No winger is so one-dimensional that they can't be taught to cut inside.
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If there is one thing we gotta do as fans it's stopping with the “he doesn’t fit the system” excuses for talent misjudgments…. when our system isn’t working!
We keep having bouts of this, starting with Aron Winter all those years ago… Until you prove you are an elite team, you play your best XI and adapt to that. Like everybody else.
MINUTES PLAYED IN MLS THIS SEASON.
Jakob Glesnes is the only other non-keeper on this list.
EDIT: Unless I've missed anyone, our next-most minutes on the season was Jesus Jimenez at 2351, not even in the top 60
A. Blake PHI 34 34 3060 J. Bond LA 34 34 3060 J. Glesnes PHI 34 34 3060 S. Johnson NYC 34 34 3060 Z. MacMath RSL 34 34 3060 E. Room CLB 34 34 3060 M. Bradley TOR 34 34 3050
I believe the ten minutes he missed was the last 10 in the Charlotte game, after he scored twice.
I'd also be in favor of having some improved communications from the club next year. MLSE treats a sports franchise's communications like a corporate PR "fuck off" department, judging by how infrequently it attempts any sort of narrative or information flow.
You'd think they would use PR proactively to build excitement; but it seems to do little to take the lead.
Strong disagree. He's home grown, small cap hit, no international spot, versatile, decently effective and won't demand to play every week. Add in a local which helps for retention. This is *exactly* the kind of player you need to pad your squad with if you want to win in MLS with its roster rules, you need squad players that have as little impact on your squad space as possible. We went from making very effective, efficient moves in that area of roster building to not having the slightest idea what we're doing and that, as much as anything, is why we just had maybe the worst season in league history in terms of return on spend
Given that he's basically a hype man, I wonder if Manning requested he develop a style that would be seen as TFC "brand" ala Gegenpress at Red Bull.
Perhaps the presser, where he admitted they're sitting down this week to reevaluate everything, was a nod to admitting what was proposed just didn't work. It wasn't just the talent base.
They can be proactive without gaslighting. There are things people love about their club even when they're losing; usually that doesn't include management. But there are plenty of other angles to keep attention on what's going on; even just better communication over things like injuries and roster flexibility would probably go a long way to easing tension.
They don't have to wait for reporters to ask the question, as most are fucking awful at their jobs and ask the most facile shit possible.
We are going to know a lot based on how the "clean out day" pressers go.
Who the team brings out?
What BB says
Who has been let go by then
I expect to see MB trotted out & for him to give his usual "it wasn't good enough" speech which is getting tiresome to us as fans let alone guys who have to hear variations on that theme every day.
I'm hoping to see Oso
I would like to see Frederico
Did we all watch the same team this year? BB looked for Shaffelburg to be a LB so unless we’re saying we stubbornly believe that was ever going to work out, he needed to go.
BB isn’t changing his system because some people on a message board think he should adapt to his best X1. This is less opinion and more so accepting realities.
He left. He got minutes playing his natural position. He has so far thrived. I’m happy for the guy. Whether or not I believe in what we have going on here, this was a great move for the player. His career was being stagnated here.
He played a winger as a fullback and it didn't work. That's all that happened. We still need wingers.
His system uses inverted wingers, and Shaff has been more a traditional winger. But that's not a huge adjustment.
He did poorly because he was played out of position. He had two goals and two assists for Nashville in his first five appearances, then started for them and played 78 minutes last night.
Bob and Bill are the problem until they get released, doesnt matter who you bring in for players, we will never achieve anything with them at the helm
We did that all year, playing a bunch of different formations based on available players.
We played 352, 3411,442, 442 diamond, 343, 433, 433 with insigne central.
infact, not even 2 days ago we rolled out a 352 as that suited the available players best.
the biggest issue, as has been all season, is that the available players after the first 3-6 are nowhere close to good enough.
^We are saying different things. System is different than formation - how you think positionally, tactically etc. So high press is a system. Formation is a subset of that. In my opinion, BB has not shown much system/tactical flexibility, and yes, he has used different formations.
Plus let's face it, "system" in the context of "he doesn't fit our system", is in world football a buzzword for "we don't like his attitude" or similar - in a lot of cases anyway.
We agree on the fact that we need 5-8 new starters to be a contender.
Suspect we disagree on how fast that can/will happen, and also on whether 2022 asset management has lengthened that process.
I'm on the fence with BB and he has until June 2023 to prove himself in both his roles but you always bring this LAFC point up without the full story. When they missed the playoffs they were forced to dump important players in the offseason to be cap compliant and they also had an assload of injuries and couldn't recover.
Atlanta’s GM says he hasn’t heard anything about a 4th DP being added. Bogert says his sources have said the same thing.
https://twitter.com/tombogert/status...aURnjiQPOm6_WA
Galindo's weekly wrap for sportsnet notes Shaffelburg has now started five straight games for Nashville. The key from his perspective has been reducing hesitancy around the box, which sounds familiar to anyone who has watched any of our younger players this season.
He thinks he's going to start during the playoffs, too, as Shaff takes heat off Mukhtar and creates space.
Eh... I'm selfish. Better for him, not better for us. Insigne is 31 and has had a handful of injuries in the last eighteen months. We need a decent backup in that spot and I see Shaff having more prospects for being productive than any of our other kids.
If they sign a wide player (maybe two-footed) who is good enough to spot start maybe that becomes less a loss. But this is a league where getting good depth is obviously pretty difficult and he's getting better.
Mavinga was a respected defender in the past but he hasn't been a TAM level defender for a few years now and he is clearly sliding. Not sure about 'Neill. He was good covering injuries for Seattle though. For sure we didn't do anything to limit the damage down the stretch. Just kept plugging away at the same thing. BB's quote about taking this season to assess what we had might be telling. It almost seems like he looked at it as an 8 month training camp. "Here's our system. Let's see what you got".
O’Neill to me does not look the part of a starting defender. He does the defending part of the job admirably but he’s not dominant or a backline leader. He’s also terrible on the ball. That has #3 written all over it IMO.
If management used this whole year as a tryout they are crazy. I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again, Bradley’s system is of less value than our collective group of players. Job #1 should have been to get the most out of who is on the roster at any given time.
On that note…
Check out this tweet at https://twitter.com/AnthonyKhoury4/status/1579854493860376577
Early on in the season I thought Bob was saying stuff like this to protect Michael from criticism.... At this point though Bob must have blinders on. I haven't watched all of the pressers, but has Bob said anything negative about MB or said there's something MB could do better? I don't recall him saying something on those lines
MB has been inconsistent this year. At times excellent, but for the most part largely a liability in transition and when defending.
There should be no debate about his tremendous body of work for the club, especially when considering the team-friendly TAM deal. However, there should also be no debate about him being a lock starter next year.
He is holding this team back, not only because he’s a defensive liability, but because the team is tactically limited to slow, predictable football when he is on the pitch.
All good things must end, and that’s likely been the case since we saw the midfield excel with Oso-Delgado in 2020.
His father being the manager is such a clusterfuck of a situation because he needs to move on or sit and probably shouldn’t hold the armband for basic conflict of interest reasons. MB was never going to be rotated out because this team never had more than three starting midfielders at a time and moved Priso.
I'm in the middle of the two extremes on Michael Bradley.( Edit: Damn, this is a lot longer than I thought)
Yes, he was amazing in his prime here. A top 3 player for us all-time. I'd say overall, second most impactful player in team's history after Giovinco. Yes, he was A LOT better this season than the last couple seasons. With that said, he was far from being an elite midfielder this season as Bob basically alludes to in his quote about his son. I have to give credit to MB for his ability to keep healthy and fit to play all those minutes. While I do feel he would have been better with some 'load management' minutes off, hats off to him for being able and committed to doing it.
Also, as I said in a previous post, I don't buy Bob's comment that he was basically forced to play MB all of those minutes. There were many opportunities to take him off within a game, even rest him for a game here or there, and he never did. To me, it's a "I know I shouldn't and didn't have to play him all those minutes, but I wanted to, so I found an excuse to play him".
We had the whole youth movement, tried players out of position all the time, but the one position he didn't experiment at was MB's spot. Bob simply had a lack of desire to even consider not having MB playing. Heck, as ridiculous as Armas's decision to try Auro at DM last year was, at least he tried something else there. If this truly was a "building year" to "see what we have", why didn't we see what we have at CM. Bradley's not going to be our starting midfielder in 2024 (at least he shouldn't be), but we didn't try to see what any of our options were. Heck, even after we were eliminated, he still played every minute. We threw on Hugo Mbongue from TFC2 in the last game at forward to give him a few minutes at MLS level before next season, but we couldn't throw on anyone else? Why not give Nelson/Kerr/JMR the last 20 minutes of that game and see what they can do as a CM. What was the worst that could happen, instead of the 4-0 loss we had in the last game of a miserable season, it could've been 5 or 6-0 instead? At least, we'd have 20 minutes of footage of something different.
MB did have moments where he demonstrated his class, with some great passes, that two goal game that surprised me, etc. He was much better than 20/21 MB and the arrival of the Italians did seem to spark his game.
If had to rate his season overall, it'd be "Good". Not "Amazing" like peak MB, not "Impressive" like BB said in his assessment. He didn't make the team any worse this season (we were all around bad, he didn't make us worse), but he also didn't make us any better. He was Satisfactory. Which to me, if you have a player who is not raising the level of the team, not lowering it either, but just keeping it at the same level is a reason to see if you can try someone else who can, if your goal is to be an elite team. We're not a West Ham, who is fine with that mid-table ranking in the EPL. We're TFC with all our money who needs to be a top of the table team. Satisfactory isn't good enough. Try something, so we can be better than Satisfactory.
However, like I said earlier, Bob simply didn't have the desire to consider an alternative, hence why a MB-replacement/alternative was never acquired. MB still has a role on this team. I don't want him off the team. However, I don't want him to be our 34 game starting midfielder. To me, he should be in that Cheyrou role. A starter here and there when needed through injuries/suspension/rotation (~6-10 a season) when you need him and that second half sub (~10-20 times) to ice/calm a game down with his veteran presence. If he's playing 30 minutes a game in a veteran role, he can maximize his class, by having maximum freshness because his energy level isn't depleted and he has recovery time. Playing him 3050 minutes is not helping this team because when you need him, he's not effective because he's been overused unnecessarily. At his age, he's not going to win many footraces. But stick a fresh MB in at minute 70 and maybe he doesn't lose that battle against another player who's been playing 70 minutes already (whereas a MB who has played 70 minutes is going to lose that ball bc he's tired too). Maximize his disadvantage (speed) by putting him in later when others are tired.