Before the game I would have taken a draw so congrats to the Galaxy, they did have a solid game. However, it's strange how we have 65+% possession most of the time but it seems 75% of our goals are scored on counter attacks. We don't know how to break a packed defense.
In fairness few teams do. But yes, we could, and should, be better at it, especially given our offensive talent level.
Best performance of the year except for set pieces. Pec and Paintsil are huge assets. Riqui picking out some beautiful passes. Aude has to be most improved player of year And Vancouver now has the most hideous pitch in the league (Seattle put something more pleasant to look at down this off season)
team is winning on talent and carrying the coaching staff, 8 games in and vanney still hasn't fixed the set piece defense, you'd figure he'd improve that by now.
Agreed. When McCarthy delays too long in getting the ball off his foot on a simple pass out of the back and it is blocked, he at least saves the ensuing shot. Bond would have let in a goal on a play like that!
Yep. Fortunately and unfortunately we are winning games on talent alone. Like I said earlier in the thread Vanney is taking a winning side and sand bagging them for most of the game with his idiotic formations and then letting them play about 20 mins in the correct formation. We have seen over and over that Paintsil wide right is really dangerous. More dangerous than Pec anywhere. Paintsil wants to run from the outside in with his head up to make a pass into the box or maybe a shot. With that information Vanney takes him and puts him on the left. Totally taking away his natural gifts. That doesn’t work so he puts him in the middle where he has to run from the inside out. Now he is running away from goal to the corner flag and can’t make a pass into the box so he has to lay it off every time to Yamane. With 20 mins left he goes to his preferred position and right away is involved in two goals. why does Vanney make it so difficult for himself? He constantly gets in his own way.
I don’t know if that’s fair about Paintsil. He seemed as much central as on the left while Pec was on the field and combined a lot with him. all our attack went down that side. but it is true that when Paintsil went to the right wing he was unstoppable against a. An outer team set up to only attack.
I assume he was talking about the last game where Vanney put Paintsil on the left. That didn't work so this game he moved him to inside right, which was still congested. Only when Pec was subbed out did Paintsil get to be a true winger, and that was also when he really took over. Aided, as you noted, by VAN pushing some of their defenders up.
Vanney, being 1920’s smart, seems to fancy a WM in attack right now. Aude a left winger and Painstil and Pec on top of each other as right winger and inside forward. IMO, this “overload” as the announcers have been saying for a few weeks, just has them stepping on toes and negating their speed. Such a waste. Play a 4-2-3-1 on their strong foot, let Yamane and Aude overlap and game over.
Our defense still makes me anxious. But we are getting the results. And man when Paintsil can run at tired defenses and Puig gets a little space in midfield to see the passing lanes… yikes.
Great road win on yet another sh!t turf field. It's already our 3rd road win this season! I'm sure the boys had a little extra motivation from that "PRO" Referees report that indeed showed that we got screwed last week. But we have a MAJOR Achilles heel this season, defending those damn set pieces! How the hell does Fagundez end up defending their most dominant header of the ball? We should look to a strategy of not giving up so many set piece chances if the defense is gonna continue to be giving up set piece goals at a record-breaking pace. I think Vanney has seen basically all of the ways our MLS competition is going to play against us, we should have strategies to adjust to them all. There's the STL/LAFC method of aggressive pressing/fouling early and often to get dangerous turnovers. There's the NSH/VAN method of ceding possession and basically bunkering all game to get us tired/out of shape to counterattack. Only MIA played us straight up and we had the vast majority of good play in that game. SEA game was a farce with the waterlogged pitch that actually went in their favor as the game progressed. Today was a decent showing as far as being patient and taking the chances when they presented themselves without getting too stretched, except for the 10-15 minutes after our 1st goal. We need to stay focused and look for the killer blow before we give up the tying goal. Also a bit lucky that Kreilach put his cleats on backward as he had several chances for VAN when he came in, but alas we still had 2 goals left in the chamber. The scary part is that we can play even better, lots of things to fine tune. And when we do... Ooohh. Go Galaxy!
One aspect this season which I absolutely love, we finally have an actual difference maker on the bench. Having Diego ready to go, who can not only offer us a different tactical look, can present quality and score/assist late in the game off the bench!!
It will be interesting to see how flexible Vanney is with formations and personnel when our new defender is available, and Neal is fully fit (3 back formation? Or with one of them drifting into the 6 position since passing seems to be their strong suits as well as being a defender)
Now that we've had a few games with him, I rate JMac above Bond, by a small bit. JMac looks like a significantly better reaction shot stopper, but Bond was a much better acrobatic shot stopper, you're far more likely to see the former than the latter so it feels like an upgrade. Neither seems great at "bossing their box", but JMac's been a significant upgrade at 1v1's, which we will probably face a lot, considering how many "counters" we see (congrats on finally getting my picture earlier skydog lol). I think Bond was slightly better at JMac with the ball at his feet, although not really that much better, so its not like we downgraded all that much there. (I noticed the way JMac threw himself at a rebound opportunity, he looked like he was coached to "make himself bigger", 6:18 on the highlight video)
Why are you worried about this - Vanney already fixed this by telling the team they just need to “concentrate more” on set-pieces! Why bother teaching the team the specifics of corner-kick defending (like defending the far post or matching up our better defenders with their best goal scorers) when you can just drop Yoda-esque pearls, like Vanney does?
tbf Vanney seems hardly alone in this. Following the national teamers in Europe, you get the chance to see "corner kick" defending at the highest level and I don't think anybody guards the posts anymore. Makes zero sense to me unless the goal is offsides coaching.
Personally I don't think McCarthy is being given enough credit for the amazing shot-stopping display he is putting on this season. Yes, Bond would do the occasional leaping acrobatic looking save, but those aren't the real testers. Where McCarthy excels is on low worm-burner shots to the side that are almost impossible to get down in time to save - his stellar reaction time and technique has saved us 3 or 4 sure goals of that type. He also uses his quickness to snuff out 1v1’s consistently, a big change from Bond who was quite weak in that area. (We saw that quickness last night when he used it to successfully recover from an uncharacteristic blunder.) And this isn’t just a subjective claim -- McCarthy has the stats to back up his superior shot-stopping ability. The advanced stat that Fbrefs uses to capturing this trait is the rather baroque: “PSxG-GA - Post-Shot Expected Goals minus Goals Allowed: PSxG is expected goals based on how likely the goalkeeper is to save the shot. Positive numbers for PSxG-GA suggest better luck or an above average ability to stop shots.” McCarthy’s PSxG-GA = 3.8, which is 2nd best in the league, behind only SKCsTim Melia at 4.0, and solidly ahead of 3rd place Callendar at 2.8. That means after just 8 games John has already saved us an estimated 3.8 goals more than would be expected from an average MLS keeper. That is ~0.5 goals saved beyond expected per 90 minutes. For comparison on this measure both Bond and Bingham were a negative -0.18g/90m last season. Obviously there is more to goalkeeping than shot-stopping. And many of you are critical of John’s command of his box. I haven’t noticed this as much but I don't doubt it - I just haven't been focusing on it. In any case, shot-stopping is job #1 for a keeper and McCarthy has been absolutely stellar in this area. His shot-stopping success has single-handedly (or maybe two--handedly ) won us probably 3-5 points in the MLS standings. Well done, John!
Sorry, I was unclear. I understand teams have moved away from putting players at the posts. I meant good teams don’t leave big open areas on the weak side for unmarked attackers to waltz into completely unmarked. if you watch the replay our response to that corner was absolute Fail 101. All of our left side defenders ran to the center of the field, leaving a big area wide-open right in front of our goal. A big part of defending is not allowing your opponent to drag everyone to one side of the field. That’s the “balance” part of pressure-cover-balance defending principles.
Vancouver fans leaving, @ACBrigade celebrating the 3-1 win! Let’s go @LAGalaxy 💙🤍💛 pic.twitter.com/tHbAYV6Gx4— ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰 シ (@ChrisV323) April 14, 2024 kudos to our traveling fans!
My only coaching note is that, whatever our strategy is on defending corners, throw that in the trash and light it on fire. and use any other strategy.
The interesting thing is that it looked like they abandoned zonal marking for more man marking on corners this game. That worked OK for most of the game (they had a ton of corners after all), but sometimes man marking on a corner can be harder for a substitute to jump right into when they enter the game, which might have been the issue on the goal. Either way, it doesn't look like we aren't doing anything; it looks like everything we are doing is ineffective, which usually means this is more about personnel than tactics.