Brilliant deduction by Joe Lowry that the Quakes season is over! We've known it for weeks. As for Hernán I don't think he's making a great argument that he's "not working out". We all know that he tends to get stuck with the ball too far back in midfield and at times loses it. That's a work in progress. I know Ian is trying to work with him on it. But he has a pretty good # of key passes, 2nd to Espinoza on the team, with only playing a fraction of games, and roughly comparable to guys like Evander, Almada, and Luna on a per 90 basis. I'd rather that he was a guy who is trying to help us build thru midfield than a guy who's standing around near the offside trap getting frustrated that he's not getting the ball. You start with a guy who wants to get stuck in the game, and then you work to refine it. IOW maybe he's trying to play too much hero ball, but at least he wants to try to be the hero.
Gruezo behind him and Pelligrino in front of him on the left. Pellegrino scores goals but he's useless in buildup play. Hernán can't for example pass to Pelligrino and expect that Pellegrino will make a move toward goal and Hernán can make a run for a give-and-go. 'Grino's going to back pass out of pressure almost every time.
I think the real problem with Hernan is that he has mentally sunk to the Quakes’ level of mediocrity and doing the minimum. Remember his first 2-3 games, where his teammates tried to get into position for his unexpected passes and tried to do a little more themselves, in order to keep up? Seems like that completely vanished after 5-6 games, and Hernan just devolved to their level. Even Espinoza devolved to their level. So we are mediocre across every position on the field.
Matt Doyle's 2024 post-mortem on the Quakes San Jose Earthquakes: What we learned from their 2024 season | MLSSoccer.com
I know people have posted bits and pieces of this article, but it’s nice to read the whole thing in one place. It’s a pretty good write-up, but I don’t agree with Doyle’s suggestion to put the young players in the lineup. Because we keep doing that, and we don’t see these young players improve. Kids like Cade and Niko get bigger and more muscular, but they don’t really improve — they don’t erase deficiencies (Cade couldn’t head the ball, Niko’s one-footedness) and they don’t develop soccer brains. Bouda is another example of failure to thrive. Tommy Thompson might be our example of someone failing to thrive while playing a whole career here. For counter-examples, there is Benji who is now turning it around because he’s playing defense. Beason I think has steadily improved and many times overcomes his lack of pace. I don’t know why we don’t develop talent. Maybe the last U-23 player to really shine here was Landon?
I've always been skeptical of the idea that the Quakes don't have the ability to develop talent. I think a lot of times the players are good enough to make the 1st team but have some achilles heel that prevents them from really developing much beyond that, and it's not necessarily something that's fixable. With TT, I think some of the coaches buried him a bit, but his achilles heel is just that he's too slow. There is no amount of "developing" that's going to fix that. With Cade it's the final ball / decision making. I think it's questionable how much you can fix that, and I'm not sure he's really improved in that all that much at Chivas. I watched several of his games last year. It was a lot of the same Cade. With Niko it's the one-footedness. This I think is fixable to some extent, and if I were the Quakes I'd have him working the heck out of his right foot. And then the guys who left, like Luna and Barajas, were just guys that left before we could start to integrate them into the 1st team. That was not a failure to develop as much as a failure to identify talent and make sure it doesn't leave.
I disagree, I would think a big part of any youth development is program is identifying talent and making sure it doesn’t leave. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be in the biz. Those players would not leave if they thought they were being developed. Here’s an analogy — if you are a fisherman who always talks about the ones who got away, then you are not much of a fisherman. (And i don’t mean you personally, I’m referring to the Quakes)
Players leave for different reasons. Some leave because they want to go the USL route - start getting D2 minutes rather than wait to get MLS 1st team minutes. That worked for both Luna and Barajas. To partially address that, I think the Quakes could be a little more pro-active and try to get the academy / Quakes II guys minutes sooner, even if they take a little bit of a short term hit. Cruz Medina is one example right now. Emi Ochoa. There are a few.
Jazzy in fútbol everything is fixable, except speed, in which you're either born with or not. Everything else is practice, practice, practice and good coaching. Things that seem like we've been lacking for a long time or ever. Now, that we may have "players" in our academy that just don't care enough (Gilbert fuentes) or maybe were good at a young age and as they've gotten older other players are passing them over because they're practicing putting in more effort is another thing.
I think there are things besides speed that are not fixable, or fixable only to certain extent. We’ve had long discussions about whether Cade’s “soccer brain” / instincts / decision-making / vision with his final ball is fixable. Even the term “instinct” suggests it’s something you have or you don’t. How do you practice it other than by just playing? But “just playing” is not a specific practice where you can hone in on it and get a ton of repetition. “Creativity”. How do you practice it? How you fix it if you don’t have it? So of the 3 Quakes academy products I mentioned - TT, Cade, and Niko, two of them have Achilles heels that are either not fixable or questionably fixable. The 3rd, Niko, has a one-footedness issue that should be fixable. If someone isn’t trying to get him to fix it, that would seem like a big miss by our technical staff not to mention by his own father, who’s a former player and academy coach. If everything in soccer is fixable and just a matter of practice then the best players would simply be the ones who practiced the most. But I don’t think it’s that simple. Natural ability is also a factor, or getting the right kinds of repetition / training at a very young age such that it seems like you’re born with it, but it may have been somewhat baked in early. But in either case if you don’t have it by say early teens or so it may be hard to ever get it. I’m talking mainly about the vision / creativity / instincts kind of stuff.
When I first started playing soccer (at age 49), I was struck by how smart the best soccer players were. Before that, i had always thought that tennis players were the smartest athletes. But I realized soccer players were on par with them. I think part of the reason is that to be top notch at tennis, you have to know all the angles to help predict where the ball will go next. You also have to be able to read the opponent's body. Soccer is the same, but then you multiply by 22 players on the pitch. And that's what I think makes up the soccer brain. Some of the players who I thought had superior soccer brains were Messi and Zlatan and El Pescadito (I forgot his real name). As I've said before, Bobby Moore was ostensibly like that, cuz if he closed his eyes during practice, he could tell you where every player was on the pitch. Can soccer brains become learned behavior? who knows, but it seems to me that Cade and Niko will never have that power.
I think Niko's instincts are pretty good. It's just the one-footedness that is his biggest problem right now. Here's a link to the thread where we got into the whole "soccer brain" thing a little bit. @don gagliardi posted an article about a guy who has a method to try to teach "field sense", right after my post. https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/the-official-cade-cowell-thread.2094056/page-70#post-41541142
Our players made a special visit to the kids at @KPSantaClara, bringing smiles and helping brighten up their days with gift bags from our Quakes Foundation. #KickChildhoodCancer 🎗️. pic.twitter.com/eIPdN3wLdo— San Jose Earthquakes (@SJEarthquakes) September 30, 2024 GO SAN JOSE EARTHQUAKES!!! -G
Those researchers sound interesting, but that article is from 2007 and I couldn’t find anything new from them. So maybe the teachability of perceptability didn’t pan out. Oh and yeah, I see I posted almost the exact same thing a year ago. My apologies to everyone!
You wouldn't be the first to (virtually) repeat posts or say the same thing more than once (guilty as charged!).
Earthquakes achieve ignominy. Is John Fisher a multi-sport stumblebum? (sfchronicle.com) Can someone cut and paste this or remind me how to hop over the paywall? I'm curious to read more about Mr Stumblebum. Thanks.
If it's raising public awareness about the great fleecing of the San Jose (and greater Bay Area) soccer loving public, it's probably worth the time.
Not talking about the value of the article in helping to inform the general public about the great evil in the world. I’m talking about the value of us reading it. We already know the Fish thing, and discuss it incessantly.