This game could shape up to be another snooze fest. SKC currently sitting 8th in the West against the 14th place Whitecaps. Some positives are that Vancouver is leaking goals worse than SKC with a goal differential of -7 to SKC's -4. Vancouver is also having a hard time finding the net scoring only 2 goals and haven't won a game yet. Of course this is MLS so anything could happen. My hope is that PV pulls some guys off the bench to get them some important minutes (Voloder, Pierre, Davis,,,)
2:08 am. But pretty normal, wake up the next morning and have a game to watch over breakfast. it's a good thing
I was thinking this was the first time we'd be headed to Canada since Covid, but apparently we were able to make the trip to Vancouver last October as well. Shows how much I was paying attention.
No matter how bad this team gets, I think they'll always have a chance to beat Vancouver. Dark day if they don't, though.
They've only got the one draw, though it was against NYCFC. Too early to call their surge late last year a false dawn. Still, we ride into the Coov sitting pretty on 3 goals for, 8 against, while they're sucking air on 2 goals for, 9 against. different worlds, eh, hosers?
I'm still recovering from the first time we played them. Up 3-0 on the road in the 73rd minute, and we somehow drop two points in stoppage time. That one still hurts to think about.
Sadly for them (Vancouver is a truly great city and deserves more), I'd think that game is among the club highlights. The others are all Davies doing cool stuff, and something from their playoff game win in 2017
Vancouver is a very cool place and worthy of a visit, especially when SKC plays there. My wife and I went and attended a game a BC place. We had a blast. The Canadians are great people and the city is alive with a lot of entertainment and activities. SKC happened to win that particular game, but the Canadian fans still treated us well and stayed friendly. With all the money and beauty of BC, I don’t understand how they don’t attract great players and coaches. If I was Canadian, I would live there.
The first 45 was about what I expected, a snooze fest of bad passes, bad movement, and just bad soccer. How many times is Shelton going to flop on the ground before PV pulls him out?
I only saw the second half but that was poor. On one hand, our defense does look better this year. But not really better enough. Some really good attacks by our offense. But not really good enough there either
SKC has almost become unrecognizable as a serious MLS team. Looking at the game as a whole, SKC never got organized into anything seriously resembling an attack. Shelton was garbage, Sweat was bad, Uri was not good, and the rest of the team was just ...... mediocre. PV needs to start looking in the mirror, because this mess is his doing.
What was disapointing, to me, was that we couldn't do the little things right. The little things, hitting the simpler, high percentage pass, trapping the ball close enough not to give it away, moving into good positions to regain possession, all the basics that kind of define who we have been the last 10 years, and we were struggling with them today. TBH it wasn't as bad as i kept shouting at the TV. our passing percent was 80 (not great, but good), our possession over 50 (don't know what this means anymore), and while they won the game and the xGame, the three most likely shots to end up in the back of the night (aside from the one that did) were by us, but as those were 16, 15 and 12 percent chance of goal shots, it's hard to identify injustice. But we played a really tight, interior third of the field game. JFR's movement was weirdly limited. Look at his average position on the pass map, it's nowhere close to where we get the most out of his game. Maybe these are the things vancouver forced on us? A couple general whines: I don't like this ref in the center. The game always seems choppy and inconsistent when he's in charge. The new field at BC Place is... maybe just new? It looks like a huge advantage to the home side, because the ball gets sucked into it a lot more than is normal. I'm sure that having been reviewed, etc, the goal was good, but it sure seemed offside to me, and I'm a grumpy old man. One big observation that spans several weeks: For a long time, we worked the budget better than most MLS clubs, and that meant a talent surplus for us. we had more players in the above max but not way above max category than anyone in MLS, and that meant that 1-15 we had more talent to call on than many other clubs. This new iteration of MLS, where there's a ton more talent, everywhere, is not playing to our budget savvy strength, and we look less talented, or at least not more, than everyone we play. Now, 2 DPs out injured plays into that, but it seems more than that.
SKC has consistently punched above its weight with a roster that included a ton of good players, a few great players, and no real stars. PV did his best work in the MLS era when he could pluck reliable players from the draft. The transition to relying on Academy players has clearly not worked out as they intended as the base of players previously supplied by the draft has not been replaced by a base of players supplied by the Academy. The result is a roster with awful depth and below average players in a number of spots. The few stars that come out of the Academy leave after a few years (Busio) and the others struggle to provide meaningful value to the first team. What we are left with is a roster filled with players who couldn't make it in Europe or recycled MLS "value" players. SKC 2022 is a reflection of the roster. 6 pts out of 6 games, 4 losses out of 4 away. It's JFR against the world. 1 vs 11 every match and man I feel bad for that guy. Time for PV and the gang to take an honest look in the mirror and admit that the "player pathway" isn't working. Sure, it gets a lot of kids NCAA scholarships, but it's not doing much of anything to support the first team.
In my opinion the success of KC has always had more to do with Vermes' skill in finding talented players and not his coaching skill. As for the Academy and SKCII, those player pathways will continue to be anemic producers of players as long as they are just tools to train players to play the "Vermes System" rather than develop and improve the general soccer ability of young kids. After nearly 13 years I am so ready for the Peter Vermes era to end. There is no one I have in mind to replace him, I am just tired of the futbol I have been watching and would like to see something new.
2 shitty teams in shitty form playing shitty soccer - this seems to have been, with the exception of COL and ATL who were both decent, the headline of all SKC games so far this season. I don't mind the losing as much as the absolute snoozefests that all SKC games were this season - we just can't create shit. This game in particular made me want to look at some games from the previous seasons to see whether you can actually find qualitative evidence for the 'Shelton makes Salloi and Russell score' claim. I feel like he actually does a fairly good job at dropping into the midfield to help with the buildup, but as soon as we are in the final third it almost looks like he's actively trying to not be available for a pass. I hope to see a Tzionis - Salloi - Russell attack against Nashville to see whether that can do anything. Also we miss Ilie's pass accuracy, especially with long passes, a lot.
God I'm eating crow so bad about Ilie these days. I was ready to move on from him to someone younger, more athletic, and/or cheaper. But he's been team of the week twice and made the bench this week. He's looked great. And it's just galling me that maybe the problem with our team wasn't an inathletic 6...
Ilie doesn't fix this team's problems. He would help with passing accuracy but he's not going to help create chances in the final 3rd and he certainly wouldn't help with our continued inability to defend in transition.
I guess I'm less suggesting that losing him was why our team is struggling now and more that... he's playing better than anyone on our roster currently is. Just doesn't feel nice.
i have literally fallen asleep during every single one of our games this season. now, in fairness, some of that is because i'm on the wrong side of 40 these days, but most of it is our abject play.
Just realize how many former SKC players go to other teams and do well or even better than they did playing for PV. Granted, some players don't (looking at you in particular Uri) To me, its a system or style of play issue that seems to release a player from the shackles of PV ball and lets them play to their greater potential.
Those last two sentences are where I am at with Vermes. His system is so ingrained into the organization that it would be a major tsunami to the club when/if he is let go, but right now I believe the league has finally passed him by and we need a more flexible, player friendly coach.