San Jose Earthquakes - Vancouver Whitecaps FC (Saturday, 5/9) pre/in/postgame thread [R]

Bruce must be looking ahead to Seattle, otherwise his reluctance to use subs in the 2nd half doesn't make much sense to me. Honestly, the way I'm looking at the rest of the games between now and the World Cup break is: Don't get hurt, rack up as many points as you can before the break, and just hold on for reinforcements.

Again, we were gassed out after pressing and defending all game long. Again, fresh legs would have helped us. Again, a real two-deep is required for us to be competitive in MLS and in USOC comps at the same time, let alone dealing with CCC.

Great effort by the guys, tired legs led to misplaced passes and miscontrolled balls, which led to the Whitecaps goal (sorta). IMO it was pretty scrappy, so sometimes you'll end up giving those up, but the Whitecaps' PRESSURE put on in that 2nd half was ALL due to fatigue.

This team is bought in. We have the grit and talent to fight at the top of MLS. We need a deeper roster to sustain our required effort over the course of the season.

 

The take away for me is even with the injuries, we have a top level defense...it's legit...very disciplined getting numbers back...really solid collective D. I fear our midfield will struggle with turnovers while Timo and Niko are out....Bouda central was poor...we don't have a lot of mids who are comfortable with the ball centrally in tight spaces...Jona is pretty good but the rest of his game isn't quite there.
I think we're going to see more games similar to this one, maybe not as severe but same profile...we hold their attack in check but don't put enough pressure on them with our attack.

 

Jona is the only other midfielder who is good with the ball in tight spaces, and I'd like to see him out there instead of Harkes sometime if we're gonna go with the setup where we push Beau a little higher. While we definitely missed Niko I think it's also still partly a general fatigue factor and this is partly due to Bruce's lack of rotation over these 1st 12 games. We also didn't look good against Toronto even while Niko was out there.

Bruce mentioned that we didn't win 50-50 balls in midfield and that's why we just couldn't get anything going and had to absorb attack after attack. Again I think it's partly lack of good possession players and also a fatigue factor. And you also have to credit Vancouver, whose midfield is very good.

 

I saw our formation as 4-4-2 with Bouda as a 2nd forward. I don't think the intent was for him to play as a #10, and he didn't do some of the things that our #10 does in Bruce's system, like go in front of the back line to help build out of the back. That's not an appropriate role for him. His touch is too loose. So I think it was a tactical plan to try to play much more direct in this game, with Bouda and Judd out there to run onto balls (as well as Ricketts and Marie). I think that partially explains our impatience with the ball. Plus Vancouver was counter-pressing like crazy and so we played a lot of panicked passes. But in any case, the strategy almost worked in the end. We got the 1st goal out of it, but couldn't create much in the way of chances after that.

This is not a game that I enjoyed watching, outside of the 5th minute goal. It wasn't fun watching Vancouver attack us all game long, and for us to almost never have an attack of our own. I was just waiting for the ball to go into our net. Thankfully it was just one.

 

Playing against Takaoka rendered the high press relatively ineffective so we really didn't have any short counter opportunities, and our buildup was shaky as well meaning we had to keep launching it upfield in hopes that Judd or Bouda would salvage possession for us. Bouda in particular was poor at ball retention, though Judd also had trouble winning his usual share of cheap fouls and pushing Beau upfield later on as an additional tall-ish target man was ineffective as well. We also had trouble advancing the ball on the wings in Timo's absence.

In short the game probably played as neutral observers would have expected given the personnel situation. We just didn't have a way to deal with the Caps' ball circulation and lacked the quality in attack to threaten them on rare counterattacking opportunities. But we never lost focus and intensity on the defensive end which allowed the Quakes to hold serve. We probably need at least 3 meaningful starter-level additions during the WC break to make the most of this season, along with some good tactical work.

 

How did that 12th man work out for us Don?

 

Not badly, really - given Berhalter’s “prowess” on free kicks - which had been his strong suit until last night.

 

Well the 3 meaningful starter level additions is almost certainly not gonna happen. We can take it with a grain of salt but Matt Doyle indicated that he’d heard “from people in the building” that “the purse is closed”. Maybe we can acquire one more TAM level player and then what kind of player would that be? I still think we need another #9 because if Judd goes down we’re screwed, although I suppose we could play Timo there. But even when he comes back, I don’t expect him to be injury free the rest of the way.

If Niko’s more of less done for the season we could say #10 but I don’t think we’re gonna get a useful #10 for TAM kind of $, if that’s what we’re limited to. I think we’d be better off letting Nick Fernandez work into the role.

As an aside someone asked Bruce mid-week about the Vancouver situation - being for sale and the potential relocation, and he said “well we’re for sale too”. I took it as a reminder that we are unlikely to get much in the way of financial resources at this point, with our ownership in limbo.

 

Better than it did for Vancouver when the Quakes beat in their barn.

 

I watched the recording, and it did NOT show Daniel’s King Kong celebration at the 57th min. So I must have been the only person in the stadium who noticed it.

 

I was really hoping Galexi was going to be there so we could boo him.

 

In one of the replays on the big screen after that, it was at the tail end.

 

I wasn’t into soccer at the time of the ‘94 WC and I had a hard time caring much about these guys’ appearance at the game.

 

Everybody in their own time! I wasn't really "into" soccer until we moved here in the late 80s - mostly because in Wisconsin and Idaho - where I'd lived the 12 years prior - soccer was not a thing. I first learned to love it from a couple of colleagues/friends at DoD in Sunnyvale - an Egyptian and a Palestinian.

 

Yeah, I didn't play it as a kid - very, very few people did in my neighborhood at that time, and I didn't realize I liked it until I saw the news about the 2002 WC team, and realized that one of the stars was playing SJ. So I went to a game, and was hooked after about 5 minutes. That 1st game I saw was against Columbus - the one where Mulrooney flipped up a free kick to Ecklund and he volleyed it into the net.

 

This got me thinking about how we're in a bit of vulnerable position right now. There's an offer on the table for Vancouver by a group that wants to move them to Las Vegas. What happens if a new owner emerges for Vancouver? Does that Las Vegas group really care that they buy Vancouver and not some other team that's for sale? Probably not. And word is that Fish is struggling to finance his baseball stadium. If no viable owner comes forward for the Quakes who wants to keep the team in SJ, what's to keep Fish from selling to the Las Vegas group, and possibly also get into some kind of revenue sharing arrangement for his stadium if it could somehow be multi-use?

Could Fish be evil enough to relocate 2 Bay Area franchises to Las Vegas. Yes, he could. Would the league be evil enough to relocate SJ twice? Yes, they would. Does Apple care that MLS has a local team, when they've shown no interest in our team that I know of, except maybe when Messi visited, and they've got one foot out the door on the MLS deal anyway? Probably not.

 

S

You see a lot of stuff no one else sees.

 

We've got a stadium linked to us and VW doesn't. Not sure how hard it would be to sell/reuse that land, but I would assume fish would want to move that cost out along with the team. That might make it less attractive.

 

Yeah, that's a good point, though Fish has already said that the stadium is inadequate for MLS, and the stadium does have another tenant. It would probably be cheaper for Bay FC to buy PPP than to build their own stadium (which they've intended to do).

 

Is Bay FC well capitalized enough to buy PayPal? Also seems like they would much rather be in the City. Besides, if we got to the point where demand for Quakes tickets outstripped its size and amenities, it doesn't seem that complicated to expand.