I sure as hell did.. http://www.unitedmania.com/episode-107-chris-jinxed-them-6713 Join the boys as they passionately go over the past two losses and offer up some opinions to what United need to do to stabalize themselves. We also cover some MLS news and do a lightning round recap of this past week's MLS action. Enjoy! BTW - anyone who loves cool rock music from the 80's will love the opening music.
First time listening and it was pretty good. I was expecting all kinds of wonky opinions a la Borg. The one guy everyone seemed to disagree with most essentially shares all of my opinions. [He's right and the other guys are wrong ] 1. We DO need consistency and changing our roster has lead to significant dysfunction during this away period. We do not have 16 starters right now, we have perhaps 9. This idea that because several players massively overperformed during a certain stretch we have 16 starters is completely false. Which leads to point 2... 2. Salihi doesn't 'fit' right now [as a starter]. Actually none of our strikers fit. At least 1 will be replaced by season's end to be honest. Why doesn't Salihi fit? Again, that one guy is absolutely correct... 3. Our midfield is dysfunctional. At the wing, we are just not cutting it right now. DeLeon, Najar and Cruz are NOT starters. They should be backups, learning their trade. Pontius is a winger. HE IS A WINGER. On right wing, we need to find someone that has pace and can distribute. In my opinion, we need to trade Najar and get someone else. The reason a guy like Tan might fit into this roster is because of his pace at forward. He can outrun Pontius and make plays alongside him rather than getting outrun by him [see: Pontius taking the ball from Salihi against C0lumbus]. 4. However, in the last 40 minutes, Salihi can come on and really take advantage of a tired defense. One thing people are starting to really notice is that our forwards don't work well in different pairings and yet we run those pairings more than once [the definition of madness?]. Salihi and DeRo is a no no, for example. 5. Santos is regressing to the mean. He does this seemingly every year he is on a new team. He has a fire in his belly and then it goes out over time. Everyone gave Charlie Davies shit for the same thing, but because the team is overperforming (trust me, we have a chance to not make the playoffs, so no one should relax), we are all giving him slack. When he is on the field, we regress to longball soccer. I don't like it. 6. We could use another defender at right back. Why right back? Well, we also need a right winger. In my opinion, our team is significantly lopsided. Our major strength is on the left. I'd bet dollars to dollars that a majority of our plays come from the left throughout this year. As such, we fail to perform well against teams that have strong right midfielders/right backs. This leads me to the major crux of my argument: We need a right winger and right back to be a Cup contender this year. We need to find our starting 11 and our ~2 subs that come in after 60 minutes (Should be Salihi and Cruz/Najar/DeLeon). We need to consider perhaps trying a new formation against different opponents. It's never even been a discussion. People are too harsh on our defense. Our defense isn't that bad really, but what needs to change on the D is someone new (to replace Russell quite frankly) that can distribute to the midfield and in turn can distribute to the forwards.