Seattle Sounders FC - San Jose Earthquakes (Wednesday, 9/18) pre/in/postgame thread [R]

Trophy!!

 

I hate Apple+. I had to watch the game late because I had meeting tonight. (Not AA!) I got it to restart from the beginning, but just a few minutes in, it jumped to the end of the game. So I know the score and saw some of highlights. Bunch of shit!!

So, a tie. I guess we didn’t suck?

Watching now.

F#$& Apple!

Go Quakesfans!!

 

Great to not lose on the road but believe it or not I didn't truly realize how bad our overall record is. Even if we win out... At least 21 losses? The league should make Fisher sell.

And it makes me laugh even more that the organization keeps contacting me to get us back in the STH fold. I guess that's what we get for being suckers for 15 years.

 

That's a very good finish by Marie btw. So often from that angle of attack the ball goes wide. Willingness to use the proper foot goes a long way.

 

Don't forget, he also took Montreal from 9th / 10th to 2nd in his first (and only) full season with them. Besides a couple of great players, I don't think Columbus has much of anything on us. Even their roster spending is similar to ours.

Philly coach Jim Curtin on Nancy and the Crew. I think this pretty much says it all:

Sure, Columbus boasts stars Cucho Hernandez and Diego Rossi, but most of the team entered the league out of college. As Curtin put it, they "weren’t the highest recruited kids."

But the Crew still manage to be successful. According to Curtin, the credit for that goes to coach Wilfried Nancy.

"I don’t say this as a disrespect to their players ... but he (Nancy) makes the most out of his group," Curtin said. "His players respect him. He’s hard on them, but they learn from him. So that’s, for me, the sign of a really good coach."

Nancy also respects Curtin, who is in his 10th full season as Philadelphia's coach. Nancy's admiration grew over time through watching and eventually facing off against Curtin, starting in 2021 when Nancy took over as CF Montreal's coach.

The two praise each other's ability to develop a game plan, but Curtin was particularly impressed by the way the Crew's roster embraced Nancy's style of play.

"He is brave. His guys play the same way," Curtin said. "Up a goal, down a goal, home, away, they’re going to keep doing what they do, and they do it really well, and that takes a really good leader. So, I respect him a ton as a coach, as a person, as a leader."

 

Yeah, but despite that he probably saved a goal just by slowing things down a bit - he bolted in to cover for Rodrigues, who'd gotten beat.

 

Cade didn't really improve for us but OTOH we did get $4M for him. Verhoeven will be OK. Still 18 and his 2nd start I think. Niko is the guy I'm kind of down on these days. Tonight again, he was hitting some really bad passes kind of inside-out with his left foot, one which didn't come close to the target and started a counter for Seattle. The second was to a guy on the wing in our defensive half who had a lot of space and was able to chase after it and track it down, but it was a simple square pass and way off.

 

Overall, not a bad game for the Quakes. Deserved tie, although we had a really hard time creating chances late in the 2nd half and were lucky to get that goal. Losing Bouda hurt our attack - hard to imagine saying that a couple of months ago. But most of the rest of the game we played pretty well especially early. I feel like it was one of those games where the favored / home team is playing a known weak team and expects the game to be easy. And then it's not and they freak out a little bit. Their goals were kind of lucky - blown clearances that fell to Morris.

I guess you could say that our 1st goal was a little lucky because Pellegrino should have headed that ball into the goal but instead managed to hit it straight down into the ground. Fortunately he got a foot on that bounce. Bad play there by Roldan.

The thing I've come to realize about Bouda is that - he's somewhat fast - not super fast - somewhat fast, but he's also strong and physical and kind of out of control in a way that makes him unpredictable, and that combination makes him a little hard to deal with. He's still a bit of a bull in the china shop and got lucky with some of the calls tonight going his way. There was one "boink" touch that he chased after and ran into a Seattle player (Rothrock?) and they called a foul on the Seattle player. Still, all in all, we are so desperate for forward help that he does help us a bit.

I didn't even notice Benji being out (and not in the 18). Apparently he has a knock. But Akapo played pretty well.

I haven't been impressed with Seattle's new DP attacker, Pedro de la Vega. He's the biggest or one of their biggest ever transfers at $7.5M. Too early to say but they might have gotten a bit of a dud. If so, I love that for them. He wasn't very impressive in this game. I know he's working himself into sharpness after being injured for a while, but I didn't see much from him and he hit a couple of really ridiculously wild long shots.

 

The mad accountant - postgame. He was unhappy that his team didn't kill off the game. Quakes had 55% or so possession in the game and he felt like, with a lead at home, they should hold the ball and kill off the game. He is quick to blame himself for the lineup and the subs (the anti-Cherundolo - who will never blame himself). He regrets that he didn't do more rotation with the starting lineup. Says that he didn't think his team took the Quakes lightly.

 

Thank God Preston Judd was unavailable to play tonight. When you have to sub Paul Marie in to pull out a result it drives home the point you are bereft of talent. Once again Daniel makes ridiculous saves. With Yarbrough in, that’s a blowout.

 

Overall, we played pretty well.

Still, we were often disorganized on defense, and our offense struggled much of the time too. But we did out together some good moments.

Akapo was good. Looked like he was trying to earn his starting spot back.

Munie was good.

Daniel was excellent!

Verhoven needs work.

Gruezo blows. The sooner we get rid of him the better.

Niko was mediocre, again.

Pelle had a good night, and not just his goal.

Bouda was good again.

Hernán struggled again. Sometimes trying to do too much, sometimes just getting double- or triple-teamed.

We need to win another game or two. If the players know, or think, that Ian is not coming back next year, it will be difficult to motivate them. I’m hoping that RottenFish is too cheap to sack Ian.

Go Quakesfans!!

 

Missed the game as I was had to get up early but saw the replay.

Pellegrino had a nice goal, but both of Jordan Morris Sounders goal resulted in some sloppy defensive play by the Quakes

Nice to see Paul Marie getting another goal.

 

Sounds like you accidentally hit the highlights replay and not the full replay.

 

The score flatters us.

 

Daniel, Marie, Kikanovic, Munie and Espinoza are the only guys worth coming back. Possibly even HLM, however the rest of the squad can take a dirt nap

 

That was me!

Not really... I decided to sleep instead. Went to bed at 8:30 :\

 

No, I had it on full replay. It played the first ten or twelve minutes just fine. Then, when the game ended in real time, my feed jumped to the end. That’s a bug, not a feature.

Not pleased.

Go Quakesfans!!

 

Not really. Both of their goals were chaos goals. And the one that came off their free kick was BS. Their guy fouled us. Shit call.

We had more possession at 53%. We had the same number of shots on goal, 3 each. Our passing accuracy was better. They had 5 corners to our 3. Our xG was 1.5 to their 1.4. It was a pretty even game.

We had some defensive breakdowns, as usual. Gruezo is shit. D-mid is one of the most important positions on a team. You have to get that right. Our bad d-mid makes us look worse than we are. (And we really suck!)

On the whole, that was a good game for us. We tied 5th place Shittle in their house.

We now have 18 points. Three short of our epic worst season ever, 2018. I really want us to break 21. We’ve got five games to do it.

Go Quakesfans!!

 

I've had weird things like that happen a few times, where I pause the game, and then something weird happens when I press play, like it jumps to the live version. There may be some edge cases they haven't accounted for. Live streaming of The Town games is even a lot funkier. If you try to rewind you might get 10-30s of past play but then what happens after that is a bit unpredictable. I've seen it play at like 2x speed to catch up. I've had sound and video fall way out of sync, but I think that was pre-Apple live streams of Next Pro games.

 

Yes, his positioning sucked most of the game, but on the first goal, Bouda needs to learn how to clear a ball (75% at fault) and Daniel should have stopped a shot right at him (25-50%). Yes, that is more than 100% at fault, but this is the Quakes. They suck more than 100%!

 

Good start to the game, but gave up a sloppy goal in an overall sloppy game. Other than the Quakes last, the other three goals were really poor defending. I think the giddiness of tying the game covers an overall crappy game from the Quakes.

Both Henan and Esponiza had poor game again. Henan keeps making poor decisions and giving up the ball. Rodrigues was back to making poor decisions and seemed weak in the air for some reason. Munie passing was poor (sent one to no one the first half) and didn't cover well on the second goal. The few times seeing Oscar in the past, I liked him. He was horrible this game. He kept tucking in too much centrally and completely flubbed a cross that led to the second goal. Gruevo was back to his frustrating self (stupid foul getting a yellow card and inability to shoot at a professional level).

Niko played better and Jebo and PM did well off the bench. I look forward to the day that I don't see TT in a Quakes uniform and Yuell is back to being yuseless.

Still, we somehow got a tie in Seattle. Go Quakes!

 

Except for assisting on both goals.

(Esponiza. Haven't seen that version before. )