I don’t think it’s been about developing youth but instead about Bradley putting his people in place. If Oso and Kaye were healthy we would be seeing the youth only as fresh legs later in a match.
I think if we had a dedicated GM in place this would have been a bit of a different situation. For example, we would have kept our two experienced outside backs or we would have replaced them earlier.
Bradley himself has said that most of the guys who left were already out the door for one reason or another. He’s also said several times that the kids are learning and are not very good yet and that’s to be expected.
He hasn’t said that his ability to be the coach limits his time as sporting director but that is common sense. You can give people any number of portfolios but it doesn’t extend the hours they have in a day. Actually, I don’t think this will hurt us much once we have an adequate roster in place but until then it has been a real problem and it makes a total rebuild a bit slower/without finesse.
Bradley was starting Westberg before his injury and Bono has been terrible. Until a few games ago there wasn’t much choice. Since then I can only guess that Westberg has looked terrible in practice or isn’t 100% yet. I would have liked Davidson to ask not only “Are you getting adequate keeping” (Bradley answered something like, “no, not recently”) but also: “you used Westberg to good effect before his injury, why is he not starting?” To be fair Davidson had to ask three times “What is wrong with Osorio” and the answer still wasn’t clear.