After another weekend of American soccer 2 things jumperd out at me. First, to my utter disbelief, Troy Perkins started in goal for DC United. Second, I looked over the A-league results last night, and noticed that Portland won 3-1, improved to 4-0 on the season. 2 totally unrelated facts right? Well consider that Perkins start seems to indicate that Doug Warren, a member of the US Olympic qualifying team is now the 3rd string keeper in DC. Then consider that Josh Saunders improved to 4-0-0 on the season in goal for Portland, and 14-4-2 in 20 games for the Timbers overall (who started last year 5-7 with Spiteri in goal). Meanwhile, DJ Countess was traded to make way for Scott Garlick, and is mired on the bench in Chicago behind Henry Ring. So whats all that mean? Well it makes me wonder about the goalkeeping selections for that last Olyqual team. Josh Saunders was not a part of that team, but right now he is having the most success by far, albeit in a league lower than MLS. Its been beaten to death about field player selections, but goalie selections havent been talked about much. What makes me wonder, is that oftentimes evaluating goalkeepers is VERY subjective. Its sometimes hard to measure their impact on a game, because frequently they have very few plays that matter, and bad positioning can turn a routine save into a highlight reel one, or make a difficult save look easy. Then there is the notion of how well a player controls his box.. was that ball really an easy catch? Did a keeper really have no chance to come off his line? And even worse, the "organizing the defense factor". Statisticly speaking, what matters? GAA, Save %, Catch/Punches? Who was the best of those 3 options, and how were we supposed to know? And how do we know it wasnt Perkins, or even Cronin, or somebody we havent even thought about? Then add to that our development system, that is extremely multi-tracked. How do you rate Countess vs. a college keeper? Our keepers have been remarkably consistent between teams at the youth level, but then have we seen the same kind of dominance continue? How much did that weigh in favor fo Countess in goal. Then regional issues, Warren, playing in DC probably had much more exposure leading up to the competition than Saunders, playing in SJ and Portland. Then there is the college player vs. the pro player. Troy Perkins is right now apparently better than Doug Warren, despite very limited pro experience. So did this happen in the last year, or was he better in college, better while Warren was a pro and he was not? Its an interesting question, one that I dont think we know the answer too. If you look at the impact of Clint Dempsy, Joshua Gros and Chad Marshall, all with limited pro-experience doing very, very well this season, with Nat Borchers, Pat Noonan and Damani Ralph being the banner carriers last year. Did they become better overnight, or did they just have a bigger stage to show that ability off. It makes me wonder if pro players and development are better than the college aternatives are overplayed. It could just be that by and large, a player is a player is a player, regardless of where they are. They either have it, or they dont. Consider Baseball and Basketball. The single most polished player and quite possibly the most valuble player in the NBA in my mind is Tim Duncan, a 4 year college guy. Overall in Baseball, the trend has become that College players are succeeding at a much higher rate then High School ones. Why I think this is signifigant is because while making guesses on who will be great at 18 is much harder than at 22, it does indicate that there is no clear disadvantaging in the process. Is there any concrete indication that College stifles development? To me its always seemed that it fosters it, it allows players to polish there game instead of fighting for a paycheck, and it lets young men get used to being lockerroom and field leaders. That kind of confidence building, a deep faith in their own abilities I think is overlooked. There is the level of play arguement. Look at John Stead for Blackburn, formerly of Huddersfield Town, in the English 3rd division (iirc). Clearly the level of play in that 3rd Division is MUCH lower than even in MLS. How much lower, its hard to say. But despite that, he was able to easily move up to the Premiership and immediately start scoring goals. Is the notion that you need a lot of time to adjust a false one? Isnt it possible that some players may just be instantly ready for a higher level, while others will struggle with the transition? And if in fact some players can instantly/very quickly adjust to a higher level, shouldnt we be trying to scour the college ranks with our Youth Nat teams for those players? Finally, an aspect of college soccer occured to me that I dont remember being touched on. While the EXTERNAL pressure to succeed in the media and on campus might not be there, the pressure that others put on you, but doesnt college provide a GREAT environment for young men to deal with INTERNAL pressure, the pressure that people put on themselves. These guys have 4 years to make there mark at their university, 4 years to attempt to win a national championship. By their senior season they are down to 1 shot, and 1 shot alone. I know that in college, that goal of being a national championship isnt a mickey mouse thing, at the time its everything your playing for, and I bet most people who have one won in any sport are VERY proud of that accomplishment. So really, is there any more (internal) pressure packed environment we could put them in short of the olympics themselves? Reserve games? Please. The MLS cup? Certainly it would be a huge goal, but they have to have in the back of their minds that they are young, and may have many more chances. For a college senior, or someone who plans on going pro in the next season, there is a grim finality of it, the looming end of a dream in crushing fashion that cannot be simulated anywhere. So, in short 2 issues I guess Im raising about the U-23 team. First, how should we evaluate our goal keepers? What is it that we should stress? Do we overemphasize previous youth nat experience? Second, is college really the hinderance or excuse some would have us believe? Is it just that our ability to look at college players is made difficult by geographic differences so that we make mistakes, thinking some players are better than they are because they have name recognition, while letting a Josh Gros go unnoticed? Some random thoughts I'd thought I share.
You’ve put together a very thoughtful post, with a lot to chew on. There’s no way I can respond to everything you say here now, but let’s get a dialogue going, particularly about one item you discuss that particularly interests me: Talent assessment, and its corollary, performance projection You mention Tim Duncan. The story goes that San Antonio’s GM and his wife (now, don’t think I’m being sexist here, I am not) took in a Wake Forest game to “scout” Tim. After the first half, wife says to husband: “Well, I guess we can leave now; I don’t think we need to see anymore.” Meaning? Sometimes everyone can look at a player and conclude they are going to be a star. It doesn’t take a whole lot of analysis, or hard thinking. It’s obvious to anybody and everybody. Certain players invariably fall into that category. Tim Duncan, Mark Prior (major league ready as a sophomore), LeBron James, Landon Donovan, Freddy Adu. Basically you would have to be in a vegetative state not to realize at the beginning that their career arcs are heading to stardom, and heading there fast. But even players who some think are “can’t miss” are going to be thought by others as doubtful. DaMarcus Beasley is a prime example. There are still folks who think he is too technically weak. Yet, if he stays healthy, he may play in three World Cups. And then there is the great mass of very talented players whose career progressions are fraught with uncertainty. Back in 1998, I saw Indiana beat Penn State in the Big 10 tournament final. Indiana had 5 professional level players on that team, including Nick Garcia and Dema Kovalenko. Now, I consider myself a reasonably astute judge of talent – not perfect by any means, but pretty good. And on that day, I thought Lazo Alavanja was one of the best college players I had ever seen; right in front of me he did a turn on the ball that I thought was astonishing. And I wasn’t the only one who thought he was great. He was drafted high, and even Ray Hudson sung his praises. Yet where is he now? The A league. I would have never projected him to drop to that level, but there he is. For a few players, a very few, you know how great they will be. For some, you just never know. It was Sandon Mibut, I think, who was at a college cup final and overheard some MLS guys talking about Pat Noonan, who was going to stay in college. You know what they said? “He’s wasting his time there—there’s nothing more he can get out of it.” They KNEW, just by looking at him, he was professionally ready. Yet I think you are onto something – the ability of even professional level, full time soccer guys, to assess talent and project it forward, is very very flawed. I think part of the reason is that, in the soccer world, there is no formal discipline or approach to evaluating talent. The NFL has its combine – which is really a first cut to see if you can compete athletically – and then a whole tradition of film study and performance rating, as well as intelligence testing (Wonderlic). In baseball, you have a mountain of statistics, and either binary measures you can track (“hits a curveball, can’t hit a curveball) or precise measures (throws at XX mph). In basketball you have fewer statistical measures, but all of them are meaningful – points, rebounds, blocked shots, turnovers, steals, field goal and free throw percentage. You have measurably physical attributes: vertical leap, height, arm length, hand size. And then you have defense: can new Player X stop/limit current veteran and strong NBA Player Y? If he can, well, he’s good. But in soccer, we don’t have anything like this, (though some clubs do beep tests and VOX2 measurements). It very very non scientific – it’s all about “experts” doing observations and coming to conclusions, which sometimes can be right, but sometimes can be terribly wrong. I don’t know what the answer is, but I think soccer is way behind other sports in this regard.
Karl, Boy are you setting yourself up to be flamed by our European and Latin posters! I agree with you that more objective evaluation methods could be developed with the caveat that even with the other major US sports these are only about 50% effective.
I don't think Karl mentioned that we could have more objective evaluations in soccer. Personally, and I think Karl was saying this, I think soccer is not something that can be objectively quantified. There was quite a bit of this discussion in the Freddy Adu thread aboyt "pointing." You can't take stats and tell if a player is great or not, you can't figure out their acceleration and vertical leaps and tell me they will be good players. In football, if you have a cornerback that runs a 4.2 40 and has a 35" vertical, chances are he'll be pretty good. You might not ever have to see him play, but in soccer there's nothing comparable.