Definitely agree he is much improved, but it was brutal to watch that interplay between Villa and Pirlo end with Khiry's handball.
Houston Postmatch
- Thread starter NYCFC_Dan
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Definitely agree he is much improved, but it was brutal to watch that interplay between Villa and Pirlo end with Khiry's handball.
Khiry is no Jack Harrison but his technical ability is probably not below average for the league. Of course it would be better if he had more but that isn't the main thing holding him back. I don't think Larin or Zardes for example have more technical ability than Shelton, they are better for other reasons.
Larin > Zardes >> Shelton, unfortunately.
Shelton had a couple of quality games off the bench but I think the stage of the game and the opposition had a lot to do with it. In the last couple of games he came on when the game was stretched. At beginnings of games teams are typically adhering to their defensive shape more closely. Houston also sat very deep. Beasley is also a smart player. Khiry had to make decisions
I'm also glad to see Vieira try new things. I want to say that this RJ / Iraola switching tactic didn't work because RJ was ugly in the center, but turning over the ball in the middle third is still preferable to giving it up at the 18 yard line. OTOH, it's a tricky transition to get right and there were definitely a couple of times where Houston got into either Iraola or RJ's space before they could get there. Better teams would have made us pay.
I think we could get the same security out of the back if we had Iraola drop between the center backs and had RJ and Mata push up and in to make a 3 with Pirlo. It would also make for less complicated formation shifts in transition. And potentially give Pirlo even more space. This is basically what Man City are doing now, so I have to think there's a reason we are trying to reinvent the wheel. I just hope it's not "PV doesn't want to crawl too far up Pep's ass" or "PV wants to be his own man".
All in all, I came out of this game feeling like we have a better chance of taking the East than I felt we had before the game. Villa is catching fire at the right time. Vieira is trialling creative solutions to our most pressing problems, and communicating them well enough to his team that we aren't a total train wreck. We've ended the Hernandez experiment, and we're beating teams routinely that we should beat routinely.
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Does anyone remember how the priority draft worked? How did Orlando get top draft pick from that? I seem to remember Kreis taking allocation order over the Draft. So we got Mix lol
There was a selection process where Orlando and NYCFC alternated and selected which mechanism they wanted to pick first. ORL had the first selection and took the expansion draft, then NYC took allocation ranking (Kreis actually screwed up here and wanted the USL discovery ranking instead), then ORL took Superdraft #1 pick.
Kreis screwed up royally - first he admitted that he really didn't want the allocation, and if he had his sights set on Mix, he didn't need the #1 in allocation as no way that Mix would have wanted to go to Orlando.
This concludes your Kreis bashing for today, back to post game discussion. By the way, if Kreis doesn't win tonight than most likely ORL misses playoffs again.
Larin > Zardes >> Shelton, unfortunately.
Shelton had a couple of quality games off the bench but I think the stage of the game and the opposition had a lot to do with it. In the last couple of games he came on when the game was stretched. At beginnings of games teams are typically adhering to their defensive shape more closely. Houston also sat very deep. Beasley is also a smart player. Khiry had to make decisions
I'm also glad to see Vieira try new things. I want to say that this RJ / Iraola switching tactic didn't work because RJ was ugly in the center, but turning over the ball in the middle third is still preferable to giving it up at the 18 yard line. OTOH, it's a tricky transition to get right and there were definitely a couple of times where Houston got into either Iraola or RJ's space before they could get there. Better teams would have made us pay.
I think we could get the same security out of the back if we had Iraola drop between the center backs and had RJ and Mata push up and in to make a 3 with Pirlo. It would also make for less complicated formation shifts in transition. And potentially give Pirlo even more space. This is basically what Man City are doing now, so I have to think there's a reason we are trying to reinvent the wheel. I just hope it's not "PV doesn't want to crawl too far up Pep's ass" or "PV wants to be his own man".
All in all, I came out of this game feeling like we have a better chance of taking the East than I felt we had before the game. Villa is catching fire at the right time. Vieira is trialling creative solutions to our most pressing problems, and communicating them well enough to his team that we aren't a total train wreck. We've ended the Hernandez experiment, and we're beating teams routinely that we should beat routinely.
I definitely agree with your last paragraph. I thought with Chanot out, we had no chance. But Vieira is looking really smart right now with what he's able to extract from our defense. Zero shots allowed on target is incredible.
I think we only have one fullback that is capable of playing inverted: Iraola. Both Matarrita and Allen are much more traditional attacking fullbacks in that they can cross and shoot, but short passing isn't really their game (particularly Allen).
It's probably too radical of a shift at this point in the season, considering how crucial Iraola has been in the middle full time, but let's say we grab Schweinsteiger this winter as a Lampard replacement, we could push Iraola back to RB and have him play an inverted role.
I think you are misremembering a little bit. It went like this:
- Orlando wins coin flip.
- Orlando selects Expansion Draft's 1st Pick
- NYCFC selects Allocation Order Top Spot
- Orlando selects Superdraft's 1st Pick
- NYCFC selects Discovery Ranking 20th Spot (whatever that is) by accident, because he showed the card from the top of his pile rather than the bottom. This was supposed to be our least valued option.
- Orlando selects USL/NASL Discovery Priority #1 (what we intended to select)
- etc.
All that could have been avoided had we won the coin toss though. We could have gotten Allocation, then Superdraft. We'd have Villa paired with Larin right now. Then again, we might also still have Kreis.
Tasty and luscious is one way to describe the hypnokit...
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Yes, the error was valuing the allocation order above the super draft (the other one where he picked the one he didn't want was the lesser of errors).
It was clear that Larin was #1 in the draft and Kreis played a 4-4-2 so don't know why he wouldn't want a young striker to go with Villa. He overvalued allocation order. In hindsight, Larin/Villa would have been Oba/Deuce levels of awesome. And maybe Mix could have been that #10 feeding them in this alternate reality.
Back to topic - anybody have the heat map from Iraola from this game? He was all over the field.
The non-stop karma chameleon in the 1st half...... that drove me nuts.
They tore it up with This Land is Your Land in the second.
He's been doing plenty of playing based on his snapchat and insta.
Will his agent complain if PV doesn't get him a cake?
wasnt precedent set last year to give guys at least 20min game time for their birthday?
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