Originally Posted by
jloome
You're behaving like these are new problems. All of these shortcomings existed before Bradley, before Perez, before Armas. They've existed since 2018. We need a goalie. We need a line leading central defender. We need a defensive midfielder.
They couldn't find a new keeper in four years? They couldn't bench him this year and sign one of the dozens and dozens of professional keepers who are free agents at the end of the Euro and Asian seasons?
They believed they could get Bono into competitive shape and he has NEVER been good, not since 2017 when he had an iron wall defense in front of him.
He's averaged 2 goals per game EVERY YEAR.
So he should've been job one.
"Starting to see under the hood"? We've had youth teams for over a decade and they've produced very little compared to other clubs. Again, not new. At least they've brought in good management at TFC II, because this is the first year they've actually looked competitive.
I don't disagree that expecting one guy to fix it all THIS YEAR is unrealistic. But he is not the only person there, and the problems didn't change.
The single biggest error they made this year wasn't the decision to play youth. That didn't help. But it wasn't the real problem, because we were in the top third in goal scored and only ONE of those youth was involved in the defense.
It was putting Alex Bono back in net. He cost us, easily, fifteen points this year.
The second biggest error was signing Carlos Salcedo to the biggest defender DP deal in league history because Manning was his club's president as a youth.
He flamed out at Frankfurt, he flamed out repeatedly in the Mexican league, and in each case, it was the same kind of weird "sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible" defending that would make calls for a match-fixing investigation pretty popular, if anyone ever wanted that type of attention.
Either way, those two moves, in isolation, meant this season was a total write-off. And they both occurred AFTER we hired Bob. I'm not saying he thought they were great ideas; both REEK of old management wanting to prove themselves.
But the fact is our biggest impediments this year had nothing to do with rebuilding, and everything to do with not being willing to let go of the past.
In Bradley's defense, I smell Manning's hands all over some of these decisions, as if internal politics are playing a bigger role than they should. Bradley has always liked giving youth a chance to prove themselves. He has never, to my knowledge, started a team with this much inexperience in it, even at Chivas USA, which was a newly built team.
One more transfer window should be enough. Then he's had three windows to address the two most GLARING problems with this team.
We averaged two goals a game against in EVERY SEASON Bono has played since 2018. We also have never replaced Drew Moor. That's it. That's our chances of the playoffs gone in every season, and that's before we even get to the need to have competitive depth.
This is either disingenuous or you didn't understand the reference. Saying "even FM kids could figure out this one tactic won't work" isn't saying it's as easy as playing FM to fix a team. It's saying playing two SLOW central defenders up to the half-line against a fast team is SUICIDE.
How many times this year did we need to see Thompson or McNaughton beaten for pace on the left side? Football tactics, pretty famously, don't demand trying to pin the other team back constantly, eleven behind the ball. We could've played a counter occasionally, we could have played a deeper front line when we had two inexperienced defenders on the same side.
This season was a disappointment but it wasn't all on the players, or Manning. I refuse to believe a top coach couldn't have done better than conceding four goals FOUR GAMES IN A ROW, when we were still in the playoff hunt.
That looked like the team gave up on him.
Fire the Coach
