Matt Turner at a palace made of crystals. (Olf Nottingham Forest)

If he can get back to this form by the WC next year we’ll have one position covered that we don’t need to worry about.

 

This is kind of a broader-than-Turner topic - and he's less germane (go ahead Tim, I set it up for you) to the topic in a way as a late-convert - but it's interesting that YA's have produced so few top-league starting keepers in the past generation. I'd have predicted, given the steadily rising popularity, pay and accessibility of soccer in the states, that more Turner types - good athletes with jump and hand-to-eye - might migrate to keeper, but if that's happened the results have not been stellar.

Oh well, hopefully Turner makes it to Lyon, starts and proves Gertrude wrong by reviving his career just in time for WC.

 

Perrish the thought!

 

Too many of them opted to remain in MLS (pay has improved) instead of taking their chances abroad. Not sure if it's a work permit issue (I mean Freese and Schulte only have a few caps so def very little NT exposure for clubs overseas who may have been tracking them).

 

I also suspect that a lot of the keepers of USMNT legend wouldn't fare quite as well with today's game. One of the reasons Robles replaced Howard at Everton after Tim's last big injury is that he was a better distributor who could find outlets under pressure instead of kicking the ball out of play. I still think Keller, Fridel, etc were better shot stoppers and organizers than the current crop, but I also suspect they'd struggle to start for the same teams they did because they weren't great distributors, especially with the ball at their feet.

 

You're reminding me that I'm partial to longbowmen, but I'm not sure how well they would fare against today's drones.

 

This is a pretty good point, I think.

 

lol, now I'm imagining a bunch of Nubian archers dropping their longbows to worship a heretofore unknown flying god of mass destruction

 

It wouldn’t be just Kasey Keller and Brad Friedel… it would be most keepers formed in the late 1980s and 1990s.

I think those kind of comparisons are worthless.

Who knows how Brad Friedel would have turned out if he was born in 1997 as opposed to 1972 (or whatever year he was born).

 

Friedel walked out of the fire with minimal hair, fully formed, onto the UCLA campus in 1990.

And I have a strong feeling if Brad Friedel and Kasey Keller were expected to handle and kick specific balls in order to win starting jobs, they would have done it until their appendages bled.

 

I don't see Matt beating out Perri for starting GK if both are at Lyon. If Perri leaves, then Matt has a chance.

 

Just real shocking they picked him. Guess those FA Cup performances were much better than I reckoned they were.

 

I normally agree, but if the question is "why is the current crop of keepers noticeably worse than the crop before ~2010" my contention would be that the coaching and player talent pools probably haven't changed much, but that the game is asking more from GKs than it used to. I find it a little hard to believe that guys like Howard were trained by other Yanks and became among the best in the world, but that suddenly the kids got worse despite more resources flowing into the sport.

 

I do recall more than one really poor pass out of Keller, and Brad could kick it a mile, which was always fun to watch. It still doesn't totally explain the lack of YA keepers - even if your footskills aren't great, like Turner you usually at least get a kick at the can. I think we might just have gotten spoiled by a few overlapping generations of exceptional goalies. And this is a Turner thread, not a general YA keeper thread, but i do find it odd.

 

From what I've seen the hand-to-eye skills are still there in American GKs and so is the jump (the organizing of defences, not so much IMO) but if they don't have the ball skills to pass it out from the back, MLS or the Championship is their ceiling

 

I think the Euro-born keepers have gotten better, rather than the Americans getting worse. I think in the 90s and 2000s, Euro club teams didn't invest too much in training goalies with their feet, more on shot-stopping, where Americans excelled. Since the emphasis on playing out of the back and being good with your feet, American goalies have regressed. Howard, Keller, Friedel were never great with their feet from what I can recall.

 

The U.S. GK rot set in way before "must be able to pass out of the back very well" phenomena.

I think it's just a missing generation thing.

Donovan, Dempsey, Beasley, Bradley, Holden, Cameron all came from the birth years 1982-1987 and all made it to the Prem and were important contributors to the USMNT.

Why didn't the U.S. produce much top end talent for the birth years 1990-1997?

Why did we get another influx of talent around 1998-2002 birth years?

Friedel, Keller, Hahnemann were all born in a cluster between 1969-1973.

Golden generations happen. Missing generations happen. This has been a thing for most every country over the course of the last 100 years.

It can happen with GKs and it can happen with field players.

 

This is still OT so I apologize, but there are non-US MLS keepers - Frei and Blake, for two simple example - who spent a lot of their career in MLS and you could well argue are better than most Yank keepers - save, perhaps, Turner at his peak. (and you'd get an argument on that as well.) So if it were just "Europe don't want them" you'd think MLS might have a few more dominant Yank keepers - anyway, this is really way OT, so I'll stop. Turner's trajectory has been odd - and perhaps a result of not playing regularly. He was really good for a short span there - which, of course, contributed to his big transfer. And then never got his mojo back. That Miazga of YA keepers.

 

I mean, Miazga was in an MLS academy at age 12 or 13. As I understand it, Turner still thought of soccer as his "side sport" in his sophomore year of high school at 15. As much as I'd like to roast every MLS club for not drafting him in the 2016 SuperDraft, it's hard to blame those scouts for not trusting a guy whose career peak at the time was making the All-MAAC first team in his senior year of college.

Based on his resume on paper, Matt Turner has no business even sniffing PL game time. To me, his career trajectory is somewhat miraculous.

 

I think a lot of the fan base overhyped Turner early in his usmnt career and thought he was better than he was.

I never believed in him. It just wasn’t there.

 

1 1/2 years of no consistent play has taken it's toll. Hiopefully he starts immediately in France if the move goes through.

 

The early days, sure, but he had a few very decent season in MLS and had his learning curve not flattened, on physical skills alone, his metrics and the eye test showed he could hang, he just did/does not have a head for the game at anywhere near the level he needs to make up for his lack of touch and short distribution (long distribution is fine.) Its a bummer. Ted and Coach could have fixed him with a few heartfelt stories.

 

So was it just his agent working wonders or the EU passport or the fact the owners are Americans, what got Lyon to drop some cash on Matt?

 

A good agent is always important and the EU passport, while helpful, isn't that important in France (if EPB got a WP, the threshold isn't unmanageable) but the key is that he's a decent GK. Otherwise Glasner wouldn't have taken him or given him Cup starts at all.

The owners are businessmen first, Americans second. They want a decent GK for their budget. Matt ticks both boxes

 

thanks Reverse Nostradamus