in the spirit of conciliation, i went hook line sinker for sebas. i think he could put up better numbers with a supporting cast tailored to him at great effort -- and that's how pat is now talking about it -- but that strikes me on more thought as a narrowly useful DP. he can't hustle around and make a turd into a diamond. a good DP could be dropped in a pile of junk misfit to him, and still be very productive. if we're objective -- and i owe that as well -- his numbers are will bruin numbers. to be real, elis and quioto didn't outscore bruin -- but they were more complete players who could put an offense on their shoulders, create, and also had double digit assists as well. and then as a striker, bruin is a pimple on what manotas and even cubo put up. and then we can debate if elis or manotas was The Big Guy. but then that's half the point is they were 4 deep with weapons like that in 2017. vs this is the DQ and sebas show. the 2017 bunch weren't a perfect fit -- the athletes could be very sloppy, cubo couldn't keep up with their speed of play -- but they didn't have to be hand in glove to be competitively productive. if i am rebooting this anyways why not shoot for "easier." a more adaptable and perhaps even productive forward, runs more, can score in more different ways, doesn't have to have the team built perfect around him. you know, like when you have a friend who is with the wrong girl, and not sure how he'd know the right one, and my explanation is when it works "it's easy." you whack a longball to ching or an outlet to elis and the rest kind of takes care of itself. and then in terms of how bad this has gotten, there is no effective supporting cast beyond DQ. it's a weaker striker but the wings to me are literally replacement level or worse.
to be fair to sebas, he might be in the top few of technical finishers we have had, up there with davis, dero, and cubo. but he disappears from the offensive build and you can't funnel a 433 to the 9 as your whole system and have your striker in witness protection. even if you went and got the next elis or davis wide to get him some service i kinda think you would need to go 442 and have a target player with him, for us to have some sort of reliable outlet(s) to run an offense. because the wing theory is premised on we get him service -- but he's still in hiding for most of 90' in terms of playing soccer each possession. part of where this falters is the lack of a younger 10 or target forward or even elis speed guy to run this through over and over. i mean, the championship era dynamo could run the offense through about 3 players. longball or cross to ching. ball left off to dero who takes it to goal or passes. ball wide to davis who takes someone on and either crosses or cuts in and shoots. that was DQ this year and 8G 4A for being The Guy is meh. he's also a gazillion years old in soccer terms. (the dynamo are real bad about being years late on age -- beasley, ching, figueroa, parker -- rather than letting someone go at just the right time where they blow up on someone else's dime -- davis) more i think about it the deal is both sebas and DQ in skill sets are the second striker or 10 hanging off the CF but the offense is set up like they are brian ching and dero. they can't both be the guy running off the striker. someone has to be holding the ball up, showing to the backs, providing a focal point up there. that and you'd have your choice of HH coco vera behind them, maybe raines. i don't like our midfield. i think raines has a future. otherwise it's a mess. eg memo made a recent MLS.com list of the leading players in the league in terms of whose xG doesn't play out in reality. you put the mids in position and they kick it over or into a defender's chest.
*Rey* is absolutely correct. This is typical JC nonsense. Claim to be right because only he predicted the sun rises in the East while the rest of us thought it rose in the West. Just bullshit. No one ever claimed HH was either a 10 or a 6.
this is bullsh*t. if you go back to way back when, my point was the main spot a team spends a DP on is a 10. maybe an awesome 6 who cleans things up. definitely not a "supporting 8." are you people kidding me with our plan was to sign our most expensive DP as an 8 who neither attacks productively nor defends, just kind of links. that we're gonna have a midfield that all together has like 2G 2A. really. i said at the time i saw him as a 6 at this stage in his career, but not good enough of one. too old not mobile or healthy enough. not really a 90 minute destroyer like we need. nor worth a DP that way. what we then need from him is goals or assists. but he's not that either. i said that at the time also. he's not a 10. so you pot-stirrers are going to split hairs that he's an 8 really. it's a clever spin on his lack of offensive or defensive quality, but then why am i spending DP money. cause for $200k we could debate the value of an ageing connecting player. at millions of year and our most expensive DP, i kind of want excellence in one or both directions. not just this vogueish talk where players not really good at anything get called 8s to flex how much soccer you watch. all due respect but i thought when he first came here he was being deployed as a twin 6. we would ship goals. he is't pirlo the other way. so not good at his job. so bench now. so we are apparently going to perseverate, call him an 8, and flip the triangle in the midfield. if you've seen the giveaways when he tries to force balls to create near the actual 18, same diff. any value he has, has always been deep lying. diagonals and switches from out between the center line and the 18. that doesn't fit an 8. he's a 6. like a slightly more aggressive yeuill. get it straight. pat is trying to go back where ramos was with the twin 8s and he's going to figure out someone needs to do the creating, you can't have a load of unproductive wide and AM players and then a striker who has to have service. and you can push HH further upfield and sign quinones to fly downfield then give it away to the first defenders but that won't change that what we ACTUALLY NEED. we don't need label games. we need service to the striker. or we need a different striker. and then we need midfield transition defense, a better backline, and basically the ability to stop an opponent. as i said then, he doesn't fix an actual problem. i am sure HH has plenty of value south of the border and the world cup is arriving. fix the actual problems. or we can have the pot-stirrers play position number bingo for us. i am sick of losing. i don't want to spend any added fractions of future seasons re-learning this season's lessons. clear house.
btw "no one ever claimed he was a 6?" i did. based on what he did at atleti was chase around in packs within a 352, help win the ball, then pass it to someone who did the actual setup work. the flaw in your silliness is if we play twin unproductive 8s and a single striker who is going to provide the missing assists. and then no one much mops up opposing runs as anyone who watched that nashville game can see -- which was basically a finishing contest we managed to win against the odds -- like LAFC a few weeks back where we got hammered but outscored them because ours went in. which is hard to rely on when you miss as many as we do. y'all seem to think he will go flying upfield vertically with the ball to connect, no, he's not really an endline to endline guy, not at his age. he's going to lay some 20-40 yard longball from way out. if that's an 8 that's a very lazy two way guy. when what we need is someone top of the "D" threading it to sebas or throughballing to a backdoor cut from a wide player. like i said if he's not a 10 or a 6 why am i spending DP money on him. ask yourself that, genius.
to me the "two way" stuff has been watered down beyond all recognition. it used to be a positive description of a productive high motor player like holden or cameron. not the 10 -- or at least shouldn't have been -- because they aren't going to get davis-type assists, but an athletic fit guy who could run end to end all day, help the 10 out on offense and defense, few goals and 5 assists a year -- involved in close to 10 goals in support of a 10 who would contribute to 10-15 more from a few goals and 10-15 assists. and then they were athletes who could get back and defend where the 10 could take occasional risks. which at some point became nagbe who gets involved in a goal once a millenium but is good at possessing. which is no use when TnT goes up 2-0. which at some point further deteriorated to "8s" like this who contribute nothing and don't stop transitions. next thing you know your whole midfield together is like 5G 5A being generous. i mean totaling up a half dozen players. and you wonder where the service dried up. if you want to call a guy who usually does his work 30-40 yards out, and then often got beat in transition, a two way player, that doesn't mean anything anymore. it's like some asterix way of describing a player who's not a 10 or a 6 but is out there on the field. cause on a good team the supporting cast a la holden sings for their supper as well. i get this "delatorre" idea of the "8" is popular these dutch soccer days but it's nonsense. we have better technical players. he is no good on defense. it's become a catchall for "i want him out on the field somehow" -- he's an 8. to me when two way meant something it was like the dude was everywhere, endline to endline. we would do well to get back to that. both the NT or the HD. personally i prefer excellence one end or the other where they help define the team and provide excellence, is why i emphasize 10s and 6s. a key element of 2017 was alex. or it helps to have pure destruction. i am not a fan of "he's just there." that kind of feels like buck passing where someone else is supposed to provide The Thing You Want but no one ever does. which is the recipe for the 2018-cycle NT and this HD team. in the end you need an alex or a tyler adams who solves the issue. accept no substitutes or 8s.
Some of what he pointed out was correct, although probably 50% of initial observations on any deal can be correct to some degree. The club will spin it as we signed HH for "the project" and 2023 will be a better indicator but he did not deliver as promised in 2022. Showed some flashes but injuries and I thought middling play at times undercut his effect. At that salary, he's got to be more of a creator
HH's injuries are part of the package deal. it's like beasley or ching, and you could see it from his Atleti game logs. or by last year it was evident from watching their games. HH would play a little. HH would disappear. to the extent you have people acting like there is a "when he's healthy," the deal is he's going to be healthy half the time. there is not going to be some full recovery. there is managing health issues. i've already done my skill critique ad nauseum but my punchy critique would be that for a supposed analytical team we turn into giggling fanboys in terms of handling him. the numbers are fairly clear. what my eyes see is pretty clear. a broken down player of his class -- like figueroa, beasley, or ching -- is going to do the odd nice, classy thing. but a team this analytical should see it's not working. i mean, pat even said we appear worse when HH plays. i assume that is some version of the ppg analytics i ran on the team a month or two back. dude is now reduced to coming off the bench for 30'. every objective indicator is speaking to you. we have no transfer fee financing to pay off. his cost is annual salary. if he leaves we maybe make a little coin off a transfer, and we offload the salary and open a DP. for a truly analytical team this should be easy. but obviously we can't keep a straight face and do the smart thing here. pat's going to acknowledge how bad he is but then as westie suggests, come up with some new role. ironically, it won't be something obvious for a tough marker but immobile player with good long composure and distance distribution skills -- CENTER BACK -- we're going to pretend we signed something we didn't and make him an AM.
along the lines of HH as CB experiment, i was horrified how little churn occurred in terms of the final few games. we played the usual suspects in their usual roles, won a couple games (but not at a pace that screams this is fixed), and saved an increment of face squeaking SJ to not be last 3 years running. which will cost draft position when we need help. we didn't learn anything new about kids, or find new bottles for old wine. but to me, a lot of similar faces in similar spots next year means more of the same. it's like you're trying to convince yourself to be really really stupid. on an NFL game i was watching yesterday the commentator echoed my favorite line on this, which is you are what the standings say you are. and give or take some schedule dynamics playing out, or transfer window activity, i buy it. other than it's more fun to watch a bundy team, what did we learn?
Houston Dynamo fans after another disappointing season pic.twitter.com/vULSFnUGSd— Christopher🌻 (@ChrisWrighteous) October 10, 2022 cracked me up