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US Men's National Team (11 Viewers)

NewlyRetired said:
Those bells you hear ringing are the sound of minutes opening up for Gio at exactly the right time

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Borussia Dortmund

@BlackYellow

During yesterday’s match, Marco Reus sustained a muscle injury that looks to keep him sidelined for up to four weeks.
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Julian Brandt got hurt yesterday (which is why Gio subbed in at halftime).  Brandt will now be out around 4 weeks himself.

There is a chance if things line up right that we may see Gio's UCL debut next week against PSG.

I hope he can take advantage of this. The timing of these injuries should give him more minutes than he normally would have expected.

 
NewlyRetired said:
Julian Brandt got hurt yesterday (which is why Gio subbed in at halftime).  Brandt will now be out around 4 weeks himself.

There is a chance if things line up right that we may see Gio's UCL debut next week against PSG.

I hope he can take advantage of this. The timing of these injuries should give him more minutes than he normally would have expected.
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Just think, 2-3 decades ago, Gio would be playing high school soccer right now.

 
@usmntonly

According to The Mirror, Chelsea are interested in Wigan left back Antonee Robinson after the failed AC Milan transfer.

 
Dinsy Ejotuz said:
Was coming to post that.  WTH is going on?  Is he good?
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he is considered one of the best left backs in the Championship.  He is still relatively young at 22 and about to enter his prime years.  And while we joke here in this thread about our dearth of LB's, it kind of holds true world wide in that it is the position with probably the least depth all over.

Whether he is good enough to ever regularly play for a Milan or a Chelsea seems a long shot to me.

 
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About a year ago I was basically a World Cup watcher and that's it, then I bought a 2 year old version of FIFA for 6 bucks. Super fun. Started going to Rising games. Then I added a side trip to Newcastle to an already planned Scotland/Ireland trip so I could catch a Premier League game. Joined the FFA Fantasy Premier League (currently top of the table.) 

Fast forward to today and I'm setting my alarm so I can wake up in time for Sheffield United and Bournmouth, plus I'm looking at the clock because I'm looking forward to Bundesliga game in 2 hours between the top two teams in the league but mostly so I can watch Tyler Adams. 

This is why I won't ever try heroin. 

 
I won't often say this about a game with no goals so far but the Bayern RBL game has been fantastic.

Davies is a highlight machine (mostly good and some bad).  Adams is literally all over the place.  Even the announcers have no idea what position he is playing.  He has been solid but nothing great as Bayern has carried most of the attack.

 
NewlyRetired said:
he is considered one of the best left backs in the Championship.  He is still relatively young at 22 and about to enter his prime years.  And while we joke here in this thread about our dearth of LB's, it kind of holds true world wide in that it is the position with probably the least depth all over.

Whether he is good enough to ever regularly play for a Milan or a Chelsea seems a long shot to me.
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He’s basically the only attacking-ish LB in the Championship which is looked for at the higher levels.  He’s also physically gifted at a level that looks like that attacking style could project to higher levels. So I’m not shocked he’s being looked at by clubs.  He also has the WP that helps in England. 

 
There is nothing official I can find but a Dutch paper says that Bayern and Ajax have come to an agreement of 26m for Dest, which I assume would happen this summer.

 
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Reactions: Ned
Small update on Pulisic.  Sounds like he is progressing

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Pulisic suffered an abductor muscle tear on January 10 and has subsequently missed wins over Burnley and Hull, draws with Arsenal and Leicester, and a defeat against Newcastle.

Lampard revealed he was hopeful of the winger being available for the showdown with United, which will see Chelsea try and extend the advantage they have over the Red Devils.

"Hopefully he will be back on the other side of that break," Lampard said. "It is kind of in line with how we expected to be."

 
NewlyRetired said:
Looks like Chelsea has found its Wilian replacement.

https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/hakim-ziyech-transfer-chelsea-ajax-reach-eur45-million-verbal-agreement-on-summer-move-report-says/
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Good signing for Chelsea.  Get 95% of Sancho for $100M cheaper.  Pulisic will likely be competing with CHO for the LW starter role going forward and he's better than CHO so that should be his spot going into next year.  If they use the rest of their money to upgrade LB and maybe AMC, then Pulisic might find himself in a very favorable situation attack wise.

 
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Reactions: Ned
encaitar said:
Good signing for Chelsea.  Get 95% of Sancho for $100M cheaper.  Pulisic will likely be competing with CHO for the LW starter role going forward and he's better than CHO so that should be his spot going into next year.  If they use the rest of their money to upgrade LB and maybe AMC, then Pulisic might find himself in a very favorable situation attack wise.
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I may be over confident but I am starting to think Pulisic's main competition going forward is going to be his own health. 

I think if he can find a way to stay healthy, he is going to be a very productive player for Chelsea.

But he always seem to have some knocks at Dortmund he was dealing with.  His body is not really built for the damage he takes.

 
NewlyRetired said:
I may be over confident but I am starting to think Pulisic's main competition going forward is going to be his own health. 

I think if he can find a way to stay healthy, he is going to be a very productive player for Chelsea.

But he always seem to have some knocks at Dortmund he was dealing with.  His body is not really built for the damage he takes.
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Two years ago he played more minutes than any other attacker at Dortmund.  Yes, the last two years have seen muscle injuries, but those usually aren't indicative of longer term issues.  I hope he finds a way to stay healthy because I agree in that I think he'll do very well if he keeps getting consistent minutes at Chelsea.

 
Sorry to open old wounds, but I'm sitting here in my office, over 3 years later, doing the slow burn ...

From the Athletic, so I'll just post a short snippet.

Bruce Arena interview:

Asked whether he views that aforementioned U.S. qualifying failure any differently with a few years of retrospect, Arena remains defiant.

“For me, it was a great experience,” Arena says, “that year in 2017, pushing that team and trying to get qualified for the World Cup. We couldn’t have come any closer than we came. And it’s unfortunate that we didn’t qualify. But I’m very proud of the job myself and my staff did, and the effort the players gave.

“I think the American public, and the media, did a really poor job, even to this day, of articulating what happened, and the real world of those things. It’s all part of the sport. You don’t win all the time. If I’m not mistaken, in the last World Cup, Italy wasn’t in it, and Holland wasn’t in it. And we’re not in it, so wake up and deal with it. It’s all part of it.”
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CletiusMaximus said:
Sorry to open old wounds, but I'm sitting here in my office, over 3 years later, doing the slow burn ...

From the Athletic, so I'll just post a short snippet.

Bruce Arena interview:
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Opening up a double wound for me. I 'll support USMNT no matter what but I've supported my Italians for just as long. Both not qualifying was absolutely terrible. On the bright side I ended up working so much anyway I missed most of the competition. 

 
Worm said:
Interesting read from the US men's players association regarding the women's CBA conflicts.

https://ussoccerplayers.com/2020/02/statement-about-the-uswnt-2017-2021-cba.html
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When your players start to compare you to FIFA you may be losing the PR war.

It is time for this to stop. The Courts, juries, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Congress, new Federation leadership, or a combination of all five need to reform the Federation. The exploitation of athletes to generate revenues that are siphoned off to benefit owners of for-profit leagues and teams, Federation personnel with massive above-market salaries and bonuses, and self-promoting all-expenses-paid Federation “volunteers,” must end. The practice of paying multi-million dollar bonuses to personnel associated with the Federation for running various Federation-controlled tournaments in the United States should be investigated and outlawed. Soccer is perhaps the most corrupt sport in the World. We do not want a US Soccer Federation that behaves like FIFA.
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DJackson10 said:
Opening up a double wound for me. I 'll support USMNT no matter what but I've supported my Italians for just as long. Both not qualifying was absolutely terrible. On the bright side I ended up working so much anyway I missed most of the competition. 
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His choice to use Italy as a comparison is crazy.  Chiellini, Barzagli, De Rossi and Buffon all retired from international football within hours of the loss to Sweden.  Ventura was fired two days later and is now managing a team at the bottom of Serie B.  The president of Italian football was fired a week after the game. The Italian press was not kind to any of these men - players, coaches, admin, etc.  Its insane for Arena to use Italy or Holland in support of his "so wake up and deal with it. It’s all part of football” comment.

 
CletiusMaximus said:
His choice to use Italy as a comparison is crazy.  Chiellini, Barzagli, De Rossi and Buffon all retired from international football within hours of the loss to Sweden.  Ventura was fired two days later and is now managing a team at the bottom of Serie B.  The president of Italian football was fired a week after the game. The Italian press was not kind to any of these men - players, coaches, admin, etc.  Its insane for Arena to use Italy or Holland in support of his "so wake up and deal with it. It’s all part of football” comment.
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Yeah Italy had a lot of issues but the US Federation has done very little to fix anything that is broken. It all IMHO starts at youth level. It's not surprising that most of the best players for the US have been born international and hold US citizenship outside of Pulusic 

 
There absolutely was a talent pool issue in this cycle.  We've talked about the "lost generation" multiple times here in this thread even.  The issue wasn't just missing out on the WC(although the talent issue loses a lot of steam when all we needed was a tie against the 130th ranked team in the world).  The bigger issue for more of us was the USSF not blowing #### up after their policies/leadership/involvement lead to the talent issue and missed WC.

Like Cletius points out, Italy had a similar problem(again, not the same given they were facing much MUCH stiffer competition to get in).  What did they do?  They blew things up.  Looked into where the issues arose and worked on fixing those issues(they're already in a much better spot nationally than they were two years ago).  Germany had a similar issue in 1998.  They changed EVERYTHING to make sure it didn't happen again.  Belgium is another example in 2002.  We can go on and on.

Yes, there are many examples of teams failing to have the talent pool necessary to achieve qualification.  There are even more of teams failing to reach expectations.  The 2018 US team did both.  Unfortunately, unlike other national teams, we didn't blow things up, or we did it in the wrong way.  We waited over a year to even hire a coach for the "new direction".  Now, we have a director forcing coaches to move to a cold weather city just to coach youth teams.  Instead of figuring out where we went wrong and developing a process to ensure that never happens again, we've been moving backwards.

We failed to qualify 2 years ago and yet, today we might be in a worse position than we were then.  We're sitting back and resting our hopes on kids being brave/strong/talented enough(SAVE US CAPTAIN AMERICA!) to develop overseas or hoping the MLS works out better methods for training our youngsters.  Unless we treat our failure of 2 years ago as a crisis(like other nations did), then we'll never see the change needed to push beyond, but given where our youth programs sit right now........

 
I'm having trouble with the "we couldn't have come any closer" portion of the statement. We finished 5th! We didn't even make the stupid playoff against Australia. I've mostly purged it from my memory but I am pretty sure he did an awful job setting the team up for that last match of the hex. Bruce needs to be out of my life forever. 

 
so true.............

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@BrianSciaretta

Pretty wild comments from the last two #USMNT managers the last two days. If there ever is a real winner in all this, it will be whoever puts his hand up and says "hey everyone, you know all of those struggles? They were on me."

 
Moe. said:
I am pretty sure he did an awful job setting the team up for that last match of the hex. Bruce needs to be out of my life forever. 
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he coaches my team so I am stuck with him until he retires :)

One thing I will never understand is how he flipped his whole philosophy that last game.

Earlier in the hex, he had a tight schedule of back to back games.  T&T at home and then a couple of days later at Mexico.  For that Mexico game, he changed an enormous amount of the team to play against Mexico to have fresh legs.   But for some reason when he had a similar back to back the last game, he trotted out almost the identical team that played only a couple of days earlier.  And the team looked dead against T&T.

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Now there is no agreeing with his statement from a high level, but we have to acknowledge it was pretty close.  It took ridiculous come backs in two other games, in the second half, that night to help knock out the US.

And lets not forget that goal that wasn't.  If this doesn't get called a goal, the US would likely have qualified.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txw1gPURFT0

 
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I am definitely in a state of discomfort.  On paper, I like the way the team looks heading into qualifying.   But I am extremely concerned we have never seen anything close to the first team play together and by the end of this calendar year we will have already played 60% of the qualifying games.

 
Fair enough, and I do remember the ridiculous set of circumstances that night that led to us ending up in 5th. Still, it's utterly tone deaf on his part

 
Moe. said:
Still, it's utterly tone deaf on his part
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100%.  

This is the same guy who had the temerity to show up as a TV analyst on the very next game the US played after not qualifying.  I think he honestly believes there is nothing he could have done better, which is just nuts. 

 
Moe. said:
Fair enough, and I do remember the ridiculous set of circumstances that night that led to us ending up in 5th. 
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I still think that if you crossed a ball into Gonzo 100000 times, he would never be able to score an own goal like that again.  I think that was even more remarkable than the once in a life time goal T&T scored for their second goal.

 
People laughed at me and Floppo when we were nervous going into that last game but I remained convinced that when ever you let it come down to the last game, you allow for the possibility of a fluke (or in this case, numerous back to back to back to back flukes) to knock you out.

1 extra point any where else in the previous 9 games and we could have sent a USL team to T&T that night :(

 
If the Dest rumors are true, his valuation may be double the number in this list.

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Tutul Rahman

CONCACAF top 10 in market value for 21 and under players:

1) Pulisic, USA, 66m

2) Davies, CAN, 44m

3) McKennie, USA, 24m

4) David, CAN, 22m

5) Adams, USA 14m

6) Dest, USA 13m

t7) Lainez, Macias, MEX 11m

9) Weah, USA 9m

t10) Alvarado MEX, Sargent USA, 8m

 
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NewlyRetired said:
If the Dest rumors are true, his valuation may be double the number in this list.

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Tutul Rahman

CONCACAF top 10 in market value for 21 and under players:

1) Pulisic, USA, 66m

2) Davies, CAN, 44m

3) McKennie, USA, 24m

4) David, CAN, 22m

5) Adams, USA 14m

6) Dest, USA 13m

t7) Lainez, Macias, MEX 11m

9) Weah, USA 9m

t10) Alvarado MEX, Sargent USA, 8m
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That would put him third on the list.  Wow!  A year ago nobody was anywhere near this kid.  That's a huge push forward.  Scouts must be seeing something great to justify that number.

 
Man City called Steffen back from Germany to try and figure out what is wrong with his knee.  It's obviously not a good sign that doctors in Germany are unsure what is going on.

 
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