How is France a red herring? We played conservative soccer, were up a goal a while, and got a tie. Used to be we were quite happy to play for the result as opposed to for possession. Now, if we had an equal or better team, go toe to toe. We didn't. We still often don't. So why am I playing tactics like we do?? Because you don't like the stats?? The idea is the stats aren't going to be pretty, it's a mismatch even if we line up 433, but do you at least want a chance at the result? To me this is very simple. Against good teams with aggressive styles, 451. Against cautious teams or mediocre ones, 433. Basically a matter of where the mids are on defense. But you can see from the results that we get a different result from Mexico depending if we go numbers back or not. You can be an absolutist aesthete and whine about stats, or you can play to win. I am simply suggesting that some nights we play more controlled soccer against obvious good teams, and not pretend like a 433 end to end shootout favors us. Not until you develop 15 world class players where we can play Brazil or England end to end. Until then, our chance is to absorb a stats mauling that doesn't translate to the scoresheet, and then get our disciplined goals and walk out with a result. I want results. Snobs want aesthetics. I think most of us wanted to win and not just look pretty, and your sales pitch was you wanted to win too. To be clear, I think there are very few teams in the world that when they evaluate a mismatch would do the aesthetic thing instead of the tactical thing to give them a chance. It is common sense. If I worry that they are better than me, I tighten it up and play for the odd chance. Few teams in the world would favor style of play over the chance to win, Clockwork Orange, etc., and they don't tend to lift trophies. The ones who lift trophies either are 100% disciplined tactically or they can get there for a particular tough game.
And yet the Total Soccer Show boys, Taylor Rockwell & Joe Cleats, who did a deep dive, were both effusive in their praise of his play. Even went so far as to wonder if he should be starting when he gets the fitness of one. So maybe don't be so emotional & watch closer. The guy had 3 hockey assists, would have probably had a direct one if Soto didn't block Lletget's shot, he made brilliant runs both in the tight spaces & wide that his counterparts weren't against Wales nor Panama, pressed them to oblivion to force to's, won the ball back for his team regularly after they turned it over & made his first passes square or fw with any reasonable opportunity to not have to go thru extra lines of defense. The people who bemoan loudest about the metrics being part of the evaluation in modern day don't want a check on their bias like the good ol' days.
I wish we were privy to Weah's minutes limitation, if any, for those games. He was so positive and aggressive in his cameos that I really would have liked to see him get a whole half at least.
I don't understand how our pool "fits" 433 better than 451. At a basic level it's literally just where the wing mids default back to on defense. Same personnel. Balderdash. Ditto 442. We have at least two players who could play striker. We have a 6. We have some 10 candidates. We have plenty of wingers. Bayern that actually won Europe plays 4141. I assume you like some other snob favorite team/coach and ignore they take second place or worse. Most champions are well balanced teams. If they aren't, they probably are outspending everyone by an insane amount of money, and people confuse personnel superiority with tactical dominance. If I buy enough expensive people they could probably play something silly and win most of their games. But the real question is against equal or better teams what would I play if I wanted both ends of the game covered. We the US do not exist in the checkbook world and can't just buy a wingback or 9 we can't develop or get a passport. So the formation has to exist in the world of reality and adjust accordingly. The question of whether we have the players for a formation is misleading. It's what would happen if they played it. My argument is in a few big games the 433 results in uncontrolled games that run away from us in the second half and provide poor team defense. It's a cute formation when you can buy anyone you want, which we can't. it's a cute formation when you have superior personnel to everyone you play, which we don't. In the reality where we exist more caution and defense is advised. And as I said we can have both the 451 and 433 at our disposal and just slide the wide players up and back as opponents demand. All I am really asking is duh in the tough games act like we might be in for a tough one and slide the wings back.
Don''t be a twit. This is not emotional. If you have been around here 5 minutes I have begged for Weah to be used. I should have the opposite bias. If you're going to pull that crap. I simply thought objectively not much came of it. I appreciated the hustling back. That is not going to be anything Adams doesn't do 20x better. That is not anything McKennie also didn't do. Suggesting he played better than Adams is silly. That is emotional trash no matter what the numbers can be jerked around to say. Claiming "hockey/second" assists when the goal is Ledezma gathers a simple ball wide, 35 yards from net, waits a second or two, and then puts a precision cross on someone's head is laughable. I could get he does some throughball into the box that then gets knocked across -- goal. You're exaggerating his role in rolling a ball wide for someone else to do the heavy lifting on. As I complained about Wales, I am sure the starters could do just fine rolling passes wide for Ledezma, if need be. They did it for Dest and Robinson. FWIW, since you are suggesting I saw things wrong, here is a collection of the ratings narratives: "Worked hard out wide but USMNT and showed a lot of quick thinking late on." "For the first half of his 28-minute shift, Weah looked like a guy still trying to find sharpness after a long battle with injuries. In the waning moments, though, he looked a lot more like the dangerous speedster we know." "Had some good moments off the bench, showing some nice technique." So they saw basically what I did and gave 6-6.5s. You listened to a podcast and dramatically overrated what you saw. I like him and want to give him more chances, but in the context of the sheer pile of available people, I thought he was projecting this cycle for the edge of the 23. If I wanted to be indulgent, I thought he like Reyna suffered from being played more centrally, and he would show more deployed wide where he primarily played U20. But that's arguing about how he wasn't used and didn't perform. In terms of how he was used and did play, he was not one of the dominant subs. He was solid and willing to work hard. He didn't play himself off the pool, but did he play himself on? Let's be blunt, Morris will probably start. Reyna whether he should be there or not, backup. We have some other wings. Ledezma himself starred there. Ditto "8" or "6" or whatever you have in mind. We are not bereft of options. I thought he hustled and then gave the ball to Ledezma. Ledezma then looked like the one to grab.
I can't begin to say how odd it is in an experimental friendly game where we thrashed the opponent, not a tough opponent, not a first team selection, that a hustle player sub should emerge based on some stats argument. To me if you can't objectively blow me away in a B game against Panama what can I expect from you against A team Mexico. It's like January camp. Your goal is to play well enough to stand out and get a second chance. A fairly average hustling performance barely keeps you in contest. There were a handful of players who made cases -- Nico, Soto, Ledezma, Steffen, Adams, McKennie, Musah. Reyna was a mixed bag but on pedigree probably gets a second chance. Lletget is coach's pet. Maybe Konrad. The coach likes some of the defenders. When we gather the first choice team you aren't going to go much beyond that set, that will integrate with the MLS players and missing regulars. To be fair, I have been pimping Weah, but as a dynamic wing player and not a hustling center mid. Ironically part of this may be people who gave me crap for suggesting him in the first place, seeing sparks of what I did and hopping on the bandwagon, no, worse, taking the reins from me. I am the one sitting still. I liked him before. I didn't think that was his best showcase. For that matter, this is not Klinsi, he does not give out equal time to campers and play the performers. If you came off his bench he pegged you before the game, limited your minutes on purpose and are one foot on a banana peel.
Right. This is my concern. If I have Pulisic and Reyna/Morris and others, do I really need to emphasize so much Dest and Robinson? I felt like we had a good cut of steak passing off to sirloin to make the cross. This would be like having your 10 give the ball to the 6 for the final ball. I want the ball in the point guard's hands to run the play, not have a power forward out there pretending he's Magic. If I get stuck? Yeah, overlap me. But setting up the team to be wingbacks crossing to a 9 sounds like how to get 0-0 Wales draws. What I wanted was more of what happened first half Panama late. Cut that ball some back in across the top of the box, run at people, take them on, make passes to feet in the box. To me take it to the flag and whack it in is lazy.
You need a team defense but the difference between good and special for a team is often if they have a Kante type that sweeps up EVERYTHING. You are going to occasionally get strung out with the lines way apart and a few teams have the guy who can mop up on an island, and most don't. Now, you're right, you're not going to be a good team without team defense. But there is a reason the EPL title followed Kante from Leicester to Chelsea.
I am a big believer in results against common opponents as predictive. Wales A beat Ireland 1-0 home and tied 0-0 in Dublin. Ireland beat US 2-1 in Dublin. Since people are pretending, what does that suggest Wales A does to us? So Wales B was clearly a drop off, and I could see the name brand guys like Bale sitting in a box in street clothes. At that point I don't want to hear this rubbish of how it's the Nations League team and a worthy test. They were willing to play 3 games in a window, and thank you for that. But the roster says what it says in terms of their level. I am pro experiment. Even at the expense of results. I just think when the whistle is blown the experiment's result gives you some hint at where you relatively stand. At whether what you did worked. You don't ignore the results -- but you need to risk them is my point. If I try out some new players on a team that lost to a rival 0-1 last year, and I get 0-0 against the rival, that's progress. If they lose 0-2, the changes are regression. You need to make changes to not lose 0-1 again. But if you ignore the results you have no objective sense if you are helping or not with the changes. The fairer critique would be it's hard to separate out GB's tactical and selection impacts from the personnel. ie did he screw them with the false 9. Did he have 8 or so close enough but then blow it with the last 3 choices, in terms of who and where. And having done so, we play to basically the same level of result as before, when you run the common opponent analysis. If he gets those last 3 choices correct maybe we get the "W." Personally that's my sense of the relative talent and what his tactics do to it. Is that we may match up one way but he kicks us down a notch by tactics. We deserve A on talent. We get B for tactics. In serious group play that starts to show up. At minimum, before people get a big head, you have to balance off the result and the quality of opposition against looking better. Beggers can't be choosers but we have to be honest about what we faced. And the fact 0-0 was all we could manage. This is also part of the reason I chastized the flag crossing against Wales was you saw we racked them up dribbling right at them in Panama. Or that if you have to cross maybe it should be Reyna or Ledezma and not the wingbacks.
The story went that he was offered the job c. 11/17. "The initial list had 33 candidates, which was then narrowed down to 11. Stewart said he, Mooney and Romeijn then just looked at what he called the required qualifications for the job, which cut the list down to five, while the top three “had scored very high in that.”" Speaks to my belief that rather than conduct true analytics where a flaw merely has calculation weight, we used check box items to absolutely exclude. In plain English, I can grade you down for your language facility, or balance it against your other qualities, or I can make it an absolute and rule you out -- even if you have other superior qualities and would grade out on the whole better. It reads like we arbitrarily got rid of names for check box reasons. Were these things like language and Chicago and GM and such that weren't required before and are not objectively necessary -- or conclusive in sum total with other features? For example, and I am not saying bringing Klinsi back, but if in theory you could have a "Klinsi" but he wants to live in LA or a Tata but you have to work with language skills, you can compromise or sum all the scoring, or you can make those absolutes and get a weaker candidate. You might tell me the process gets a superior result but the way I can tell that is did the cut candidates look better than the final hire. We don't quite know because it was so secretive. This gives them deniability. This is what we got from this applicant pile. I find it hard to believe a process which results in a nepotism hire with midtable results was objective and a template for the process going forward. I would assume it was ends-oriented junk, a fig leaf to hire who they wanted. Ironically hidden in the guise that we were becoming objective and deliberative and would improve the quality of coaching. OK, if the last full time hire was a world cup semi guy, where is the finalist? How is this improvement? Houston has similar distortions where we brought in a GM, the claim was Kinnear was overwhelmed and with the new coach we needed a division of labor. In reality our results have decayed, and the GM is horrific and has become his own obnoxious power center that never gets fired for performance. The personnel work is not better and the game seems to instead be the coach is always the fall guy even if the GM can't pick players to save his life. The reality is we need to spend more payroll to be competitive, and fire the GM if not reintegrate the two jobs. But the org chart has taken on its own life, and the whole exercise seems intended to avoid spending the money that would change things. There is no real evidence that the claimed process is any better than the old way of having an executive with checkbook authority negotiate with a candidate pre-qualified by having trophies in his background. Ironically for check box abusers the one check box they got rid of was requiring some trophies on your resume. To me they can be hired at executive whim, speak Japanese, and demand to live in Tokyo when not in camp, and if they have trophies and win here who gives a d*mn. It;s backwards. Are we trying to win or are we now some third world federation playing executive politics?
No, you said that I'm looking for sourcing on that. Otherwise I'm going to assume you made it up like you usually do.
yeah thats what HR does. people who "look the part" get all the opportuniites...while the truly best candidates who have some kinda flaw watch on from the side.
I'm all for a 4-1-4-1 for the USMNT...only thing is that means that only 1 of mckennie, adams and musah would be on the field.
my deal is the one check box they got rid of was "have you won some important trophy before that shows you are a good coach." moving to chicago, kissing butt, nepotism, language perfection, these are secondary or even political concerns, not speaking to whether you can do the job well. but those are the checkboxes still in effect. the flynn rule requiring a league title is the only one they ditched. for that matter, you can turn check boxes into a scored analysis if you're being objective. a candidate graded down on english might be superior on resume and grade out ahead. a candidate tossed for english can't grade out ahead overall. and we're supposed to be the analytics people now. like i said, it came across like -- no different than before -- the candidate was already chosen. otherwise if there were any objective teeth in the process GB's "ideas" have to be balanced off against his "track record." there is no way a midtable club coach with one lost cup final and no international experience wins this in a fair fight. personally i think the process is only going to backfire if continued. coaches a la tata tend to want to move quick. they don't want to sit around for months while you dither and maybe hire another guy. and in cases like klinsi getting fired, you have to move fast. you might have games again in a month. to me the real purpose was to get the choice out of flynn's hands and into someone else's. but then to chain up the new hands by making them go through a process. during qualifying you really don't want some old coach-caretaker-new guy triumvirate. you need to switch to a new stud coach and it needs to be quick. if it takes months qualifying is over. and even in a down part of the cycle you can't waste a year making a decision or waiting on a candidate. that's 1/4 a cycle burned. GB acts like it (sarachan) never happened for a lot of his selections and evaluations.
for starters, you get that the logic you are arguing is we both had job openings same time and he is working here for atlanta, never coached before in mexico, but you're suggesting he only wanted their job. ooooooooook boss. he's only already here coaching. https://www.dirtysouthsoccer.com/2017/11/3/16602808/tata-martino-reportedly-turns-down-usmnt-job https://www.espn.com/soccer/atlanta...o-contact-about-interest-in-united-states-job Eff off to your cave, troll. Other people confirmed as not interviewing for the USMNT job: Vermes Pareja Marsch Osorio And I am fully aware of your little game here, which is pretend like internet = fact. The reality is we have little visibility into who was considered and when. For a supposedly analytical and deliberative process we were not transparent about who we looked at. Conversely, I don't find any pronouncements on "I want to coach Mexico" until he gets that job either. Probably part because he was under contract and part playing hard to get. You're playing games on Tata. We both know that when someone's name is mentioned for one of these jobs it's either them or their agent talking to the reporter off the record floating a trial balloon, or the reporter is obsessed, or the Fed wants them. You continue to ignore that by the time he's commenting, he's taking the other job. By that time and having lost the job it's not in my interests to play up which other jobs I applied for or wanted. At that point, unless it's already in the press, "I wanted to coach Mexico and they hired me." And then if I do comment on other openings, like he said, "they didn't call me or ask for an interview, I took this other job, why should I talk about whether I wanted the job behind Door 2?" It's pretty absurd to suggest a coach with two NT on his resume who comes to MLS wouldn't have been interested in the head job. You want to play the "internet go find me a link" game? Go find me a link before he says I won't be back in Atlanta where he says (a) I want any other job or (b) want to coach Mexico. It would have been wandering into tampering. As it was I thought he could have undermined his own title run. I don't like coaches openly saying I'm not coming back before the playoffs are done and I am looking at A B C jobs.
I mean, do we even have a list anywhere of who the interviewed finalists were? We have more visibility to who WASN'T interviewed, because they either publicly tantrumed or confirmed it to reporters. It's like listening to someone try to tell you the only facts are puffs of smoke in a papal selection process, because that's the part we see. The only other name I've heard bandied about was Tab Ramos -- and this would have been coming off the meh 2017 U20 worlds where we won one group gamei n an easy group, not the 2019 version. As a Dynamo fan I can tell you Ramos had no adult head experience and his Houston team this season was dead last in conference and regressed from the previous season, while not playing the kids much either. Do not pretend your guy emerged from some normal hiring process as the leading candidate based on merit. This was weirdness incarnate.
And be real about the Mexico job. They have a hangup on foreign coaches. They routinely go through multiple coaches in a cycle. The promise of 2018 qualifying had fizzled into a round of 16 exit. Our job in the broader view is just as prestigious, safer country to live in, and we are more indulgent of the coaches -- it's closer to tenure. He would have known we had a talent bubble coming up. And he was already coaching here.
So wait, first you claim that Tata Martino EXPLICITLY SAID he wanted the US Soccer job, and then you post, as proof, a link that says TATA MARTINO REJECTED the US Soccer job a year before (when JK was fired). How is that proof in your world? All it seems to state is that Tata Martino EXPLICITLY REJECTED the US Job at one point. Please source where Martino explicitly said he wanted the US job?
I was closing the Mac after I read this when I realized why I find this take disagreeable. I don't have an issue eating crow when you're fundamentally wrong about something but in this case, I do have an issue. I'd find eating crow in that scenario analogous to eating crow as a Dallas fan just because Switzer's Cowboys won the Super Bowl in '95. The fact that Switzer gravy trained that Cowboys team to a Super Bowl doesn't mean the process that ended up with Jimmy Johnson out and Switzer in was right, and that one should eat crow. The resulting 25 years of mostly Cowboy irrelevance to sub and slightly above mediocrity made that negativity of cowboys fans correct, regardless of what Switzer managed to accomplish one season w/the Cowboys. Bad process is bad process. I'll take a quarterfinal run, period, and love it, but it doesn't mean that that justifies the idiocy and incompetency endemic in the process that lead there. The Lakers just won a title, but the only reason they won a title is because LA is LA, not because they're genius. The management of LA botched a decade of moves and then lucked into LeBron wanting to be in LA and Davis wanting out of New Orleans. Good for them, but that had zilch to do with brilliant team building or good process. Likewise if the team manages a huge run, it isn't because the process in '17 and '18 was good because it emphatically wasn't, it was totally incompetent. It will have happened because we had hopefully the peak stages of our first brilliant generation and hopefully Egg will have learned something from his mega pile of mistakes in '19.
The Eredivisie is a top feeder league and has been for a long time. Obviously the best players in the Eredivisie can and do go anywhere they want. It's a favorite starting point for young forwards before they move to the Big 5. Examples: Ronaldo, Suarez, Robben, Romario ... But the overall quality of the Eredivisie is lower than the Bundesliga, especially the defending. There's nothing controversial about that. The Eredivisie is not just Ajax and PSV and Feyernoord. It's also VVV Venlo, Fortuna Sittard, and ADO Den Haag.
It's a production position and going to Holland will generally manifest the production to make the sales pitch. The snobs can then try and talk it down but the discussion begins from, "oh he had 20 goals in holland last year." And often enough (AJ a few years back, Nova) the league comparisons seem to be decided in their favor). Even if the goals are softer, goals are goals. But German goals are more earned? Germany is more prestigious but also a place where Bobby Wood can disappear and despite his 2018 NT production be treated like a has been. Tougher league can also mean tougher place to make your productive case. It cuts both ways. This might be different if we had a 20 goal B.1 guy but we don't. So that leaves the perennial question of how 20 goals in Holland compares to 5 goals in Germany. There is no obvious answer to that one. I know one take on a player like Soto is he wasn't good enough for Germany and stick your finger on the scales that way. But there is a long history of German-flushed players (McBride, Donovan) being leading MLS players and NT members. And there is an equal and opposite take that he has been successful everywhere else and you're over-stating one interaction with one coach who didn't like him. That he is now back to full operation and better judged for that. Heck once early in select I got cut by a coach, had a hat trick against them in a scrimmage, and was back on the team a year later under new management. Hannover is in a downward spiral. Ever consider they were just wrong?