USA 0-0 Colombia: Mom, Dad, I Don't Know How I Feel About (January) Camp

Me tonight, only 20 years ago and with a lot more hair.

I was a little torn about the line-up the U.S. trotted out in tonight’s positively somnolent 0-0 draw against Colombia. January camp is, or has become, all about calling in players from the fringe and giving them a moment – I get that - but I would have rather seen interim coach Anthony Hudson name and stick with a starting XI over both games. Instead, he played the camp like a bad hand in draw poker and swapped out 10 players between Wednesday’s loss and tonight; unless I’m miscounting, only Walker Zimmerman started both games (and he lasted longest in this one).

Now, had you presented me with both line-ups and asked me which would do better, I’m pretty sure I would have picked tonight’s line-up, regardless of opponent. If nothing else, it featured the more experienced/accomplished players, particularly with the national team set-up – e.g., Paul Arriola, Aaron Long, Jesus Ferreira, Kellyn Acosta, Sean Johnson – and yet they delivered less in every category I could name outside the spine of the defense.

To state the obvious, Serbia and Colombia are different teams that played different styles. Perhaps knowing they could get something lethal going given the right circumstances, Serbia gave the U.S. more of the ball while Colombia played its defense high enough to force errors and broke from there; call it a second cousin to a press, twice removed. I don’t know what Wednesday’s line-up would have looked like against Colombia, in other words, and mostly hope that that multiverse got treated to a more entertaining game because, my god, was tonight’s game like watching old people fuck in front of drying paint....you have my apologies for the mental image...

The Mothership’s stats page doesn’t post xG for U.S. games, but the Yanks’ five total shots suggests something in the 0.5 range. The only two shots on goal involved Matthew Hoppe – he set up Paxten Aaronson for one (and he could have done better) and fired from the channel for the other – but those didn’t amount to anything besides easy-ish saves for “A. Montero,” Colombia’s ‘keeper. The only other decent U.S. chance I can recall from my times of full, attentive consciousness was the chance Ferreira opened up with a smart first touch. The way he lost that ball to a swarm of Colombian defenders sums up the game in a singular moment. The Colombians broadly overwhelmed the Americans tonight, but without ever coming close to beating them - i.e., boredom, by any other name.

MLS Weakly, January 28, 2023: A Thermometer Enters an Orifice

If you know, you know.

The U.S. Men’s National Team wraps January Camp 2023 with a friendly against Colombia tonight. Be there, or expand your cable package/antenna TV offerings (c’mon, antenna TV, old buddy, don’t let me down). That wee nugget is the biggest shit in domestic soccer today, but all that will change. And soon.

Since I started with the national team, I may as well finish the thought – though I have less to say than I thought I would (and I’ll have notes later tonight). A rash of consternation at the soap opera state of U.S. Soccer flared up across the twitters this week – one tweet flagged looming tournaments and other future events like a maid of honor staring at a wide-open to-do list through one eye and a calendar through the other – and...I just couldn’t give less of a shit about the comings and goings of Earnie Stewart, Brian McBride, and whatever the hell’s happening with Claudio Reyna. To offer some words of comfort to that hypothetical maid of honor, the big day will come and you’ll be ready for it or you won’t and you’ll celebrate or despair accordingly...and who knew this site would age into naked fatalism? I blame society, society is to blame...

After that, if you want to know what Walker Zimmerman and DeAndre Yedlin think about the state of the National Team, here you go. My main takeaway from that piece...gods preserve us, I forgot that the U.S. (and Mexico and Canada, right?) won’t have to qualify for the 2026 World Cup, courtesy of its (their?) hosting duties (I’m not looking it up). That makes me far more nervous than whatever’s happening in Salem (shout-out to Days of Our Lives...which I just discovered is set in the...Midwest. Did anyone else know this??). Oh, and this was a fun little nugget (from this):

“Setting aside the top five leagues in the world -- in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain -- MLS had the most rostered players (36) of anywhere else. It was represented by more countries (12) than any league outside the top five and, for the first time in league history, it had a player on the winning team: Argentina's Thiago Almada (Atlanta United).”

The U.S. had that midweek loss to Serbia, of course, and I queefed (sp?) out some thoughts, but Matt Doyle had a couple nice additions to my vague gesturing in his notes on the "shaky start" to the new cycle. Two things I didn’t talk about in my post: 1) I agree that Columbus’ Aidan Morris wasn’t great where he lined up...but did you expect him to be? and 2) how good could Brandon Vazquez be with the regular U.S. Men’s line-up behind him? And that segues nicely to...

USA 1-2 Serbia: Their Coach Seating Is Better Than Our Coach Seating

No. How are you really?

How do you talk about something that didn’t matter?

With just a handful of well-known exceptions – e.g., Walker Zimmermann and Aaron Long – just about every player who started for the U.S. Men’s national team tonight are only in the picture if you’re looking at the edges or deep into the background. And, given the comparative youth of the current starting set, providing a novel approach and/or skill-set strikes me as the only way any of tonight’s bubble boys can bounce into the first team. That’s where you start...

The place I want to go from there is a back-to-front TED talk about what worked and what didn’t tonight – and, no less significantly, when. But first the recap.

I don’t know much about the Serbian national team that beat America’s freshest B-Team 2-1, but I have a pretty good idea about how it won the game. Taking advantage of the rift that opened on a lonely free kick in the first half helped (think this is a full highlight package; go nuts to the extent it is), sure, but the game turned at the beginning of the first half. That’s when Serbia started pressing the American back-line and deep-lying midfielders. That pressure didn’t force mistakes, so much as exploit and punish them. A Serbian player ran down every long touch – which had ample company, unlike Serbia’s free kick – and they read every telegraphed past like they were jamming the channel. The winning goal came well before the pressure evaporated – and it followed from chasing a loose touch and a soft, telegraphed pass – and that left it up to the U.S. to claw their way back to level terms.

As in the first half, it took the U.S. a while, maybe even too long, to tilt the field toward the Serbian goal. The Portland Timbers’ Eryk Williamson kicked off the hottest rally of the 2nd half with a flying tackle and a great leading feed to an overlapping DeJuan Jones, a move that forced a save from...hold on, yeah, the lineups are up. Guess it was “D. Rosic” who made that save. I count that as one of the U.S.’s brighter team moves of the evening – it was a lot of soloist stuff prior, with the best of it coming from the San Jose Earthquakes’ Cade Cowell – and, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see those 20 shots, but I doubt I felt all that inspired by a quarter of ‘em, maybe a third...

MLS Weakly, January 21, 2023: A Scrabble Bag, Honestly, Weaklier Than Usual

Vox Media's HR department.

I saw something late last week about a tech company that had their people show up to work and attempt to gain entry with their keycards. If an employee saw green, in they went...with a momentary reprieve, but if they saw red...

Red light, green light. Where have I heard that before?

I don’t mean to make light of the layoffs that appear to have wiped out what’s left of Major League Soccer coverage on SB Nation. I do, however, know that I’ve relied on SB Nation’s devoted team sites for years – particularly in preseason, when I’m sniffing around for hype on a player I don’t recognize. Some of those sites were better than others – bluntly, a couple employed stenographers instead of writers – but I’ll miss them all. And whatever I thought of any given writer, that’s a person now looking for work and that sucks.

Losing Stumptown Footy hits closest to home, obviously. The Portland market has always had a decent stable of writers and, more recently podcasters, but Stumptown made the local scene feel a little bigger and more stable. They had some good people to boot. Anyhoo, Vox Media can go to heck. Yearning for the days when people ran local media, and many other things, as a community concern. If I win the lottery. Or invent something...I listed each in the order they’re likely to happen...

The past week also saw the tragic, savagely unlucky death of Charlotte FC’s Anton Walkes. My oldest child turns 25 this year, which drives home the the agony of Walkes' parents. My heart goes out to his friends and teammates as well.

That’s it for the week’s tragedies, thank gods...

Last week was a slow fucker outside all that. (How slow was it?) The MLS Kickoff letter posted power rankings so premature that I couldn’t see the point in the reading – or the writing for that matter. [Ed. - Totally unrelated, but the soap dispenser next to one of the sinks at the bowling alley literally prematurely ejaculated. It went off when the water turned on and could not perform when the time came.] In fact, this little nugget from the second of Matt Doyle’s mailbag posts (again, the scrounging is universal) might have been the most interesting soccer-related thing I read all week:

MLS Weakly, January 15, 2023: Us Versus Them, Through the Lens of "Them"

Chaos can be fun.

I’ve come to the realization that this year’s season previews for both the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati will boil down to exactly one question: how they stack up against the teams in their respective conferences. In other words, the real question isn’t how good either team is, but how they stack up against the teams around them. If nothing else, it’s easier to isolate and interrogate that question – especially once you weed out the teams at the top and bottom of expectations.

Not all the pieces to that puzzle have fallen into place, of course – and they won’t until...fuck me, how is it so goddamn hard to find hard dates for the 2023 transfer windows? At any rate, I won’t deliver my best guesses on that until the week before First Kick 2023, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start pulling together the data and working toward that answer.

For instance, does either team, as presently constituted, have a realistic shot at winning the Supporters’ Shield, aka, my personal Holy Grail for the team(s) I follow?

Answer: I like Cincinnati’s chances better than Portland’s right now – just typing that feels crazy, for what it’s worth – but, no, I don’t see either team putting together than kind of season. I’ll wade about knee-deep into specifics below (but not further; too soon), but neither seems within touching distance of such a high level of consistency. Even if one team or the other cleans up in the Summer/Secondary transfer window, I expect that to work as the that little boost of nitrous that gets or keeps them in the playoff picture, not something that keeps them floating over the peons. So, you step down one rung on the ladder.

Could either contend for the 2023 MLS Cup?

MLS Weakly, January 8, 2023: A Long Way of Saying I Know Nothing Except One Big Thing

What we all want, and not so deep down.

This post has exactly one through-line: everything relates to Major League Soccer. Now, let’s throw some shit at the wall.

I want to start with a wee celebration on the occasion of Sacha Kljestan’s retirement – and I’d like to begin those notes by admitting I haven’t done this kind of thing nearly enough. Players exit the league all the time, of course – not a few of them go on to better things, some become Alexi Lalas, aka, a guy doing a never-ending, insufferable bit – and they go out with nothing more than a few hundred tweets thanking them for their service. More of them deserve better than get it, basically, and Kljestan’s definitely one of those guys.

People who have followed MLS long enough probably remember the zeitgeisty phrasing that talked about it in terms of versions – i.e., MLS 2.0, 3.0, maybe with a 2.3 or 2.6 thrown in for those hung up on finer distinctions. Real old timers remember when the league contracted in 2002, cutting two Florida teams with very Florida names, the Miami Fusion and the (league OG) Tampa Bay Mutiny. While it didn’t take long for MLS to begin what looks like inexorable expansion in hindsight – starting with Real Salt Lake and Chivas USA in ’05 – it is important, for the purposes of this exercise, to try to imagine watching a tiny league that forever seemed on the verge of collapse.

Chivas USA drafted a young Sacha Kljestan in 2006 as a Gen Adidas player. While neither they nor RSL hit the ground running, Chivas USA turned things around first, topping the West in 2007 – and even pushing DC United for the Supporters’ Shield that same season. I barely remember Chivas' roster from that era – though much like New York City FC, they borrowed talent from their parent team, Chivas de Guadalajara – but Kljestan quickly stood out as a star player. And I mean that in the sense that he could play soccer: he had the skill, brains and technique to do good and interesting things on the field. Moreover, he joined an ever-growing collection of American players who fit the same description. Some of those careers in the league started before Kljestan’s (e.g., Clint Mathis, Clint Dempsey during his New England Revolution days), some became direct rivals for a time (e.g., Landon Donovan), and they all added their own piece to the idea that the United States of America could produce credible soccer talent. I’m not sure I can adequately describe what that felt like to anyone who didn’t watch MLS in the 1990s, but it was nice to feel something brighter than a nagging sense of doom.

The First MLS Preview Post of 2023. Probably: Eyeing the Baseline

So bright you gotta wear shades...

The turning of the calendar feels like a good time to start to wrap the head around Major League Soccer’s 2023 season. Before I get started a warning: very little of what comes below will constitute “news” to your more devoted followers of the league. To put that another way, this is a post for people who follow the league like me – e.g., those who can say, “Oh, I’ve heard to that guy” when a good/rising player’s name comes up, but who can’t drop (literally) all the relevant stats.

For the people who drop in for notes on either FC Cincinnati or the Portland Timbers, you’ll find those at the end, and in that order. I wanted to start with the big picture. With that, let’s get those fingers framed and get things into focus.

Thanks to all the baggage and clutter around the 2022 season – there, I’m thinking of a luridly tainted (yet mostly satisfying) 2022 World Cup and the rolling scandals that clouded the Timbers season and cleaned out (most, but not all) of the front office - I want the 2023 MLS season to be both as good and as normal as possible. And, there, I’m optimistic: just having the playoffs feel less rushed and, without a looming World Cup as a distraction, less like an opening act begging a restless crowd to let them reach the end of their set. That should help the 2023 MLS Playoffs feel like the closing event of the domestic soccer calendar all on its own. Now...what else?

The new [Apple]+ TV deal will be in place, for one. I’ve seen some gripes about the cost – and, now that I no longer have SlingTV, I’m feeling the slings ‘n’ arrows of the exclusivity (e.g., my access to random soccer leagues has cratered) – and I fully sympathize with anyone who either can’t or won’t find a path to squeezing that into his/her/their personal budget. Speaking solely for myself, I calculate the real cost of things by breaking things down into individual units. What I mean by that is, even at the highest subscription rate - $99 for a full year – you’re looking at $3.30 per game to watch every game for any given team and, unless they’re blowing smoke up my ass or it’s getting lost in the other smoke, you get to watch it on your time, however and often you want. And if you’re like me and like to follow two teams, that cuts your per-game cost in half. Bottom line, the way you value MLS’s new TV deal tracks almost perfectly with the number of games you want to watch.

That’s to say, I like that and it makes me happy. Now, for some things I don’t like.