Zimmerman has more decisiveness -- a key skill for a CB -- in his pinky finger than the rest of our CB crew combined, it seems. He's not the most skilled, or most talented, but the dude plays with fire, intensity and he commits.
Marsch is an excellent fit for you guys, a good coach, and your talent is much better than most on here would admit. I think he's a better coach than Herdman in a number of ways, but they both have an upside limitation that really doesn't matter to you because that's not where your talent goes. The US probably has more talent if we strained it all out and put it in a bucket, but you folks have high end attackers, a TON of team speed, a functioning goalkeeper pool, and as you note, very few players who feel like they are owed anything. That group fits together very well. And the lack of entitlement means that you don't have the issues we seem to right now. (Also, don't underestimate the keeper gap -- that was basically the difference in WCQ. Our xGD was better than yours, but your keeper went ham and Steffen sucked.) I do agree the US will be okay ... except maybe at keeper. Schulte's performance was encouraging. The US was a much better team playing aggressively through the 2022 World Cup. And then we stopped being aggressive and basically came out flat way too often. A new coach can hopefully fix that. But to do that, he's going to have to send home guys who don't work hard.
Don't get me wrong, I thought Ream and Cardoso in particular were poor, or at least they were the guys I kept noticing as they passed the ball away constantly. But, we do tend to focus on the passer exclusively when the reality is the movement ahead of the guy with the ball is every bit as important. In the back, maybe you do have to make the decision to just send it longer or at least hit the pass to a less dangerous area when you're under pressure and have no options, but your teammates have to give you options or you're not going to accomplish much. There's really not much more frustrating than holding the ball out there and seeing a bunch of guys standing around marked up and not even trying to show for a pass. And the static way we played that game, I'm sure both of them were seeing exactly that a lot.
Right. The second goal is just really on Ream. He should have cleared it and made a dumb pass. But for much of the game, he wasn't presented with a lot of great options.
Musah's effort to get between his man and goal was pathetic. He could have burrowed his way there, instead of grabbing his arm & then stopping. So in spite of the giveaway, it typically takes multiple other things to go wrong in transition d for us, to allow a goal. And it seems like it's happening most of the time recently. It's a combo of slow reactions, feet, lack of effort, not being touch tight when players are stepped to & the setup where in the build out the CB's are often spread out while DM's are further downfield than the pressers. Though that setup was more part of the issue on the 1st not 2nd goal, which was totally on the players.
Le Boeuf was on Futbol Americas talking about the US, for some reason, but he ended up providing interesting insight. He drew some parallel to France struggling badly from 88-94, then switching coaches, and building up a roster that would make the semis of the Euros before winning the WC at home. Now, in that process, he shared his qualm about Pochettino being a foreign manager, and that domestic managers, on average, have the advantage of knowing the pool, believing in it, & building tactics around them. Said Pochettino should be willing to (re)incorporate a sub-sect of MLS players to fill out the roster. It's ironic that a foreign voice would go to bat for them & we'd need a foreign manager to bring back to bring back that part of the equation that a domestic manager ultimately eradicated. Let's see how it plays out. But I think Jesse, at any point, would have been the more reliable option than all the alternatives, including the sexy Argentinian. In addition to the skill-sets we do know Pochettino has of general tactics, man management, & development; he may need to bring empathy, humility, scouting, & the willingness to get into the weeds here locally we don't know he has, at least for this situation.
That is the hallmark of Berhalter-ball; S-L-O-W, over directed, confused offense. At least Varas had the honesty to take responsibility for this latest debacle. “I think with the ball, that’s on me,” Varas said. “Because I want to present some ideas to them and you just never know how it’s going to translate from training to the game after three training sessions. And I asked a lot of them, you know, and if there’s a goal, I mean, that’s on me. Both goals because when you don’t have a lot of time to work and you want to play a certain way it creates confusion. https://sbisoccer.com/2024/09/usmnt-lacked-fight-intensity-in-shocking-loss-to-canada We have all these high level players playing in top leagues, how about we setup a straightforward plan and for gods sake just let our boys play their games. It worked out very well for Canada.
The sad truth about the current #USMNT situation, with @stuholden and @RobStoneONFOX. 🇺🇸⚽️ pic.twitter.com/cFVx48hKy7— Alexi Lalas (@AlexiLalas) September 8, 2024 Say what you will about Lalas, but he's right in this instance.
It’s all fun and games till he sends home the next John Brooks and starts calling him for that reason. And then the fan base will be up in arms. Though the real issue I think is the the portion of the fan base just didn’t respect Berhalter and they will respect Pochettino. So if Pochettino made the same exact decision Berhalter would have made it’ll be treated much differently.
I hear both of you, but Ream's terrible turnovers did not have much to do with people not showing for the ball. Again, I agree with both of you that we have poor movement. I agree that quite often we focus too much on the person with the ball and not enough on the players moving around the field. But that is also no excuse for terrible passes under no pressure or other simply poor plays. Besides the terrible pass on the 2nd goal, we also saw Ream give away the ball under normal pressure in the midfield when he tried to be cute with the ball, which led directly to the Larin shot that was pawed over the bar (31:35-31:45). Defensively, we saw him standing on a blade of grass, marking no one, while a player moved toward his space without him reacting at all, allowing a great shot that whizzed past Schulte's far post (15:20-15:30). On the first goal, which was admittedly mostly on Cardoso, we saw Ream collect the ball, and have Lund wide open to his left to go up the line, but Ream held and held the ball until he decided it was better to pass into the middle of the field in which the US had 2 players (including Cardoso), but Toronto had FOUR players (16:30-16:40). At 26:20-26:30, we saw Ream have the ball, and literally walk forward INTO the pressure and then panic pass it when he reached the Canadian players he was walking into and turn it over, sparking a counter. Do I also need to remind everyone that the Larin shot from right in front of the net that Schulte saved (42:05-42:15) came from Ream man-marking Larin and completely missing the ball as it went by him directly to Larin? So again, while I understand all you are saying, Ream was terrible on his own. Quite often he was the author of the book from which he was reading.
Pochettino just realized he's going to be facing the most deluded fan base in the planet. All 200 of them.
I know you watched the USA team back in the day beat teams with rosters like ours (club resumes like the one your posting up about us) and not think twice about it. This is much more than coaching. I understand we want this to be something simple to fix; change out the coach and everything is good.... but it may go deeper than that.
The problem with Berhalter was not that he was not respected by a portion of the fan base. The problem with Berhalter was that his multi-year stint had rightfully earned a lack of respect from the entire fan base, and the footballing world in general-- despite that portion of the fan base that would rather piss glass than face the reality of Berhalter Ball.
I don’t think the footballing world in general has particular thoughts on Berhalter. There was some praise for our group stage performance during the World Cup but no one other than USMNT fans were super focused on Berhalter.
There are different levels. No one said you should take it as seriously as if it were the World Cup final. But we approach it with a complete lack of intensity and lackadaisicalness compared to our opponents. Why shouldn’t we take friendlies as seriously and plays as hard a team like Columbia or Japan for instance. And we did take the Brazil friendly pretty seriously.
Canada certainly did. And good for them. Don't make it anything more than that. Well, obviously, if Canada plays it like a World Cup Final, anything less is going to look 'lackadaisical'. . 1. The US played with as much intensity as those teams 2. There's obviously a difference between getting blown away in a tune up match for a major tournament and losing 2-1 in a throw-away friendly at the beginning of the European club season. There's just a lack of perspective going around. In any event, we have some competitive matches in November.
How would you respond to the media, manager and players who said the mentality wasn’t good enough? If this was just one off, it’s not even addressed, perhaps as an aside. You’re right about one thing, if the problem you say doesn’t exist gets fixed, no one cares about this window, it’s a nothing window in so many ways.
Cliches and memes as usual. Again, yet again, in the 1st half, the US had created 3-4 dangerous attacking movements that would have placed a man in on goal against 99.9% of teams. But 99.9% of teams didn't have Bombito who is probably the fastest player in the Top 5 leagues. It was what it was. After the 62nd minute, Varas made some adjustments that helped. And obviously, the US made some errors on the goal against. The handwringing is just unnecessary.
I watched the Canada vs Mexico match and I got zero sense that Canada played especially intense against the USA. In fact Mexico was the more aggressive, intense, try-hard team against canada. Jesse just has Canada playing a very focused, clear, well-designed scheme that fits their pool. They are very confident, motivated, and clear about how the need to play and how to go about it. They outpossessed Mexico 57% to 43% in the first half. They are certainly not playing any reckless, headless chicken ball that we were warned about by Berhalter supporters when Greggg was out after his first cycle. It turns out that managers can make a difference and they don't have to be subscribers to the Pep school of scripted positional play.
Mexico committed 24 fouls and 3 yellows. In a friendly!? Again, the US had the correct mentality. If those other guys want to act like they're playing in the Super Bowl, then whatever. Absolutely. There's something to be said about getting a coach who has something to prove.