Hint: We Lost
For the melee of matches this weekend, I was switching streams pretty regularly. I’d stop one before loading the other so as not to cross streams (important safety tip Egon), and when I paused the ‘Merican match to catch some of the Magic Pixie™ in action for Russia, the US match just happened to land on this frame (it’s a screengrab, so hitting the ‘play’ icon is futile).
Yep, that pretty much sums things up for us.
So, it’s the coach, not the talent, right? I mean, that’s the reason we’re going out in the group stage next year?
It’s both. The coach cannot properly select the talent, which has not developed as advertised, partially because the manager’s selection strategy is pants. But a good manager could get this current U.S. squad into the knockouts.
EF: that’s actually the consensus around here. We’re not world beaters from a talent standpoint but we’ve got enough of it and, with the right manager, we should be able to get out of the group stages.
Bradley might be fine for CONCACAF, but there’s not a lot of confidence around here that he’s capable of pushing the US to the next level where we’re consistently competitive with the upper tier teams.
This is going to come out wrong, but I hope JFT had a legitimate (non-serious) personal or family issue for missing Wednesday’s friendly.
But Bradley beat number-one-ranked Spain!! (in a meaningless competition in which the Spanish clearly had vacations on their minds)
I’m hoping against hope that Gulati sees the futility of sending our squad with that coach to South Africa. I don’t care about the draw; Bradley’s tactics are useless against anyone. For me, Bradley doesn’t inspire the confidence our squad needs to advance. It’s beating a dead horse, but I’m all for Klinsy taking over – post-haste.
I watched like the last 15 of this game and it seemed like we could give a s**t about the result. I saw no urgency or commitment moving forward. I thought Cunningham looked lively coming on as a sub, but overall we lacked fluency and any real desire to level the game. honestly it was like watching Bolton: hoof the ball forward and maybe we’ll get lucky. Ugh.
On the other hand, it was nice to see Martin Skrtel gain some confidence after a difficult couple of months in the EPL.
Hey, spec! Where’ve you been?
EF, you’re hoping for way, waaaay too much from Sunil. He’s got things exactly the way he wants them with BB in charge.
I’m actually a little bit excited about Dempsey and Donovan’s first post-Bradley interview (read: rant), a la David Beckham. Did anyone else see Dempsey’s substitution face? He’s practicing.
No one likes Bob, but that doesn’t excuse Dempsey’s behavior in my opinion. He sulked around the pitch the entire time on Saturday.
No, someone needs to put a foot in Dempsey’s ass and tell him he needs to be more Dirk Kuyt and less Nicolas Anelka.
To me, since it appears Bob won’t be doing that anytime soon, that job falls to Landon then. You can’t write a book about how you should be captain and what a leader you are, and then let that stuff slide.