So 2015 ends with a resounding thud, and a disappointing home playoff loss at the hands of the hated Galaxy. We've lately bemoaned the team's lack of finishing as a reason for the slip in the club's fortunes. Let's look at the stats: 2015: So, USL tracked SOG in 2015, after all. 41% of shots were on goal. Higher than was my impression, but almost certainly higher than the last several games. OTH, lower than our opponents. How do these numbers compare to the 2014 champs? With the exception of SOG, which was not published for 2014, every single number is less favorable than 2014. We also see that the slide in defensive stats was actually slightly larger than the offensive. Perhaps part of that could be attributed to a drop-off in the caliber of the 'keeper, as IMO, Gleeson is superior to McClain. Are these numbers an alarming change? I don't know what would be considered as acceptable year-to-year movement in the reality of professional sports, where a team's fortunes typically change annually. Conventional wisdom might suggest that some of this is to be expected with the addition of three MLS 2 sides in the western conference. However, the top four finishers in the west are all non-MLS 2 sides. So, maybe not. At first glance, the statistical doesn't seem to be an unacceptable, but in a conference where a single point separated the top four finishers, the change was lethel in terms of play-off positioning. Really, just one more goal in either of the ties against Real, and we would have won the west and a first round bye. It turns out, though, playoff positioning had little to do with it because we earned a playoff home game and still lost. As the club entered the 2014 playoffs I was hopeful for a championship, even knowing the road to the finals would likely lead cross-country to Orlando. But this year? I had little faith.
Great wrap-up mangerson! Five goals difference (2014 vs 2015) doesn't look like much, but just one more goal in either of the two last regular season games would have made a huge difference, I think. I would also like to see the number of PK's awarded to opponents this year versus last year. My feeling is that a good percentage of the increase in opponents goals was due to more PK's awarded. I don't think our defense gave up that many more goals in the course of play. Oh well, a number of things to work on for next year. It will be interesting to see how it changes with Coach Buckle at the helm. Urbs Indomita!
For some reason, the league stats page does not provide PK stats for 2014. But, for 2015, opponents converted three of five penalties.
What do you guys think of Buckle? I understand the challenge he faced taking over a team mid season, which isn't uncommon, but I was not a fan of his style or how he rated players. It seemed at first he wanted to go 4-3-3 but quickly rescinded, and had what looked like a more old school, simple attacking style, that devolved into route 1 soccer. Maybe that's just me, but I think that was an issue. I think transitioning from English football to American with a lot of the Mexican/Latin futbol influence was hard for him to deal with. It will be interesting to see how he reshape this into "his" team in the offseason. Who knows how many guys we will see return. RoRo may have played his last game for Sac Republic.
I didn't think it devolved into route 1 soccer so much as they became too dependent late in games on pushing up the flanks and crossing directly into the box. We seemed to attack up the middle effectively early in games, but lacked the discipline to maintain it. I put that on be Buckle. Maybe defenses adjusted and pushed us out wide as games went on. Or maybe Klimenta is just too attack-minded to patiently work the ball back to the middle at the top of the box if we don't have lanes open in front of the goal. I don't know. Lopez and Barrera certainly weren't on the same page late in the season. One could put that on Buckle. But, as you said, mid-season coaching changes can be tricky. I'd like to see Lopez back and wonder if he will play more in the middle next season. It seems to me he played wide a lot with permission to roam. As much as I like our midfielders, we seem to have a lot of central guys. I'd like to see Gissie make the leap this off-season into a reliable starting winger.
I'm withholding judgment on this, but I admit I'm worried about it. It's not "English Football" per se. It's lower level English Football. Am I just stereotyping? Maybe. But Buckle sure liked to play that lumbering oaf from the Quakes once we got him on loan. Preki had his blind spots, but he also had some tactical style. I think it's unfair to judge Buckle when he came in mid-season like he did. And not just at mid-season, but right as the team went into a slump from which it never recovered. But I know what I'm looking for in the first game next year: some pretty play. And if I don't see it, I'm gonna think Buckle is the wrong guy for the job. SRFC was known for an attractive style of play. That should continue. (And it doesn't help my attitude when I hear that Kinnear likes Buckle a lot more than he liked Preki. I'm deeply prejudiced against Kinnear's style of play, so if you're Kinnear's kind of coach, then I'm apt to think you're not my kind of coach.) Now that I've written this, I think I should correct the first line of this post: I'm trying to withhold judgment. But I haven't been entirely successful in that. I hope Buckle surprises me next season.
It seems to me I read or heard that when Buckle came in the first thing he did tactically was encourage the team to try to attack more down the flanks. So it was a definite Buckle addition to the team's repertoire. The problem, as you imply, is that became the team's default approach when it got a little desperate. In other words, when it got desperate, they didn't go back to the basics and play their game -- a game they used to play quite well. No, they did something very different (and frankly unproven). Don't get me wrong. I think Buckle was right to encourage more wing play. The team should be able to attack effectively from anywhere. It's not an either or. I'd like to see SRFC do both. I just think he and the team got the balance wrong late in the season.
I remember that, too. I thought it a little odd because we never seemed all that shy about attacking up the flanks. I thought we were reasonably balanced before, not that I was counting or anything.
Interesting views here - one point that people missed though is if we had beaten the whipping boys - Real Monarchs - just once when everybody else beat them - we'd have won the conference and not even played last week, instead we'd be preparing for our home game this weekend coming and there's only one guy responsible for that debacle - Preki. Looking at tactics, Preki played down the wings but didn't get bodies in the box. Buckle played down the wings and players got in the box alright - they just couldn't score. 24 chances against Arizona - can't blame Buckle on not winning that game. Against Az and Timbers the attacks came from both wings and down the middle - very attractive football. Our downfall has been our old habits of playing the ball slowly and methodically across the back giving oppositions the chance to get back and defend. We are so slow, we have no idea how to counter-attack. Mirkovic gets the ball in their half and before you know he's playing it back to Daly or Vukovic or even Jakubek - horrible play and it comes from Preki's possession style where that's all that matters. No wonder Preki left - he knew he screwed it up and walked. Lopez had a blistering start to the season, then he got sent of in OKC, suspended for 3 and hasn't had a single good game since. Barerra was possibly our best player over the last 10 games. Captain Braun was useless all season but managed 5 goals under Buckle which beat his total of 4 for all of last season. Klimenta too attack-minded? Pity his crosses don't get past the first defender. Kiffe did well especially with his crosses but then you get Braun trying to head the ball over a 6 foot 3 keeper who's standing on his line. Route 1 football? I wished we played more route 1 football. Let Daly kick high balls into the box, let's go fight for the drop-downs and get a goal. If we scored a horrible sloppy goal in the last minute last Saturday would fans care if it wasn't Messi-esque? If we then went on in the last second of extra-time with another horrible sloppy goal would we care? Did OC, Az or LA ever look like scoring against us? No. Did we ever look like scoring on them? Hell yeah! So in my opinion Buckle got his tactics right - his forwards sucked. With regards Sherrod - he only started one game for Buckle - the most playing time he got in one game as sub was about 20 minutes. I hope we'll be saying goodbye to quite a few players - they let us down badly against a very poor Az, OC and LA - massive disappointment last Sat but I cant wait for next season!
Your obsession with Preki is as strange as your assessment of his style. Did you even watch the team last year? You keep wanting to say "no wonder he left!" as if he was on a sinking ship and knew it and wanted to bail. Wrong. You're wrong about Sherrod, he played a lot more. Again, doesn't seem like you've been paying attention. AZ didn't need to score on us. OCB didn't need to score on us. LA got an early PK and didn't need to score on us. With the exception of Sherrod this was the same group of forwards Preki had all season, and look how much Sherrod helped us? It's like you want Buckle to take credit for the good and ignore the bad, but vice versa for Preki. We struggled this year because: 1. Western/Eastern split 2. Better teams 3. Teams parking the bus and using gamesmanship when playing Republic I'm sorry, but you still strike me as a troll, "SacMan."
Just a little perspective.......Three other playoff teams (OKC, Seattle, and Colorado Springs) had losses to Real SLC, so it wasn't like we were playing against some High School's JV team. IMHO, calling this season a debacle is over the top. We score ONE goal in the OC game, and we're Conference Champs (48 points) with a playoff game this weekend. Remember last year we were second seed to Orlando. If there were no conferences, like last year, those 48 points places us exactly where we were last year (i.e, 2nd - behind Rochester). I agree we have a tendency to play back and square when a counter-attack should be pressed, but this team was designed for posession. If Buckle wanted to change that, he could have used faster players like Gissie, Gabeljic, or Kaleemullah more often. Instead, we got Sherrod and Braun. Disappointing and frustrating end to a season of ups and downs? Yes. A debacle initiating the fullscale destruction of the roster? No, I hope the coaches are more even-keeled than that.
No obsession pal, just sick of people thinking he was some kind of God when the truth is he got going when the going got tough. The ship was sinking - we weren't even in a play-off position when buckle took over. Look at the stats - 4 sub appearances and 1 start. What exactly is your point here? its Preki's team which Preki hand-picked who weren't good enough - simple. Fair's fair pal, Preki hadn't a single good performance this year. Buckle was left with a sick dog to revive and it nearly did survive. 1. we were bad because there was another conference - laughable, ridiculous. 2. Better teams? Really, name one team in our conference that was better than last year's SRFC team 3. And we didn't have the guile to break them down. Don't be sorry for thinking I'm trolling - be sorry because you can't take a different view. If anybody is trolling here it's a dude with a SJE avatar...
When we played them 3 times they weren't much better than a High School JV team. Everybody beat them except us. It was only their last handful of games when they brought 6 first teamers into their squad that they racked up a few wins. Actually we'd be behind Louisville as well and while debacle may sound strong, in terms of the teams in our conference we should have won it by 10 points so it was in my mind a very bad year. Maybe, I like Gabeljic, not convinced on the boy Gissie and see nothing in Kaleemullah. Sherrod maybe a good target man if quicker players ran off him such as Tommy Thompson but we only had him for one game. Braun I agree had a horrible season and in Buckle's defence he dropped Braun for his first 2/3 games as well as last Saturday and was probably subbed out of every other game. Dare we mention Stewart? Absolutely I wouldn't say full-scale either but we need a lot of new blood. Way too much deadwood. Who in your opinion would you keep?
Nowhere have I expressed such a thing. We were struggling, yes, but we were far from a sinking ship. This is largely the exact same roster that won the championship last year. They were favored to win again this year. Hardly signs of a sinking ship. And besides that, Preki had this opportunity lined up before the season even started. He knew he was going to leave weeks, if not months before he actually did, so your theory is wrong. Wrong. He started against LA, he started the previous game against OCB and went 81 minutes. You seem to be leaving out the playoff game for some reason, probably to make your point stronger. But you're still wrong - he played a full half against Tulsa, played 30+ minutes as a sub against Vancouver, nearly 30 minutes against Arizona. Buckle liked to play him. You brought up AZ, OCB, and LA didn't "look like scoring on us." I was pointing out it was because none of them needed to. Preki's hand-picked team which dominated the league last year, came within a goal of securing first place in the conference. Yeah, "not good enough." And let's not point out the fact that players like Guzman were out the second half of the season, or that we lost our starting goal keeper for the last important games, or that players like Braun and Stewart had injuries and were out/not 100% most of the season, or that we had players suspended and out multiple games (Lopez, Mirkovic), or that unlike last year where we had important pieces loaned to us, our affiliate this year decided to give us the shaft until the last few games and they throw us a useless lumbering oaf target forward at the last minute... Not that I'm making excuses or anything.... But yeah, you're right, it's all Preki's fault for assembling such a crappy team. 1. It's not that we were bad, it's that the teams we were playing we much better than last year, and because they split the league into conferences we didn't play teams like Wilmington or Harrisburg or the other weak teams in the east, but rather the much tougher opponents in the west. Just look at how close the standings were between all of the teams. If we were in Rochester's position it would have been an easier path. The split made it harder. I thought that was a known quantity for any Republic fan. 2. Again, the standings don't lie. You just went on a rant about how this team wasn't good enough, so why is it hard to see that teams like Galaxy II and OKC gave them a run for their money? 3. Yes, something we didn't have to deal with much last year, which was my point. I can take a different view. It's just highly suspicious when someone shows up with a new member account just created at the beginning of September and starts badmouthing Preki and not showing much knowledge of the team itself, with a name "SacMan" as if to assure everyone else that yes, you're really from Sacramento, not someone else. Trust me! I've been posting here for years, was one of the people that actually got this forum set up. I'm trolling though, fo' realz.
Everything you were saying in your posts had a legitimate basis for defense...until you tossed that last sentence in. Are you here to discuss, or are you just here to fight? If it's the latter, then this probably isn't the place for you. Pro-tip: Don't come in with a brand new account and start tossing bombs like that against the guy who quite possibly has more posts to his name on this (SRFC) forum than anybody else.
I never said you - I said people.... What opportunity did Preki have lined up? Didn't you read his interview on SI.com? He doesn't have a new job, never had a new job. He says he is advising Mandaric on what club to buy. He left SRFC to advise a guy who has bought and sold clubs all his life on what club to buy next. That's it - he left us to be an advisor. You couldn't make that up... Ok so he started 2 games I said he started 1 - humble apologies Ummmm, Orlando dominated last season.... We came within a point of winning? Umm no we didn't, one more point and we would have still lost on the head to heads with OC, OKC and Colorado - we needed 2 points and a win against Real Monarchs (at a time when everybody else was beating them) would have done that. Guzman was badly missed but he was the only injury the second half of the season. Well Gilberto as well but he wasn't missed. Stewart missed the start of the season but was then dropped until Buckle took over for a bad Braun who couldn't score in a brothel. Lopez and Mirkovic are bad examples as they were sent off for stupid petulant childish behaviour which as you would know if you ever kicked a ball is down to a big FU to the coach because its him you let down when you get sent off like that. Yes the core of the squad came from last year but it's how you manage them. Look at Chelsea last year, untouchable - now look a them. Look at what Mourinho has been doing - publicly slating players, firing his doctor etc etc Mourinho will be fired if this continues and rightly so if he can't handle the current status quo - same as Preki. Hero one year, villain the next - that's how it goes when it all crumbles in your hands. 1.Oh so we were victims of not be able to beat the rubbish we beat last year. What were USL thinking? 2.Galaxy 2 and OKC are crap - don't you get it? 3.RoRo has the guile, Barerra has the guile, they had given up under Preki. Sorry, I didn't realise new members had to be nice about everyone and nod in agreement for a while before he can have an honest say. More than once you've called me a troll because I've offered a different view. Sorry if you can't handle that.
Actually I hoped people here would engage in a conversation but being called a troll twice kinda put that theory to bed. Because someone has more posts than a picket fence doesn't mean those posts stand up - nor does it mean a "newbie" can't contest them. Fellas rest assured I am no troll - just want to engage and offer views without offending even if you don't agree.
As the resident old fart, I'm gonna be the one to tell you that you will need to climb down off your soapbox, drop the sanctimony, find some decorum, and develop a sense of humor before anyone around here will want to converse with you. Nobody here is taking issues with your views. (Although your Preki obsession is weird.) We all take issue with your bad attitude.
I fine idea, indeed! I think it's not so much who we want back. I think all of the regular contributors are pretty obvious. The question to ask is what starting positions are most in need of an upgrade? As stated above, I don't know that this team has true wingers. I appreciate wanting to get your best 11 on the field, but it would be nice if they were in their true positions. Lopez needs to go back to CAM if we can find wingers. Perhaps if we upgrade right back then maybe Klimenta could fill that role if necessary? I would like to see young Gabe step up his game, kind of like the youthful Cato has in San Jose. And then, of course, we need stronger finishers, but maybe those guys more often end up in MLS because they're, you know, strong finishers.
I was perusing league-wide team statistics again. We've all been frustrated with what we've seen as the quality of our finishing. But there is also this: The club was tied for 9th in goals scored, but in a three-way tie for 13th in assists. Perhaps lack of build-up play was greater, and therefore more of a problem, than we thought?
Just a side note on team defensive stats. SRFC finished tied for third with a goals-against avg of 1.11. Charleston was 2nd at 1.00. Rochester? 0.54 Wow.
2016 tryouts have been announced: "October 31-November 1, November 28-29, December 12-13, 2015 and January 30-31, 2016. Each two-day tryout session will run from 9:00 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. daily. Participants will have the opportunity to be evaluated by Republic FC’s coaching staff through a series of evaluations including, but not limited to, fitness tests, skill drills and small-sided games and scrimmages. Based on performance, participants may be invited to additional invitational camps or tryouts for further evaluation and a chance to make the club’s first team." I'm sure that you are all thrilled to learn that, "Tryouts are presented by Western Health Advantage."
I wonder about the level of competition between west and east, though. Props to the Rhinos for compiling such an impressive record, but they didn't have to face OCB, OKC, SRFC, Scum2, etc.
For what its worth, four of the top six scoring teams are in the east: Not that it necessarily validates anything.