I am not discounting your comments one bit, but I do seem to remember some posters here complaining that Mexico did not deserve that "soft" penalty. With margins this fine, there are a whole hosts of what ifs. What if ES gets that penalty call against Canada right before Canada scores? What if Navas was healthy for our home game against CR? I would have hoped that the margins would not have been this fine for us. One more random break against us and we may have been in a playoff to end up in a group with Spain and Germany.
That’s assuming if she’s your aunt through marriage your uncle would have married her anyway. He may have, but balls may have been a dealbreaker.
Double edged sword. Capping for the sake of it can backfire. We have a lot of decent players now. IMO Ochoa isn’t a big deal. His play at the Olympics was waaaayyyyyyy over rated. He should have had both goals against Hondo. He has been completely mediocre for RSL since. We fixate on dual Mex nationals way more than we should. I liked Araujo a lot and GB tried to bring him in. Can not blame that on Greg. Sorry, that’s just wrong. Multiple attempts. Friendlies and qualifiers. Gomez is the next guy we have to get, and it looks like we are in pole position, but GB can not be blamed for this other stuff. No way. Alvarez. Don’t care. Head case at youth level. A lot of flash. Again, a bigger deal is made out of him because it gets press and hits. He still tried to bring him after he was pretty much gone anyway, and he had nothing to do with that. Blaming GB for these is not fair, but ignoring what was going on, and making an easy superficial critique. Again, I hate your last line of “people”. Cop out social media internet stuff. Who are these “people”? Anonymous internet posters are not people.
Makes no sense. It’s a simplistic non sensical conclusion. If you can’t understand that so be it. My initial response makes just as much “sense” as yours. All you are doing is making yours more legitimate in your mind. It’s really the same.
I give credit to guys like you who have the will to respond to posts like that in the way you do. Just not worth the effort IMO. If you understand what has gone on with these scenerio’s they can be argued endlessly in circles. GB has been incredible on the dual Nat front. Stop. I want to stay away from folks who clearly just want to argue for the sake of it. Either this poster wants to or really doesn’t know the situations.
akinola ochoa araujo efrain jgo there is also a second set of people like soto robbie robinson who he has not locked down and are in limbo incredible? really? you can throw around adverbs or adjectives all you want, doesn't change reality. dude, akinola was like the first player i think since tchani to switch away. i am sure you can list some we did win but the point is we usually lose like a handful a decade, not per cycle. and i'm talking losing people other than efrain who have a line of USAYNT on their resume which is pretty hard to lose. he's running closer to 50/50 which is weak for an american coach. we should be playing with a stacked deck, represent the USA, go to the world cup, well funded, nice, safe country. how hard is that to sell? "incredible" was the list klinsi got his first cycle. hyperbole sucks.
Huh? Someone said we should be thankful for Mexico's win in Costa Rica. I said yes we should, because if Costa Rica wins or draws, then then they have 1 to 3 more points and they finish ahead of us in the table. That's all. I'm not making any point, I was just providing the math for his point. I'm not arguing anything. Thank you, Mexico. Let's move on.
"people" as in i just responded to "people" on this very forum saying it's ok for him to be cautious and posture that it's ethics. re GB's shallow idea of ethics, i could just as easily say that it licenses unscrupulous players and agents to pressure the US to call them earlier by announcing a competition for their services, eg question whether dest would have been called on the timeframe he was, if he hadn't "sold" that someone with a line of USA on his resume might go elsewhere. GB then dutifully plays along with his half of the shopping game. he turns out to have attacking instincts but defensive issues -- what i saw on U20 too. personally i prefer how some of the prior coaches handled it which is we would reward talent + eagerness with priority caps. if you wanna shop we'll talk later. we want committed players. eg musah. ironically has the effect of removing the game-playing and encouraging players to be emphatically pro US. you lose fewer people that way. to me psychologically if you allow players to straddle then you risk them considering the other side is greener. i don't see what is unethical, particularly with the ones who grew up and play here, with acting for our purposes like this is all they could possibly want. that then has the practical effect of rewarding that mindset. and disincentivizing "but i could go play for holland." if we responded to threats by dropping candidates, i guarantee you 90% of the players will decide before the fact. fwiw there are "playbook security" reasons i don't want to encourage, say, dual mexicans or canadians to play tourist here then commit there. we had people who spent long camps with us go someplace else that we then played in the ocho. that's bad. especially if your coach's whole claim to knowing what he's doing is system, not selection. "oh, let me tell you what the reads are...."
How many of those players would be under consideration for a trip to Qatar? Probably just Araujo and Berhalter did literally everything in his power on that front. Soto is still in the fold, he just has to figure out his own career. And what has Robbie Robinson done to show he deserves a call up. Akinola wanted to play for Canada. It’s simple enough. I don’t think he’d been breaking into our roster either. Gomez is also very much in play. We have a coach who is very on top of the dual nationals. The guys we’ve lost just haven’t wanted to play for us. And at the end of the day if guys prefer to be somewhere else that’s where they should go.
In the “all else equal” scenario, we’re grateful it wasn’t a draw, but a Costa Rica win over Mexico would actually keep the USA in third and send Mexico to the playoff.
Taking the weaker two teams off the Octa to make it another Hex: USA 2022 Home = 13/15 Away = 2/15 Finish: 15 / 13 GF / 9 GA / GD = +4 USA 2018 Home = 9/15 Away = 3/15 Finish: 12 / 17 GF / 13 GA / GD = +4 Last cycle we scored more, but we also conceded more. The point difference is that this time we beat the Ticos and Mexico at home (+6 pts), only managed a tie vs. Canada at home (-2 pts), and we managed one less tie away (-1 pt) for a total of +3 points. So our home record has improved, but the away record is a bit worse.
I’m sorry, are you blaming Berhalter for Jonathon Gonzalez? The guy who switched before the 2018 World Cup? Before Berhalter was hired? Musah, Dest, Pepi, Pefok are a pretty good haul. There’s also quite a few other dual nationals that were either easier gets or just kept it quiet - Reyna, Dike, etc. But hey, there’s no Robbie Robertson in there!
Ayo spent his name entire life in Canada and came up in the TFC academy. He had no real ties to the US outside of soccer.