prefontaine
Footballguy
While this is interesting stuff, I don't think it is necessarily a fair representation given we had 10 men the majority of that game. Also, that was a 4-5-1 lineup not a 4-4-2 that we played yesterday. In the 4-4-2, your wings need to play more defense and I don't think it fits LD and Dempsey well. This is a little bit of our dilemma. We have a lot of middies that aren't really good at ball possession whether that be just holding or defending which is why we struggle with possession so often. Possession is also minimized because some of them don't have the highest work rate either. The only time I got mad watching yesterdays game was when Felheiber came on and put a pass out wide I think to Dempsey and then just sat down in the middle. He didn't flash forward or back to give Dempsey an option and there was simply no where to go with the ball. Bradley came up but was marked well and Benny just sat in a hole that gave no angle to pass him the ball. I can forgive these things late in games when players are tired. I know sometimes you just are exhausted, have made long runs, and you don't give the effort to keep a marginal attack going. But in this case, Benny had just come on. And while Demps turned it over, it was Benny's fault*. All he had to do is drop like 10 feet and it was an easy pass. Really, all he had to do was start moving in just about any direction and it was an easy pass. These are the kinds of things that our middies do way too often.
While that is coaching, that is not the kind of coaching I expect Bradley to have to do at a national team level. That should happen at the club level. You can talk about positioning and our formations, but some of the soccer IQ and work rate among our national team players just seems really low at times.
* Not trying to pick on Benny at all bc tbh it's been pretty rare as I've watched him that this is a fault of his (while I can think of 3-4 players off the top of my head that are constantly doing this). Just that particular example was pretty egregious and on my mind.
x gajillion
I'm excited to see Sacha in the lineup...hopefully he doesn't disappoint....
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... that result yesterday was absolutely priceless on so many levels.
at Tasker on sat delay of 6 days
at Tasker on sat delay of 6 daysIts sad that he could be kept in the dark on the score for 6 days though
