Bo Oshoniyi is in his ninth-year. You might be right about the fire though. They didn't seem to have it.
I must agree whole heartedly with this. Preki from last year on this years KC team, with Davy breaking out, would have been feckin amazing. Really glad that didn't happen.
Ahem. United held them off for more than 39 minutes (Dema was sent off in minute 57, and there were six minutes of extra time).
Geese people! You had a point, but did you have to try and take it that far? Had we isolated the just the conference final games, we would have come to the opposite conclusion. Sample size. I've seen plenty of individual matches in the very top flight where the loser looked that uninterested despite all to play for.
What does it say about our league that a team like KC can be so successful? They had the best record in the west and got to the finals.
Foreign coaches won't matter. Our soccer culture has decided to reject any foreign influences as to fancy in favor of 'hustle board' football. Foreigners will only work if people are interested in absorbing something new.
Fixed your post. But seriously, KC looked superb in the last SJ game and the LAG game. And for whatever reason not so good in the MLS Cup. They deserved to be there.
Its says there were some incredibly overated teams in euro 2004. It also say that when teams like france and portugal got sent home early in 2002 it wasn't an accident. I agree that they desereved to be there but that is not exactly a ringing endorsement for the league. They play so on the most unattracive soccer in the league. And we are really at the point where increasingly skillfull soccer is almost discouraged in this league.
They had the best record in the West and made the finals because they had the best defense in the West. Add a healthy Meola and the team is hard to break down. This is a good team that lost 3 of its best 4 players to injury. The coach did what he had to do to make the team suceed. It wasn't pretty, but they got the job done. They fell one game short because they didn't have the offensive flair required to break down DC. The better team won as it should be in these games. Instead of putting them down, let's congratulate them for fighting so hard in the playoffs and getting to the finals. If you had asked me before the playoffs I would have said SJ would have beaten them first, but LD and company failed. LA failed miserably, now they truly looked atrocious in the conference finals.
Whats the point here? KC put it's foot down on the neck of virtually any and every team it got a 1-0 lead on this year. Didn't happen yesterday, DC kept getting after it, got a beautiful tying goal from Esky, an opportunistic and illegal goal off that handball on the second, but please don't try to suggest that it wasn't anything less than a smart play. It was the way Esky and Moreno have played all year, pressuring defenders, getting back on defense, and Esky took advantage of the sloppy KC defense and put the ball right where Bo could do nothing and nearly scored a third when Stewarts cross turned into an own goal. Exciting attacking soccer that made a mess of KC's much vaunted defense and supposed impenetrable bunker following the early KC goal. The second half was a disaster of course, the second Dema cleared a ball off the line with his hand you knew an impression of Monaco's deeply impressive two goal effort while a man down later in the Champions LEague last year was unlikely and it wasn't to be. DC bunkered, played better defense than KC had all day, and pulled it out. Their best game? Not by a long shot, but DC played a damn fine game as far as I'm concerned and earned the title the hard way coming from behind against KC, and then holding them off for nearly forty minutes while a man down. The big problem with the MLS, as far as I can see, is that Colorado and KC got as far as they did, playing as they did. Take nothing away from two squads that rode heart, and great defense/goal keeping when injuries took so much away from them, but I do think it's at least a partial indictment of the league that two teams struck as sharply by injuries, could ride so far on 1-0 game plans all year. Anyway, great season for KC, getting so far without essentially two of their best three players, and congrats to DC for completely turning around a moribund offense and a broken down franchise behind the coaching of Nowak, and the faith of it's players.
Illegal? I agree that more refs would call that a handball than not, but I think a case can be made that Esky didn't deliberately handle the ball.
I am criticising the entire league. We have about three patented bunker teams in this league. And all three of them seem to be successful at it. What that tells me is this league simply doesn't have the creative talent to counter these kind of tactics and that is a very bad thing.
Does the name Peter Nowak ring any bells? Look, I agree for the most part; the quality of MLS coaching has improved far slower than has the qualty of the league's players. Even so, I do think that there's been incremental improvment. Hanki was one of the old hands who plateaued as a coach years ago. Now he's gone. Andrulis took over for one of the league's early mistakes (Fitzgerald) and should get canned, too. Rongen's treads are looking awfully thin, but he might be little more than a placeholder w/Chivas (I doubt he'll be very effective). But on the flip side are guys like Sarachan, Bradley (whom I still think is a good coach despite his troubles with the MetroStrars), Nowak (not a bad rookie season as a coach). Gansler and Sampson have coached the USMNT. The current USMNT and Canadian NT head coaches are MLS alums. We have a couple of Euro imports in Nichols and Clarke who seem competent, if unspectacular coaches (better, say, than Ron Newman was back when he coached the Wiz). It'll be interesting how Ellinger does at Salt Lake City (certainly, he deserves a shot). I've always been less than convinced that a "foreign coach" would succeed in MLS simply based on his foreign experience. MLS is an odd potato; one must understand the oddities of NCAA soccer, of the unmined talent that exists in CONCACAF and the "lesser" S. American nations (i.e., not Argentina and Brazil). Any coach has to operate under MLS' unique single-entity rules, a very small salary cap, and restrictive (and confusing) roster rules. However, I'm beginning to feel that MLS rosters are starting to get deep eneough now, that there's enough knowledge (of how to work within the rules, of how to find players in Central America and how to draft decent college players) that's built up in the league, that it would be interesting so see a few more experiements with foreign coaches. What we seem to lack isn't so much tactical knowledge (IMO) but discipline and professional training practices. I just get the feeling that a lot of MLS clubs simply don't work hard enough, that the players don't push themselves or get pushed by their coaching staffs, don't train hard enough simply because they come out of a totally US-based model (with too much college soccer influence). We might be very physically fit, but that doesn't translate into faster-paced, more hard fought matches. I mean, look at how some guys play for their club teams vs. Bruce Arena. Night and day. Well, I have nothing to back me up on this. Could be totally wrong. But I do feel that better coaches could make this league much more entertaining.
Of course, KC won the league on a 1-0 game plan a few years back, so maybe it's an improvement. That game plan is a bit of a crutch to skill almost anywhere. And KCs back four is legitimately excellent. Heck, their forwards aren't half bad, either, they just don't have the means in midfield to get them the service they need. At about 8 positions out of 11 they are solid or better. I have no reason to see a particular correlation between aesthetic value and skill when I look at soccer across the world. For years, MLS was one of the highest scoring leagues in the world. It only meant that more defensive mistakes were being made than are today.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG... There is a long history of players being moved back during their careers and then becoming extremely successful. Roberto Carlos started out as a forward, Franz Beckenbauer started as an attacking mid. Closer to home, Tony Sanneh started out as a forward and has found much greater success as he moved to mid field an then to defense. It is not mickey mouse, if anything it shows a maturing in the league.
Well, it is disturbing, I'll grant that. But the fact that it was effective doesn't speak ill of the talent, which is in plentiful supply in Columbus.