Ryan Nelsen, in SoccerAmerica, on Freddy Adu - "Every coach he's had has pretty much just let Freddy play. He's so naturally talented that nobody has told him how to think the game [my italics] ... I tell him he has to figure out ways to out-think opponents and what to do when he doesn't have the ball." For the sake of our other youths in Florida, I certainly hope that Mr. Nelsen is incorrect.
Gaven seems to be reading the game well enough. And, if you look a little further down the line, Beasley, Donovan, and Convey too. If not so much with the club team, with the national team when he's in his ideal position, in Convey's case.
Fair enough. So either the Bradenton coaches treated Freddy differently, or tactics aren't his strong suit.
Can anyone really expect a 15 year old to be tactically savy? Just the fact that he can compete with men at this level at such a young age is incredible.
All of the players that you reference are all older than Freddy and none had anywhere near the microscope placed upon them. Look at the leap Freddy has made in the past year, with intense world-wide scrutiny every step of the way. That's not to say Nelsen's point isn't valid, but I don't think anyone was talking about the tactical awareness at the pro level of any of those other guy's at age 15. Heck, Donovan hadn't even gone to Germany at that age. Give Freddy some time; he's gone from "the man" to just part of the team and that takes some adjustment both confidence-wise and tactically. As to John R's larger point about Bradenton, there may be something to that. You can't learn game tactics from drills or even from scrimmaging against the same players over and over. It comes from being put into competitive situations over and over when you're forced to make split-second decisions. Bradenton, while better than nothing, is still a far cry from reserve or youth matches in a professional system.
Not technically savvy by adult standards, but as technically savvy as the other U17s. We should expect that at least that much, because although Freddy is younger than his U17 compatriots, he's also quite a bit smarter, as evidenced by the fact that he skipped several grades of school. That's my line. You're supposed to say that it's credible.
That's exactly why I think Freddy will make great strides before the end of the season. Also, it seems to be taking the whole team quite a bit of time to adjust to Nowak's style - that makes Freddy's curve that much higher as he's learning from guys who aren't comfortable either.
Good point. To put it further, it's possible that DCU will never adjust to Nowak's style. It could be that he's just a rotten coach. In which case Freddy's learning curve is that much higher yet.
Nelson's quote is pretty obviously implying that Freddy was treated differently because he's special. Even with the u-17s it looked like Adu did what he wanted, and the rest of the players were supposed to support him.
OK, let's consider that possibility. We have no way of knowing if this is true unless we receive information from a reliable Bradenton insider, but it sounds reasonable. A good thing or a bad thing? The Good Argument - Freddy is a 13, 14 year old kid at Bradenton. Don't kill the talent as it's developing. Don't overcoach. Let him be creative. The Bad Argument - Rightly or wrongly, European youth professional development programs demand structured play at a very early age. They wouldn't just let Freddy dribble around. Also, since it was common knowledge that Freddy was heading straight for pro play after Bradenton, it would seem irresponsible for Ellinger et al to just "let Freddy do his thing" without breaking him into the harsher realities of professional play. But again, all a hypothetical discussion, based on the premise that Freddy was indeed treated differently at Bradenton.
How could Nowak be a rotten coach? If he was a rotten coach there would be no way he would have gotten all of that top level coaching experience at other clubs before joining DC United. Oh, wait a minute...
Well as we see right now, his tactical limitations are his primary weakness. How much less skillful would he be if they spent more time drilling him on positioning and making runs? I don't think we'd see much difference. Maybe he wouldn't have the same moments of brilliance because he'd do the safe thing. His first goal against SK just struck me as the wrong thing to do as soon as he started dribbling, and the next thing I know he's scored. So I think that the difference in play, hypothetically, would be he plays a more solid, but less brilliant game if he had more tactical training (I don't know how much he actually had). Which is better now? Probably playing solid mistake free soccer. Which would be better down the road? It depends on how good he gets. Keep in mind that this entire post was made on about 800 assumptions.
As opposed to how many assumptions for the typical bigsoccer.com post? If they'd just give me Bruce Arena's damn job I wouldn't have to speculate so much. Heck, I'd even give you the scoop, too.
I wouldn't want to have his job. I could just follow him around and takes notes so that I could post juicy tidbits that would have the board in an uproar. Oh, and the average BS post has roughly 768 assumptions.
Side Note - By the way, my kid played twice against a Magic squad in a 3 vs. 3 tournament last month. They were good, as you might expect. Not as physically aggressive as one often sees with Magic players, but our boys showed 'em the way , and the Magic kids had their dander up in the rematch. Good stuff.