US mexico
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Greg Berhalter is from the SMF school of soccer, where the only way to play is to keep possession as much as possible and be on the attack all the time. Which is fine when you are playing teams like T 'n' T and Haiti. Not so much when you are playing someone as talented or even more talented than you that is just praying that you'll keep trying to play out of the back, no matter how ill-suited you are to play that way.
That first half from Mark McKenzie was just about as bad as possible. They need to get him off the pitch, even if that means changing the formation.
That first half from Mark McKenzie was just about as bad as possible. They need to get him off the pitch, even if that means changing the formation.
About time! They cannot mark the US on set pieces at all. Very entertaining final. Hopefully Steffen is ok. Weird injury.
Take a guy like Seigerwald. I mention him because there are millions like him. He bitches and moans about MLB all the time. He was just doing it yesterday. But he will suffer through that miserable sport, yet has it in his mind that soccer is the worst sport on earth and not worth a second of his time. He’s a crotchety old guy who does not have an open mind about anything.
I don’t care who watches soccer and who doesn’t. It doesn’t impact my life. All I know is it’s almost a year round sport and my team was just crowned champions last week and the season got me all the way to June 1. So I got all that enjoyment beyond the college hoops and NFL seasons. And it gave me something to follow after my NHL team was eliminated.
right now, all Steigy has is MLB because he’s a penguin guy and he is not an NBA guy. No wonder he’s miserable.
being a soccer guy gave me EPL, Champions League, Pitt Men’s soccer and USA soccer all the way until today. And now Euros are starting which will be good to follow. Then we are essentially back to the soccer preseason again (after the summer transfer window keeps us interested). And for people like you, you have MLS.
There is no downside to soccer.
Sure there are boring soccer games, like any other sports, but people who think it's boring because the scores are low have it all wrong. Last night's 3-2 score was fairly high scoring, but I have to say to me anyways, I was on the edge of my seat the whole game. last time I felt that way about a Pirates game was probably 1979
There's also Gold Cup, which is a decent tournament. By the way, do you know? What's the difference between Nation's League and Gold Cup? seems like basically the same tournament.
And I like MLS, I like watching teams in the USA at 7pm, instead of teams in Europe at 7am, I care very little about "quality of play", I'm a DC United fan, I find it impossible to attach myself to a team in an English city for whatever reason.
The game was a struggle for me at first, which often is the case for international games. It was frustrating watching the helter skelter play, and the inability to bring the ball out of the back and/or string some passes together. The ball seemed like it was in the air the whole time. But then I settled into the game somehow and enjoyed it...as there were plenty of exciting moments. One thing I found strange is the 7 minutes of injury time, and then a majority of the overtime periods were sucked up by VAR reviews, injuries, scuffles, and a stoppage of play due to the Mexican fans chanting homophobic cheers. I’ve never seen a game like that before.
I’m trying really hard to adopt an MLS team but I am just having a hard time. Almost all of the players are nameless faceless guys to me and I just can’t latch onto it. They might as well pluck guys off the streets of central and South America and insert them onto a field in Kansas City because that’s how it feels to me. The next club to bring over a legend from my favorite Euro club might be the team that I follow. Roy Hobson, who just stepped down as Manager of Crystal Palace, has expressed an interest in MLS. He’s a great football guy and a great character. I might be able to root for a team he manages. Antonio Conte just said that he’d like to spend some time in MLS. I could get behind his team as well. But right now he’s commanding 15 million per year in Europe so he’s not coming here anytime soon. And of course José Mourinho would be great for MLS too. But he’s now at Roma. One more failed gig for him and he might be here sooner than later.
as far as MLS vs Europe...the world has shrunk so there’s no difference to me following a team from New York vs a team from London. The difference is the game times as you said, which are favorable to me, and the talent. Watching that game last night had me up until 1AM. That’s not ideal.
btw, Roy Hobson (mentioned above) said that MLS soccer is not all that different than the English Championship. I don’t agree, but he has more soccer knowledge in his toenail then I’ll ever have. So I will have to believe him. Although, any minute now SMF will chime in and say that he’s wrong.
I don't know? To me the EPL is as nameless and faceless as MLS, other than maybe the biggest stars. I just adopted DC United because I live near them and I can get all of their games on TV, so whether they are good or bad I get familiar with them and kind of bond and root for them to beat the nameless faceless guys from South America playing in KC, I have a kind of local guy Yinzer attitude about sports, where I care way more about having a favorite team rather than the quality of play, and actually I really came to become a soccer fan from watching hundreds of girls soccer games from U8 to a year of college, when my daughter played, so I'm used to watching plenty of poor quality soccer and don't care all that much. I have a problem on the other hand choosing an English EPL team, I just can't care. In UEFA I root for Olympiacos of Greece, because I'm Greek and have been to Greece many times and even attended their games in person because it's kind of my family team, that connection makes me passionate and excited every time they beat an EPL team in the UEFA CL. Oh yeah, those guys you mention, I never heard of any of them 
@mike 301 sell me on Dest?? How does he make Barcelona and/or the USA better? Last night wasn’t a very impressive performance by him. Then again, Pulisic wasn’t great either. Dest had no interest in tracking back last night and helping his left back who was all alone on an island. If he’s not good enough defensively in a back 4...and he doesn’t track back as a winger, is he not suited as a wing back either? Maybe it was the coaches tactics last night...but I was hoping he’d show more.
speaking of our left back (Ream)...why is he starting over a player (Robinson) who plays over him at Fulham Football Club? Ream has no pace. I think Robinson deserves a shot at that job.
for my money McKennie and Reyna might have the most upside in this group.
speaking of our left back (Ream)...why is he starting over a player (Robinson) who plays over him at Fulham Football Club? Ream has no pace. I think Robinson deserves a shot at that job.
for my money McKennie and Reyna might have the most upside in this group.
One thing that game made clear to me is that the MNT cannot be successful trying to play out from the back. The first thing you need for that to be successful is a GK with good feet. Remember when he took over at Man City, the first big move Pep made was replacing Joe Hall with Claudio Bravo. Hall was the England keeper and a national hero. But, he couldn’t play in Pep’s system. Bravo had been replaced at Barcelona by Ter-Stegen but was, and still is, good with his feet. It is the first imperative to playing the system the US wants to play. Neither American GK last night showed that ability.
When Dest plays RB or LB at Barcelona, the system often gives him enough space to bring the ball up past the center line. If he is pressed, there are always at least two passing options. Last night, when the CBs or WBs for the US were pressed, they often had no options.
And, say what you want about the improved skill level on the USMNT, but they are, as a whole, much less skilled than the Mexicans in handling and maintaining possession of the ball. The attacking players possess those skills but the defenders don’t. There are good teams in Europe which also don’t have defenders who are adept ball handlers. Italy, Switzerland and Sweden are three. But, none of them try to play that type of offense.
The top European nations pay millions of dollars a year to their managers. Guys like Southall, Deschamps, Enrique and others have turned down managing gigs at big clubs to continue coaching the national sides. The USMNT faces not only a talent gap but a coaching gap in trying to catch up.
When Dest plays RB or LB at Barcelona, the system often gives him enough space to bring the ball up past the center line. If he is pressed, there are always at least two passing options. Last night, when the CBs or WBs for the US were pressed, they often had no options.
And, say what you want about the improved skill level on the USMNT, but they are, as a whole, much less skilled than the Mexicans in handling and maintaining possession of the ball. The attacking players possess those skills but the defenders don’t. There are good teams in Europe which also don’t have defenders who are adept ball handlers. Italy, Switzerland and Sweden are three. But, none of them try to play that type of offense.
The top European nations pay millions of dollars a year to their managers. Guys like Southall, Deschamps, Enrique and others have turned down managing gigs at big clubs to continue coaching the national sides. The USMNT faces not only a talent gap but a coaching gap in trying to catch up.
I've seen several people posit that the best teams in the Championship, the ones that are getting promoted to the Premier League and the ones fighting for those spots, are better than the top MLS teams, but similarly that the teams at the bottom of the Championship, the ones in danger of getting relegated, are generally worse than even bad MLS teams. Which kind of makes some sense to me, because the difference between a good MLS team and a bad MLS team seems much smaller than the difference between a good Championship team and a bad one.
One thing that would be a problem if you dropped an MLS team into the Championship to see what would happen is that those teams have, by necessity, much deeper rosters than MLS teams do. MLS teams play 34 regular season games and in most years play in the Open Cup, which is schedule to minimize the number of games that most MLS teams will play. Teams in the Championship play 46 regular season games, plus the FA Cup and the Caribou Cup (yeah, I know), both of which are set up such that a good Championship team is likely to play a decent number of games. A good Championship team easily plays more than 50 competitive matches in a season, and a good MLS team probably won't play 40.
The difference is that the Gold Cup is just a tournament, while the Nation's League, is, well, a league. The US qualified for the Nation's League semi-final by winning their Nation's League group. The US's group was Canada and Cuba. Mexico's group had Panama and Bermuda. All the countries were divided into three tiers. The team that finished last in the top tier, Cuba, for instance, gets relegated to the second tier. The top teams in the divisions in the second tier get promoted to the top tier. So in the next cycle Cuba, Bermuda, TnT and Haiti drop to tier two and Granada, El Salvador, Jamaica and Suriname move up to the top tier. The same thing happens at the bottom of tier two and the top of tier three. So it really is just like a league, with promotion and relegation and a championship tournament for the division winners.
Europe has done the same thing. They also have a National League that is completely separate from the Euros. The reason is that it theoretically gives teams more games in competitions that mean something rather than have teams just playing friendlies. It's no big deal for the US to play a friendly against Canada, but when they played in the Nation's League group stages it was a big (or at least a bigger) deal, especially after the Canadians won the first of the two games.
Well the problem there is that they aren't playing the same position. Robinson plays the winger-type role that Dest and Yedlin were playing (poorly) last night. Ream is a centerback in a three centerback system. The problem last night is that with how poor a job Dest was doing coming back and playing defense that it left the left side of the three defenders, in this case Ream, all alone defending guys in space. Which is NOT what he is good at.
When they tweaked the formation in the second half it seems to me that you had to take one of Ream or McKenzie off, because when they didn't that basically made Ream the left back in a four back formation. And again, that's not what he's good at. They'd have been better off taking McKenzie off and allowing Ream to play as an actual centerback, since that's, you know, what he actually is.
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