Bradley got the interim job in 2006 after Arena was not renewed following the WC2006 disaster. Bradley was made permanent after a string of good results and did get a 2nd cycle. Bradley benching Donovan at GC2011and the embarrassing L2-4 to Mexico got him sacked. Sunil did try to hire Klinsmann in 2006 in much the same way Crocker tried to hire Klopp in 2024.
How acquainted was Berhalter with the USMNT pool when he took the job at the end of 2018. Looking at GB's 2019 choices I would conclude not well acquainted. At least Poch knows what good soccer players look like.
Having the horses is all relative to something standard. I suspect that he's going to have to adjust what he wants to do because we don't have a lot of complete options back there. He's also known as a really strong teacher, so maybe even from afar, he can help develop more skills. Or maybe he finds a tactical compromise that elevates folks. Or maybe he doesn't and he has to pull back. I'm just saying that I think this will be the toughest part for him. He's a super positive dude, and I think that it's not just evaluation -- it's evaluation in knowing who can improve and how much when his experience is at the club level. I think he will evaluate Walker Zimmerman and Tim Ream pretty accurately. But he might overestimate his ability to get Walker to improve or to work around Tim's issues given that he usually has a LOT more time with the players.
I simply don't think the evaluation phase is the hard part. Everyone has their misses, but I also think a good percent (not all) of the mis-evaluations are a combination of not understanding what a coach wants out of a player and overestimating the alternatives. Poch has been coaching elite players for a while, and I doubt he's ever had a pool this unskilled given his "worst" team was probably at Espanyol. If that's what you mean -- figuring out how much the broader pool can do in context of his preferred tactical plan -- then I agree. I just don't think the player v player assessment will be that hard. But then again, I think a lot of the pool can be differentiated from club work. And especially with just two years, it's important to focus on the swing areas.
The pool is the pool. It is by far the best pool we have ever had since I have been following the USMNT. The manager's job is to get the very best out of this particular pool of players. That is the job.
First things first, Poch needs to keep the Nations League streak alive or ‘dolo will be getting a phone call.
To me, the crucial man now is Johnny Cardoso. He has to live up to the role, and show he truly loves the shirt giving his best every time.
That probably sells me on Poch. He and Crocker speak the same language and presumably Poch trusts Crocker who has now had a year to survey the USMNT pool and performance.
Or maybe the people trying to examine the problems with Berhalter, were right, and part of the reason Copa America happened, and the desultory exits against Uruguay, and the Netherlands were quality illustrations of their arguments in real time? It may be annoying to listen to, but how much worse was actually watching that Copa America performance? That WC '22 exit? I'd say, far, far worse, and I found the excuse making of his coaching every bit as aggravating as some found the excuse making for the player performances. As mentioned before, I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle, this wasn't all Berhalter, hell it can't be, but can he escape criticism for it? I don't think so. I think it's patently obvious he's always been part of the problem. It's a problem that's persisted with him elsewhere in exactly the same descriptions, and in this case, in new manifestations. Is some of it: squad fit, style of play, the lack of enough connectors? Maybe. Some of it's player health. Some of its form. Some of its mentality, it's I imagine bits of everything, and some of it is him. I don't think it's possible that it's ALL Berhalter, or ALL Player, or even Mostly one or the other. But I do think he was a much worse fit the second cycle than the first, probably the only coach we've had where I kinda also buy the "no second iteration" view so many have (I think the vast majority of other cases are explicable in other ways beyond just a second term being inherently foolish).
New additions to the gear pack when USMNT report to camp next month pic.twitter.com/DJpYpq5SXv— Charles Boehm (@cboehm) August 15, 2024 I need to get me some maté
I agree with this. My issue is pretending everything is all about the coach at every turn. When people say things like "Berhalter lost to..." or "Berhalter beat...", insert coach of your choice, as if the coach is out there doing everything right or wrong it just gets ridiculous. When every conversation is all about the coach and the players are an afterthought, I find it ridiculous.
When anyone says he hasn’t won anything…Pochettino won Ligue 1 in 2022. He was fired a month later. That’s what kind of job that was.
The one thing I'll give Berhalter is that despite a revolving door at CB throughout his tenure, and some hot and cold personal feuds, it seems pretty clear that he built a darn good defense circa 2020 post Covid Reboot through the WC. They gave up some goals here and there, but until the Dutch game they didn't give up more than two goals in any match, and pitched an absolute ton of clean sheet shut outs, and that was w/Steffen at his worst starting a bunch of games. They got great defensive performances quite consistently, and a huge percentage of the goals given up tended to be on individual mistakes, rather than lineup/set up decisions you could trace to him. So I give him credit for really quite excellent defensive showings for most of 2020-2022, the only awful performances that stick out would probably be away against Canada, away at Costa Rica, the friendly vs Uruguay in '22, the exhausted, run into the ground problem, as well as LVG figuring the system out for that knockout match, but generally speaking, the defense was sound despite HUGE problems at goalie, and as previously mentioned, a total ---- show situation at CB. So credit to him there. But the attack? The attack was unimaginative and yet also, seemingly overly complicated, players were often seemingly doing things entirely predictable (Weah and Jedi send in crosses, Pulisic and Dest cut in, McKennie try for some flair, and whenever we ran into a low block, or a sound defensive team, our attack ran out of ideas seemingly instantly (and let me underline that nothing was worse than the persistent use of that crossing game when he started short strikers and strikers with weak aerial games)...The attack was always just ----. How much of that was Reyna's injuries, Tillman not putting it together is open to question, but I definitely think fundamentally, he just did not know how to combine the parts to make an effective attack, period (I guess the exception would be Caribbean sides, particularly at home). was some of that mismatched attacking pieces, an endless litany of injuries at CM, WF, and Striker, and lack of reps together, stylistic mismatches etc? I'm sure that was part of it, but it wasn't the only reason.
I think more than anything, if our manager is now Mauricio Pochettino, it’s a huge energy shift for every player in our player pool.
My expectations for 2026 are going to be higher than those for the Copa, but not much higher. Qualify out of the group, ideally with a game to spare. Win a R32 game At least be competitive in a R16 gamez To recap what my expectations were for the Copa, they were. Beat Bolivia and Panama with a game to spare. Even when rotating , play competitive with Uruguay. Be competitive in a knockout round game. Basically, I wanted the US to not just scrape by with the absolute bare minimum result like they had done for 2022 World Cup qualifying and to escape the group stage in Qatar. This “we hit the absolute bare minimum standards” that was a hallmark of the Berhalter tenure needs to change. That’s not saying World Cup semis or bust.
The USMNT is a top-five coaching job in international soccer. They had to get this right and I’m delighted with Mauricio Pochettino… but here’s why it went wrong the last time the US hired a foreign coachhttps://t.co/q9VYH4OiBD— Tim Howard (@TimHowardGK) August 15, 2024
Honestly screw the NL. Just a cash grab. Everything we do should be oriented towards peaking in early summer 2026.
I am struggling to rectify: With this: The difference between bare minimum of the Berhalter era and what you expect now is only a lower margin of loss in a Round of 16 match? In which we're at home, and with a pool four years older? If we're upset with bare minimum standards, certainly we have to raise them, right?
The Great Hedge | Installing Mauricio Pochettino as #USMNT manager is huge, easily the best hire we could have expected. But it’s no guarantee of success. Why we should extend the same level of patience and grace to the new manager as we did to Berhalter.By: Tactical Manager— World Soccer Talk Fake Pitchbot (@WSTPitchbot) August 15, 2024 Lmao