a "Golden Path" he's had there.
OK I have huge issue's with peioke using the Penn Charter thing. I don't go to Penn Charter but I go to another Inter-Ac school and Penn Charter is exactly like my school only it's co-ed and it's a friends school. They wouldn't have cut Bobby any breaks, I'm sure they knew about the soccer thing before he got there because he was on the upper school varsity team in 8th grade (not really a rare thing in inter-ac schools, a girl in my class played up in 8th grade and we had an 8th grader on varsity this year too) but still they wouldn't give him a break because he was the schools star soccer player. I'm sure his classroom teachers while very impressed didn't care and didn't grade him any differently than they did anyone else. Being in an Inter-Ac school doesn't mean you're cut a break and have everything in your life easy and it deffinately doesn't mean you're rich. I understand you're argument about him being so close to the coach and that possibly explaining his being capped so many times but I don't think Bruce would let him play if he didn't think he was capable of playing at that level, and he has shown that he can play at that level. He may have gotten more exposure and hype than Clint but we can all see that Clint is an amazing player, he'll probably be capped again unless Bruce is crazy, and he'll be in England in a few years probably anyway. If a player's good the English clubs will know about it, they're like gods of the soccer world they know who's good and who's not so good and they'll get what they want. Also remember that Bobby wasn't immediately over in England, he had work permit issues and if those rules under which he had to apply are still the same Clint couldn't play in England right now anyway.
Metro - I have no preconceived notions on this topic. But hey, I read. I read about how U.S. youth soccer allegedly is a silver spoon industry, catering to the comfortable white bread crowd. I read about the old boys network in U.S. youth soccer identification, where the players from the big-name clubs allegedly are more easily identified. I read about the DCU/Virginia network, whereby playing at either DCU or Virginia allegedly eases the path to the national team. Then, I see that the one player who received more caps as a teenager than just about anybody, without doing anything noteworthy in the league, fulfills all the criteria. And I say, hmmm. Penn Charter, it's a nice deal. You don't have to be rich to go there. You don't have to be rich to go to Penn, either. (I wasn't and I did.) But let's not kid ourselves, that's a pretty special circumstance, to attend a high school like Penn Charter, or a college like Penn. Not exactly slumming it.
I agree with whoever says Convey was nothing special in MLS. Basically, I think this year will decide his worth as a player and his chance of having any future involvement with the national team, at least for WC 2006. In Reading Convey is facing a challenge where being a youth phenom doesn't matter to anybody, all that matters is the product he puts on the field. The coach wants to win and wants Reading promoted, and if Convey, despite his heavy pricetag, isn't good enough to help them, then so be it. It is possible the Convey is just in an unfortunate situation in Reading, and no one coming in fresh like him would get to start more games since Reading is doing well now. If this is the case, perhaps Convey will show better next year. Either way, though, if he doesn't get PT for Reading, he will most surely not get any PT for the USMNT regardless of any alleged favoritism he may recieve or has recieved from Arena. No way a bench warmer in the Coca Cola Champ. gets to play over someone like Lewis who is basically a "star" or as close as it gets for his team. And I think Convey isn't going to see any more time at left back, just because he isn't a defender, and we would be better off throwing Gibbs or Sanneh or anyone else there who can defend somewhat.
I am disappointed by Convey's performance or lack there of with Reading because my frame of reference was spoiled by seeing him in the 2003 World Youth Cup. For me, he was one of the 5 or 6 best attacking players in that tournament. The others that caught my eye, and their current club performances, were: Andreas Iniesta, Spain and Barcelona [don't need stats] Javier Marschiano, Argentina and River Plate [don't need stats] Iain Hume, Canada and Trammere Rovers, 18 games, 6 goals Stephen Elliot, Ireland and Sunderland, 19 games, 8 goals A. Kone, Ivory Coast and Roda, 13 games, 5 goals Edgar Barretto, Paraguay and NEC, 7 games, 3 goals Except for Hume, all of these are playing in leagues at least equal to the Coca Cola League. Either Convey doesn't fit at Reading for some strange reason or there is something in his game that doesn't work when playing against adults that is not a big issue at the Youth level. In any event, this was my frame of reference, and using it, Convey's lack of immediate success at Reading is a surprise and disappointment.
Is this directed to what I said? Because if so, it doesn't make any sense. If not, I will take it as another gratiuitous anti-Convey rant that somehow makes the ranter feel better about himself.
Not directed at what you said. Look, I want BC to succeed. It is just tiring to read post after post by homer's who think their guy should be on the Nats. DC fans are always harping about bringing one of their guys to the team. People should get a shot when they prove themselves at the club level. BC was given a pass due to his potential.