I thought that was Cushing playing gamesmanship with the media like he often does. The very next game Talles started at LW.
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cushing seemed to take ownership of the failed magno at #9 experiment... at least that's what MLS season pass announcers were saying. let's hope that is that and we keep him at the LW and bring in another true #9 in the off season.. preferably even better than bakrar (not hating on him though)
Minnesota United fire Adrian Heath
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Minnesota United part ways with head coach Adrian Heath | MLSSoccer.com
Minnesota United FC have parted ways with longtime head coach Adrian Heath, the club announced Friday. Technical director Mark Watson has also departed the club.
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LIVE Transfer Talk: Messi to get Barcelona loan if Inter Miami miss playoffs
Lionel Messi will return to Barcelona for a proper send-off if his Inter Miami team keeps falling short. Transfer Talk has the latest.
This is hilarious, Messi’s probably like “yup, did my piece (Leagues Cup forever), this team is going nowhere, let’s do a farewell tour where I really want to be”
How do you say Lampardgate in Spanish?
We'll see. I'm sure MLS and Apple want to get at least one full season out of him, regardless of anything Jorge Mas may have said. I would imagine the conversation getting pretty intense.LIVE Transfer Talk: Messi to get Barcelona loan if Inter Miami miss playoffs
Lionel Messi will return to Barcelona for a proper send-off if his Inter Miami team keeps falling short. Transfer Talk has the latest.www.espn.com
This is hilarious, Messi’s probably like “yup, did my piece (Leagues Cup forever), this team is going nowhere, let’s do a farewell tour where I really want to be”
How do you say Lampardgate in Spanish?
Besides, I'm not sure Barcelona's financial situation would even allow for it. Maybe, with some fancy dancing, which is something they've been pretty good at. But they may be out of moves.
That being said, I think his heart does belong to Barca. And I could easily envision LaLiga bending over backwards to bring him back.
La Liga = Retirement League. . . . . . .CONFIRMED!!!
That’s a failure of mentality, not talent and he shares some blame. But Talles looked lost up top, Nick has owned up to the failure of the experiment and he’s looked much better on the wing where he belongs. The talent is clearly still there. But as we’ve seen with Puli at Chelsea vs Milan, being misused can really mess with a players head.
I agree with everything you say here except that conceding late equalizers is a sign of a weak mentality or game plan (which is on the staff). Well-managed teams with strong mentalities kill games and preserve one-goal advantages.Me discussing 2023 NYCFC:
Everything this year, especially before Leagues Cup and Bakrar but even since to some extent, is downstream of not scoring, which is downstream of not generating xG, which is downstream of not shooting.
SoupInNYC covered some of this briefly
NYCFC 2022 before Taty left 15.05 shots per game 1.86 G/Gm and 1.88 xG/Gm
NYCFC 2023 before Leagues Cup 11.50 SH/Gm 1.00G G/Gm and 1.04 xG/Gm
Shots down 24%, goals down 46% and xG down 45%.
NYCFC 2023 Since Leagues Cup 13.88 SH/Gm 1.13 G/Gm and 1.62 xG/Gm
Shots up 17%, Goals up 12% xG up 56%
None of those are where they were or should be but Bakrar made a big difference in all but goals, especially considering we also subtracted the teams biggest 1st half scorer. Unfortunately, finishing compared to xG went down, though 8 game samples for finishing are meaningless.
Why so many late equalizers this year? it's not mentality or tiredness. Take a 2-0 lead and concede late and that's 3 points. We scored 2 or more goals in just 9 games. That means a single goal conceded turns a draw into a loss or a win into a draw. We have 8 clean sheets. That's league average (8.4). The problem is not that we can't keep a lead or a clean sheet: the problem is we often have no lead and when we do it is almost never more than 1 goal.
We are tied for 6th in goals conceded. We conceded more than 1 goal only 9 times. But even when we concede just 1 we only score enough for a win 28% of the time.
We just don't score, in significant part because we don't generate xG, in significant part because we don't take enough shots.
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Never a bad thing when Mark Watson departs.Minnesota United fire Adrian Heath
Minnesota United part ways with head coach Adrian Heath | MLSSoccer.com
Minnesota United FC have parted ways with longtime head coach Adrian Heath, the club announced Friday. Technical director Mark Watson has also departed the club.
Is there any evidence for the mental toughness theory? Any? And is that evidence somehow stronger than the goal count evidence?
Excluding the 0-0 games where nobody scores last, 2023 NYCFC has 11 draws. NYCFC scored the final tying goal in 6 of them and conceded the final tying goal in 5. That's bad late game mental toughness? What does the ratio have to be before we admire NYC's mental discipline and game planning? 7-4? 8-3? 10-1? What's the cutoff? You want to limit it to games where the final goal was scored late, say 70' or later? Then the tally is 5-5. That is not evidence of anything but randomness.
2019 NYCFC held opponents to 0 or 1 goal 22 times and won 15 of them.
2023 NYCFC held opponents to 0 or 1 goal 22 times and won only 7.
Mental toughness? Or is it as simple as 2019 scored 0.8 more goals than 2023 every damn game? I opt for the latter explanation.
NYCFC's failure to score this year is epic. Looking elsewhere for explanations is pointless unless you are absolutely certain that the failure to score is not the reason. [It always is the reason].
- 2023 NYCFC has scored fewer goals in 32 games than 2020 did in just 23 games.
- Unless this team scores 6 goals in the next two games it will have the lowest goal total in NYCFC 34-game season history by a 10 goal margin.
- Exclude 2015, and 2023 NYC is currently 22 goals behind the lowest goal total in NYCFC full season history with 2 games to go.
Are there any good stats to measure the impact of Cushing's tactics on our drop in scoring? I know he's generally considered to be a more defensive minded coach. You can see it with his personnel decisions but is there anything measurable that can be used to see if he has the team playing more defensively than past coaches?
It's probably hard to separate but it would be interesting to know if we are not scoring because the players are not playing well or if Cushing has the team set up so defensively that our attackers have far less support in the final third than they have had in past seasons.
I'd be curious to see this myself. Although the eye test tells me we're more dangerous of late, mostly because we're shooting more (if not necessarily scoring more). It may be a case of us simply not having the firepower and Nick doing what he could with what he had in hand.
Hearing him talk about a "dynamic attack" and that sort of thing -- I'm paraphrasing, but that was the general gist of it -- in the last couple pressers tells me he's wanted to go another way all along. He just didn't have confidence in his squad.
And his squad often played like they knew it.
I also wonder if we think Cushing is a more defensive-minded coach because we aren't good enough offensively. Any coach trying to get results is going to make defensive-minded decisions when coaching a team that doesn't score enough.
Cushing has never had a team that scored a lot. He got the team right as Taty left, and still dragged us to a conference final last year. I want to see what his coaching looks like when he has a fully-operational offense.
Cushing has never had a team that scored a lot. He got the team right as Taty left, and still dragged us to a conference final last year. I want to see what his coaching looks like when he has a fully-operational offense.
i don't have links to articles or forum posts, but i recall some statistics that our frequency of counter press in the attacking half decreased after nick took over from ronny. that was last year though. i'm unsure what this year's number's are. but based on just watching the games, it seems that our line of confrontation is generally more at the halfway line or in our half vs deep in the attacking half where it generally used to be.
A lot of our chances over the last few years has been due to forcing turnovers in the attacking half. My guess is that those numbers have decreased. Is it purely tactics? Based on last year's numbers, I would say yes. But this year was very different because we didn't have a true #9 for much of the season and our midfield general (Maxi) was also not around to direct traffic and organize the press. If you noticed when Maxi was in games this season, he would often be looking around and waving our players forward to press and move the line of confrontation into the attacking half.
Lack of offense had a lot of contributors this season, but I think lack of #9, drop in performance from key players, and tactics all played a part. That being said, I would still prefer if Cushing adopted a more attacking mindset because that's just more fun to watch and for the most part, our defensive performances have been fairly solid.
Sure is a lot of work to extrapolate data from other seasons orthogonal to my point about mentality dropping points. Mentality is not zero-sum. Our offense having the wherewithal to storm back does not excuse defensive mental lapses. Nor does defensive solidity erase blown sitters (which IMHO are more directly linked to talent than mentality anyway, because a blown sitter implies that the attacker was at least in the proper position).
At a quick glance, here are three times we blew leads that any self-respecting team would agree were lapses in mentality. 1) Columbus ties us at 90+4 2) Sands foul in the box vs Vancouver leading to Gauld penalty equalizer 3) this past week against Miami.
6 extra points right there, that would have us in 8th place, on the verge of clinching, with our fate in our hands.
Reviewing this, we also sent our most lethal late-game threat out on loan (to a war zone, now). That kid has a positive mentality. Hope he’s safe.
That's hard. It's all so intertwined. Start with: 6 of the top 8 scorers in 2022 are not here (I'm counting Maxi as not here given 315 Minutes and 0G and 0A).
Four of those were gone on opening day and a fifth was gone after 4 games and we replaced none of them until 70% of the season was over. Then the 2023 leading scorer left just as we added replacements. Any manager would have struggled. But we since the retool we've often looked listless. Oddly I think the 2 strongest performances after Leagues Cup (besides Toronto) were the first 2 against Minnesota and Cincy which we lost but deserved to win both. Outside of those it's been up and down. Away form has remained utter crap.
I'm still on team uncommitted but might lean towards it's time for a fresh start. I think a lot of the things people say about Nick are silly. I'm not sure it's his fault. But it hasn't worked.
Wayne Rooney, DC United mutually part ways | MLSSoccer.com
D.C. United and head coach Wayne Rooney have mutually agreed to part ways, the club announced Saturday evening in the immediate aftermath of being eliminated from the Audi 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs. Rooney originally joined the Black-and-Red in July 2022, returning to the club he played for from...
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Rooney out. Officially mutual but I I think he might have initiated it.
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