Touchy, touchy. Jeez. Whatever. Welcome to the forum! Most of us aren't so prepared to put posters we disagree with on ignore--especially not for such a mild criticism of a player that we should all expect a lot from.
The Turner pass that led to the goal against was a poor ta 1. Colombia and Brasil didn't start their backups. They seemed pretty focus. In fact, it was US who had seemed to lack focus in the first game. 2. The last time the US got a result against Brasil was 1998. That was before a most of the players in the current team were even born. So, yes, getting a win even in a friendly against a Brasil is a big deal.
Every defense should be compact, really. Even good presses are compact -- that's why teams play a high line with a high press. Better to leave space behind than in between if you can maintain a strong offside discipline. It's not why we sucked against Colombia, but the only thing we got from the incredibly bland miked up of Berhalter in that game was him repeatedly telling the back line to move up -- that they were leaving too much space between them and the midfield. It a usual problem with our midblock, though it wasn't yesterday -- either the front line creeps up or the back line gets hesitant and fades back.
No Bob Ley tried to boost soccer from day one. I think it’s Dave O’Brien baseball guy they jammed in for ‘06.
listen to some pre- and post- game interviews, homie. they say what gregg says, and they say it how gregg says it.
Wes is one of our best players and a bit dictator of the intensity and heart of the team. He's been not especially good in these two friendlies, but he tends to come up much bigger in competitive matches. Does he have to start now? No. But he should. He's a strong defender who brings more danger creation and goal scoring than a guy like Johnny or Musah, who both have their positives. But both of those guys are more ball secure than creative.
you saying Brazil seemed focused is your opinion, but many on here disagree. And things didn’t fall apart against Colombia until late, when we had a bunch of subs in the game who wouldn’t have been playing if it were a competitive game. The bottom line is that friendlies are not official matches. They can be helpful in understanding the quality and style of play of an opponent (depending on their player selections and tactics) but they dont count for or guarantee anything. I remember Klinsmann getting good results against some euro teams in friendlies when our guys were busting ass and theirs weren’t. Ditto for the France game under Sarachan. It’s very easy to argue that making too much of those results can be counterproductive, as it can instill a false sense of confidence in players, and unrealistic expectations in fans.
Panama usually plays us more straight up, but there's a decent chance Bolivia plays back, perhaps even puts 9-10 guys in the box and doesn't move, right? I don't know them at all. If so, we have to get numbers up to break it, and so you are almost certainly going to have higher lines.
There's no doubt Berhalter is a steady Eddie type, highs not too high and lows too low. In the long term, I think that works best because the fiery type -- positive or negative -- is just a lever that can only be pulled so many times before it falls flat. But it absolutely could be contributing to it and probably is. That said, I think after one of these poor performances in terms of intensity, the Deuce-Edu halftime crew went off on the idea that it's on the coach. Basically every former player has said you shouldn't need a coach at this level to hype you up for a game. And that's right, too. I mean, some of these guys are playing like 50 games a year -- if you don't have a method for getting your intensity up on demand, you aren't going to be very good. I think the fact that a lot of our players don't play a lot might also be part of this (or part of why they don't play all the time). I think also the aspirational motivation US Soccer chose to us -- change the way the world, etc. -- somewhat backfires as a LOT of the intensity flops seem to be when they disrespect the opposition or when they come into a friendly expecting a friendly -- which Colombia was like, no, we're going to play this like it's a competitive match. There's a real mismatch between the "we're a special group" and "we came to win Copa America" and the lack of connection to the thought that you're not good enough to back that up without bringing it every game.
This just sounds like building our team and attack around someone we shouldn't. If you were talking about Reyna, I agree, we could build an attack around him and we would be wise to do so. Is McKennie more dangerous than Reyna offensively? No. Do we struggle to play up the middle and provide service to our strikers? Yes. It's not that hard, but for some reason he keeps getting a free pass. When we've shown well the past two games, it was in spite of him not because of him. We're the guy stranded on the deserted island praying for rescue...a nice 100' yacht is passing by asking if we need help, but for some reason we're dead set on being rescued by a magic carpet.
The "Are Friendlies Important" are a matter of degrees. Competitive matches do count more, by definition. And in the vast majority of cases, the opposition is playing to win, both in intensity and in tactical and rotational choices. Obviously, there are some exceptions in group play, etc. but it's much rarer you see that in a friendly. The crowds are also usually more intense and the pressure higher, because there's something on the line. A friendly can have all those same aspects as well. I mean, Colombia played at what seemed like full intensity to me. But you can never really guarantee the other team is playing to win, either in how hard they try, or in that tactical choices, or in who they play. The worse team usually wants it more, but even that isn't reliable. So... yeah, friendlies can be good wins or bad losses and you can learn stuff in them. I mean, the Colombia loss definitely raised real questions, but also ... we pulled Pulisic at halftime and Reyna and Wes before the the third goal, and clearly played a more aggressive tactical plan than we probably will in the Copa and obviously the team sleptwalked at points which they've been more prone to do in less important matches. And this tie is a good tie. It's literally only our second result against Brazil, ever, and even if this isn't Ronaldo Brazil, it was the A team, and while Brazil does tend to float at times, I wouldn't say they didn't take this seriously; it's Brazil, they float. A tie seems fair, and Brazil outplayed us but not by much and we could have absolutely won. And yeah, maybe in the Copa, Brazil has an extra gear we didn't see because it was a friendly, so yeah, we'll see then. I don't know why it has to be a completely binary discussion.
I'm not building the attack around Wes in the sense that he's the primary guy. But I am building my team around him in that he's a Top 3-5 player on the team. Why shouldn't he be a core player? You seem to be putting all this emphasis on Wes for the failure to deliver to a striker, but I don't really see why Reyna and Wes can't coexist, which Reyna filling that role. I'm not benching Reyna for Wes. There are spots for three midfielders or in most of what we play, so if you are making a case for benching Wes "because" I'd love to see a whole midfield. I have no idea who you think the 100' yacht is in your analogy.
Our players really turned up as an actual team rather than 11 good soccer players wearing the same uniform like what we all witnessed versus Colombia. Correct! It is always a special occasion when any nation can take the field with the founders of the sport and as well the culture that has exceled at it so well over the generations. To the English, they invented football. To the Brazilians, they perfected it.
Part of me wonders, maybe stupidly, maybe not, did these guys just not get prepared right for what Colombia's been the last 2 years? I would imagine they'd be reviewing tape, scouting Colombia, but sometimes when you hear professional athletes talk about teams, its clear they don't know ---- and have absorbed nothing. Could this be a case of them stupidly being wowed by Brazil jersey's and simply not understanding that the best performing teams in South America the past year were: #1 Argentina #1B Uruguay, #3 Colombia, and then a tier drop into Ecuador, Venezuela and then Brazil? Because the way they played Colombia it's like they didn't understand that Colombia is just a better TEAM by far right now than Brazil. Period. Brazil's 3 qualifiers last fall included a tie at home to Venezuela, followed by a road trip and loss to Colombia, followed by another home face plant, against Argentina, who beat them as well. Colombia is in 3rd place in Conmebol qualifying as of now, Brazil's in 6th place. SIXTH PLACE. They aren't behind by a little either, they're in a nice clump with Venezuela at 4th with 9, Ecuador in 5th with 8, and Brazil in 6th with 7, but Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia are on 15, 13, and 12 points, with 2 total losses combined across 18 games. Brazil just hasn't been good. I figured with the friendlies in march, they'd woken up, but maybe not. Otoh it has to be noted, 24 freaking shots given up, there were chunks of time, parts of the first half hour, parts of the first 25 minutes after 2nd half kick off (and the final few mins) where they took us out to the woodshed, and we relied on luck and Turner saves to keep us in the game. We played well in terms of attacking soccer, but Davies mentioned zeroes corners earned, and it does need to be mentioned that at this point, the total waste of strikers (even McBride admitted as much on ISWT's podcast, mentioning that the system does not allow strikers to be impactful unless crosses are on point) is something that must be fixed. It's almost like Berhalter has PTSD from the ghastly striker play in 2019, and early on after the post-covid restart, and simply writes off striker before kick off. It's enough already, Pepi, Balo, Sargent and Wright are all good players, ----ing USE THEM.
The first half was reasonably close, the second half after being the better side by a little bit in half one, Colombia just ripped us apart, at first, just clearly better (probably 45-60) and then just decimating us 60-90, and a lot of that was a combo of horrid individual mistakes (it was very much of a piece with the Dutch game, where, we had 4 or 5 big defensive breakdowns, and Turner was able to keep out I think 2 of them w/elite saves, but they were able to punch 3 through thanks to Adams fail to mark, a throw in unmarked, and then that last goal where despite Turner alerting the D to an unmarked guy at the far post, he still ran in, unmarked and had an easy shot to make it 3-1 late: the 2nd half was like that, but x10,000, far more break downs, in a much shorter stretch of time (like 30 mins). The subs were a total disaster, individual performances from Turner, Richards, Ream, CCV, Weah on one goal etc were so bad it was comical. Looking back, it reminded me most of the Czech's in '06, and the Dutch at the WC (who technically, were largely quiet, but had figured out how to generate easy chances about every 10-15 mins exploiting system holes and player fatgiue, and scored on 3 of 5 or 6 of them).
Nah, the 5-0 defenestration of El Tri and Canada was better. We gave up next to nothing in those two games, and broke both of those teams mentally (El Tri again, literally fighting us since they couldn't beat us, Canada deliberately breaking Gio's leg when they couldn't defend him). This game we gave up a billion chances (24 shots! including 12 sogs), Turner had to stand on his head the second half, I would say our attack was close to as good as it was last summer, but our defense was a mess last night compared to those games. Part of that is Brazil is 20x as good as the current El Tri, and 10x as good as that Canada, but part of it is that we just played better back then, and also had a healthy Dest which puts more pressure on the opponent than Scally (who as others have said, came out of these two matches somewhere between "okay, and fine" which in its own way was a bit of a revelation since we're likely to only have 1 match, maybe 2 in this Copa America where we play teams as challenging as Brazil and Colombia (and there are probably only another 5-10 sides in the world that would be as challenging for him, tops, too).
I think there's probably a number of players who pay no real attention and who, even when the staff tells you these guys are on fire, still think Colombia is a small country and Brazil is Brazil. But the bigger thing was probably that a bunch of guys coming off a long season took it as a walk in the park because it's a friendly and Colombia came out and punched them in the face. Of course, this is all speculation. But some of the commentary afterwards made it seem like that might be it.
Yep, he's been bad, invisible, and bang average in his matches for us. How much of it is Berhalter not figuring out how to use him, and how much of it is is Tillman struggling to figure out how to play within the system and play well is open to question. We've seen similar issues with Balo, with Wright (until recently), with Richards, and others. Not sure what it is, and I'm not gonna lie and pretend he's been good when he hasn't, but I'm also not gonna lie and pretend he's not a good to very good to great player because he's been anonymous and worse for us. He was fantastic for PSV last season, and very good with Rangers the year before (Young player of the year in the SPL and with his club), he's got what 5 goal contributions in CL+CL qualifying the past 13 months. He does it against teams besides the bottom of the SPL and the bottom of the Eredivisie. Transfermarkt doesn't change his valuation from 1.5 million Euro's 2 years ago last week, to 20 million now for no reason other than cellar dwellers in the Eredivisie. Berhalter's job is figuring out how to bring out his best, and Tillman's job is making sure that happens. It hasn't so far, but there's no question that talent is there.
They went toe to toe with Dortmund in the champions league knockout stage, and I believe MT started both legs.
I almost didn't watch last night. After the Colombia horror show I didn't relish the thought of seeing such a talented MNT underperform again and get shellacked. Man am I glad I can't overcome by compulsive need to watch all MNT games because this was as entertaining a match as we've played since ... CNL 2023? WC 22? Sure it was a tie in a friendly but objectively the team played well, finally showing their full potential, which is all you can really ask. And people are free to dismiss the game as an exhibition but what I saw was a Brazilian team going forward for a win for 90min and us trying for the same span to get a win as well. One moment in particular stands out: It's extra time and Turner has a goal kick. He's trying to take it fast to spark an attack. A Brazilian player grabs him and prevents the quick restart. A foul is called, Turner is pissed. But what this means to me is that we weren't wasting time trying to bleed the clock for a draw. We were pushing to get a win, even in extra time, against ********ing *Brazil.* That is a fantastic attitude and ambition and I loved to see it. Another beautiful moment was the passing out of the back sequence around the 70th min. I've been skeptical of GGG's insistence on playing out of the back, and I'm still not sure it's the right strategy, but when it works it's a thing of beauty to see. It also epitomizes what I've always thought should or may distinguish this team from earlier versions of the MNT in the 90s and 00s, which is a greater technical ability on the ball. Those earlier teams were great and I loved them, but their strengths weren't in that regard so to see us manifest crisp passing and forward-looking soccer nous was also inspiring. Now the question is which team shows up in the Copa? The one that shat the bed against Colombia or the one that went toe to toe with Brazil? I have no idea but at least after last night's game there's reason for optimism.
Weston is famously not remotely interested in watching the game, to the extent of playing video games during the epic WC '18 Final at a party w/friends back then. Not to pick on him, but if he's that disinterested, other than tape study w/the team in an official capacity, I bet he doesn't know 1/10th as much as we do about what's going on in South American soccer.
And that Dutch league is a very good one for producing good players and we’ve seen lots of them move to bigger leagues from PSV, Ajax, and Feyenoord.
And he was one of their best players doing the beating up, and as I previously mentioned more than 1/3 of his goal contributions in league this past season were against Feyenoord, Az, and Twente who finished in 2nd, 3rd and 4th.