It's hard to play LAFC in the state we are now in without raising what has to be one of the greater regrets we have as a club: protecting James Musa and Christian Lobato in the 2017 expansion draft, while leaving Latif Blessing exposed. While I'm sure Muso is a fine footballer for Phoenix, and Lobato is just great whereever the hell he is these days, Blessing would be solving a lot of what ails us right now. As he's shown with LAFC, he's very decent option at 6, 7, 8, false 9, and 10, as well an acceptable fill-in at right back. sadly, even had we kept him cloning was unlikely, so he'd only fill one of those holes. but he's a step up at each of those spots for us, and he's, wow, now 25 and looks to be a lcareer, top quartile, MLSer. Sigh.
It wasn't protecting those 2 over Blessing. Blessing got his green card shortly before the expansion draft meaning he counted as a domestic player while Musa and Lobato were internationals.
So internationals have to be protected? That's kind of a crap system. Should have delayed his green card by a month. In any case, I'm not sure PV saw him as an 8, where he's been at his best, IMO
Yes you have to protect a certain number of your internationals, depending on how many are on your roster. For example for the Charlotte draft this year: https://www.mlssoccer.com/news/2021-mls-expansion-draft-rules-procedures
I probably won't be watching... Easter is an important day for faith and family so I will have to just catch a replay or highlights. Good luck SKC,,,keep the faith.
Kinda can't get healthy soon enough! Anyways, maybe we can luck out and get a smash and grab point. Or three? LAFC is definitely fallible and flawed this season, so maybe today is our day.
Given that fact that in our first 7 matchs, Zusi has a mere, uhm, 630 minutes, I'd really like to see Pierre today
Two announcers calls you have admire. After Vujnovic does something pathetic with a headed attempt at goal, one says, he scored quite a few in his previous league and the response: Looking at that, i'd guess not too many were headers. Also, the call that Isi is the only player worth a damn on the side was dead on
I'm not on the Vermes Out brigade, but the roster is poor. That's on him. Peter the manager can do only so much with a substandard roster. He's not going to get more than the sum of the parts. It is time, though, to start looking at more recent seasons to gauge whether PV has immunity. Any goodwill from the early teens has worn off. The past 4ish seasons has been uneven at best. And last year, which was good, ended with a total thud losing so many down the stretch and then the playoff loss. So little to inspire any thoughts about making the playoffs at all this year. Much less having any sort of memorable season (good, memorable).
At the same time PV the TD can only do so much with the roster when 2 big money spots on the roster are out for extended periods of time. I'm not absolving him of blame, but this roster was throw into complete disarray with the Kinda and Pulido injuries. And overall KC wasn't that bad today, they weren't that good, but they looked like most KC teams on the road over the last few years.
Jump for LA football club, ole, ole is pretty catchy. Yet aother multi goal loss. SKC 2022 is dog$hit.
I'm going to quibble with your last point. We looked noticeably worse than we have on the road, in quite some time. We lost every team statistical category, except for clearances. If they hadn't so kindly scored for us, would we have found a goal? our best chances were a rather weak Shelton chance in the 53 minute, which xG says is scored upon a whopping 13 percent of the time (though zero percent of the time when you miss 7 yards wide) and Vujonic' wonderfully inept header, from a spot which leads to a goal 12 percent of the time.. Our shot map is pretty clear, we were limited to mid-distance, bad angle shots. we were not going to score. LAFC, meanwhile, had a pretty nice central, inside the box clump on their shot map. They weren't all great shots, and only added up to xG of 1.7 to our .7, but, IMO, it shows they were controlling the game. I don't think SKC will win every game, and i know there are seasons that will not go to plan. I agree, losing Pulido and Kinda is devastating to our attack, and eliminates our chances of being a really good attacking side. But this is not a team playing the SKC way, or our fallback, defend while looking to counter way. We are rudderless, and this is something we haven't seen from a PV team, ever. The fact that JFR is losing it, on a regular basis, speaks to this. there is no clear objective to our play these days. In the previous 12 seasons, there has always been a clear objective.
Matt Doyle made the point this weekend that this might be a clear case of hanging on one year too long. but it's worse than that, isn't it? We hung on too long, and have no idea that that is the case. If this is going to be a non-playoff year, fine. everyone has them. but if this is going to be a non-playoff year in which the lessons learned are that our 35 year olds are really getting old, our slow players are really slow, and that while the roster is built around youth and the pro player pathway, we don't really believe in it, then what's the point? I believe that this season was destined to suck we learned of the inuries then jettisoned Mauri without a plan to replace him. Shelton is just horrible this season. Salloi is just checked out. Russell is angry. Fontas remains brilliant on the ball, but costs us, all the time, in our defensive posture, Zusi is exposed at least once a game, Roger should have retired. I love his game. One of my all time favorites, but he can't do Roger things anymore, so all that's left are the fouls. I think Walter is putting in a ton of work and cannot be judged properly because all he does is firefight. I don't know, if Kinda returns at full Kinda, we still don't have a 6, or a 9, and we're old and slow at 2 of 4 defensive spots. Voldemort finally got a game, and didn't look bad. He needs to start playing and seeing if, for 2023, he can form an effective partnership with Isi. Logan should lock down the LB position. We should try Sweat or Fontas or player unknown at the 6. Pierre or Duke ( I know, but maybe) have to start getting games at RB. We need to sit Salloi and shock his system, see if we can restart his heart, because he's in a coasting season and that can't be allowed again. Tzonis needs to start, every week, until he proves he can't improve to the point of being really worth it. Vujnovic needs to play because shelton. If we're going to suck, we should be young and suck. There is no possible upside to being old and sucking. End rant.
It's a fair point to say that having both Pulido and Kinda out negatively impacts the team in ways that are both significant and difficult to quantify. The closest example is Atlanta and Martinez. Atlanta was terrible the year of his ACL injury. I am OK with giving PV and the gang a bit of a pass on this year, but there's a lot of other layers to peel back. Unlike the Martinez injury, Pulido is 3 years of a guy going in and out of lineups because of his knees. The way he has been managed makes the SKC medical team look inept (at best). Especially true last year. Yo-yoing the guy in and out of the lineup, then having him play in the Western Conf final, then having him go under the knife for season ending cartilage replacement surgery one month later seems like malpractice. Also fair to point out that the primary roster building mechanism we were promised by PV, the Academy/SKCII, has yet to produce much of anything beyond Busio. The lack of depth on this roster is 100% due to this failure. The team is bad because it lacks depth and we're playing 35 year olds. Its also fair to point out that this year, unlike all others, is different because you just can't see a way out.
I feel sorry for Shelton. I haven't heard/seen anyone say that he isn't a fine person, but he has to know how futile and pathetic his quality of play is. He surely knows that this is way beyond him, and he keeps getting thrown out there game after game, knowing that most of the non-moronic portion of this fanbase HATES seeing his name in the starting lineup. That's gotta do damage to your mentality as a human being. People used to excuse his lack of goals by describing how he "holds up play" or distributes well up top. HE DOES NOTHING OF THE SORT. He loses possession every single time he touches the ball. If he even manages to hang on to the ball long enough to look for someone else, his touch and measure is so clumsy that he sends it directly to the opposition. I genuinely believe... and I'm 100% not being hyperbolic here... I genuinely believe we'd perform better as an offense down a man in the position that he "occupies." Not even with a replacement player, just playing 10v11. And Peter would say, "so can I use him on the wing then?" No, Peter. You cannot. You do not get to use Shelton anymore... anywhere. Bad manager... bad. So yeah, there'd always be a hole in the striker position, but Peter believes we don't need a striker to score goals anyway... like that's not the most important thing a striker does. The key, though, is that it's just a hole... it's not a black hole that sucks the ball into and destroys possession and flow. It's just empty, but the other players will have no incentive or inclination to push the ball into that emptiness. We'd be permanently wounded, but we wouldn't be constantly hemorrhaging blood all game. It'd be a contained negative. Every moment Shelton is on the field for us is an uncontained negative... and we came into the season KNOWING THIS and did it BY CHOICE!