Midas Mulligan this is the other "Pirl-nooooo" moment I was describing in my earlier post.
San Jose Postmatch
- Thread starter NYCFC_Dan
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I met a really nice dude at Columbus Circle who was a Quakes, RBNJ and City STH.I believe this was the entirety of the SJ away support. They sat down about a minute before the opening goal.
A very nice, kept man with no children and a partner that travels quite a lot?
For me, it comes down to, we are playing pirlo as the sole CDM again and we've seen that that doesn't work. And now that we've got players that can actually get the ball through midfield, we don't need his occasional brilliance, so his occasional awfulness is brought to the fore.
IKR.
Ha, from 233b or the Red Hot Terrace or wherever I was at, I actually felt like he had that under control. Also there's a moment where he's looking to Ethan for the outlet and Ethan is completely oblivious. Possibly contemplating the zen of photographic composition.
I'm with canchon on the 40/ 40 / 20 fault distribution for the first goal. Thing is, incidents like this are part and parcel of playing the pivot. They're gonna happen a number of times a season. Even for pivots who are in their prime, at the top of their game. Even Busquets.
These incidents are only part of the picture, but they seem to dominate how people feel about the way Pirlo played. Actually, if you think about the # of times such incidents have happened this season, I would say that they unduly dominate how people feel about the way Pirlo has contributed to the team in general.
The problem is that if one's picture mostly includes the ball and the 2 or 3 players clustered around it, a few moments before and after key events, there's a lot happening outside of the frame. It's harder to pick up on the times that the ball doesn't get into dangerous areas because of Pirlo's defensive positioning, or the times he picks up the ball effortlessly because of timing rather than graft. I'm happy to see Pirlo's vision acknowledged in several posts on this thread, but it's hard to see the passing lanes that get ignored when somebody-who-isn't-Pirlo has the rock. It's really difficult to keep several alternate realities in one's head and assign appropriate value to all of the times we wouldn't have lost the ball because Pirlo sees several passes ahead and chooses passes that optimize for the several-passes-ahead timeframe. When Pirlo came off in the ~62nd minute, we completely lost midfield. Where Pirlo sees the position that he is supposed to be occupying several seconds ahead of play, Ring is extremely adept at making up ground when he realizes he's out of position. Sort of like Mix in that sense, but much more pugnacious. I don't see him as a CDM.
I like what I've seen of Herrera and I think that that would be a much more interesting comparison. But it's gonna happen to him a few times too. Same goes for Sands. Fuck me, even Iraola had a couple of those gaffes last season, and probably worse. I don't want this post to be written off as merely a Pirlo fanboy post, although to be completely fair, I am a Pirlo fanboy. I just don't know if we have realistic expectations of the pivot role or if the way we would assess anybody in that role is broad enough.
Liked because of the broader perspective. In between occasional brilliance and occasional awfulness, I feel like it's easy to miss the near-constant positive influence and direction of affairs.
If you read through my posts (not that I think you should take up that time for something so boring) you'll see I am normally the one expounding the virtues of Pirlo's contributions but he is starting to slip and the "occasional awfulness" is starting to become less occasional.
As I said, I love him but we need to start the transition process.
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I just read over this and realize it could come off as condescending. To be clear, that's not my intention at all. I'm not trying to say that anyone's perspective is wrong or deficient. More just trying to offer up a different perspective that you can choose to consider or not consider.
One last thing I'll say about thinking about this role more broadly – in the post above I mostly talked about the broader material consequences of Pirlo's contributions, but if you'll allow me to slip into my Galeano suit for a second, can we talk about some of the intangibles? There is a moment where Pirlo receives the ball with his back to the defender, throws a stepover to his right and goes to his left. In the grand scheme of things, this is meaningless. He could have passed the ball to White, he could have achieved the same movement without the stepover, fine. Once or twice every game, I wonder if we will look back on these years that Pirlo played for us and regret that we spent these moments castigating him for his (very occasional) defensive lapses instead of appreciating him for his moments of brilliance.
But fuck, these moments are why I love this game. How do you assign value to that?
I don't have the time to crunch the numbers to determine if it's becoming less occasional or not. My gut tells me that this hasn't changed, but my gut could be wrong.
Regardless, I agree that we need to start the transition process – I just don't know whether we'll be any happier with whoever replaces him if we aren't looking at all of the pivot's responsibilities.
aka, The Dream.
I usually only use statistics/metrics to make any of my arguments (comes with my life long education and profession) but I will admit my assertions about his decline are based on my own recollection/tabulation of instances of errors. That said, I would be very surprised if his errors leading to chances has not increased over the last few years. I am very aware of perception biases and try to mitigate them as much as I can when observing things I care about so I don't usually form those sort of opinions without some substance to it.
When I have a bit more time later in April (these next few weeks will not be great between work and several deaths in the family) I will see about trying to track down those stats for everyone's consumption—they could very well prove me wrong.
dannd23
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Don't lie to the whole board and act like you know how the Audi Player Index actually works
Indeed. One day... one day.
This is the issue - for all of the back and short, keep-possession passes, the fact that Pirlo has no conscience about giving up the ball in a shit position work to our advantage a bit, too. He's willing to make risky turns to get us moving forward.
Of course, there's the counter that we wouldn't be under so much pressure if we didn't have an older, slower CM whom teams target to wreak havoc upon, which is a bit like my prior concern that "The reason Pirlo creates almost all of our chances is he's the only one who can create them given how we suit our play and shape to him."
It's just like any other random number generator. Tons of free ones all over the internet.Don't lie to the whole board and act like you know how the Audi Player Index actually works
We also dominated possession the entire time he was in the game, and not just by knocking it around the back, but by building up the attack and breaking down the defense, by making clever passes and slick moves to hold off defenders. Pirlo deserves a lot of the credit for that.
And yet, Apple can't use one to produce a truly random shuffle for playing music on iTunes or producing a slideshow.
#organictomatoes
I agree with most of what has been said. One thing I kept thinking about yesterday was the European interest in Mata. Its perplexing. He's not a bad player, decent for MLS but I don't see a lot of elite skill in his game. He has good pace and endurance. His passing is decent and he picks out a few good through balls a game. His defending is okay at best. By far his biggest deficiency is an ability and/or willingness to try to take on defenders and beat them off the dribble.
Multiple times yesterday Mata was 1:1 in the corner with a defender. Wallace slide in behind him on the overlap to cover for him so there was no risk of being caught out but he'd do nothing but pass out of it. As soon as the defender started to close him out he'd drop the ball to Wallace, who often was surrounded by two players and immediately under more pressure than Mata had been with no one cover behind him because Mata had overlapped. If White or some other MLS journeyman that's on the pitch primarily for defense does that fine but teams are talking about paying $3m for this guy. Granted he couldn't play D to save his life but when Angelino got the ball in the same spots you saw the skill that reminded you why he was a top prospect, I just don't see it with Mata. Hopefully the teams in Europe don't start to feel the same way because we could use that GAM.
Multiple times yesterday Mata was 1:1 in the corner with a defender. Wallace slide in behind him on the overlap to cover for him so there was no risk of being caught out but he'd do nothing but pass out of it. As soon as the defender started to close him out he'd drop the ball to Wallace, who often was surrounded by two players and immediately under more pressure than Mata had been with no one cover behind him because Mata had overlapped. If White or some other MLS journeyman that's on the pitch primarily for defense does that fine but teams are talking about paying $3m for this guy. Granted he couldn't play D to save his life but when Angelino got the ball in the same spots you saw the skill that reminded you why he was a top prospect, I just don't see it with Mata. Hopefully the teams in Europe don't start to feel the same way because we could use that GAM.
It turned out ugly in the end but imo this is a win to be proud of. San Jose's back line was hard to break down but we found a way to score twice without Villa having to finish the chances (he assisted on both goals). 4 games in and we've dominated the run of play in all our matches and we've yet to concede more than once in a match. My only complaint is we need to find a way to get the ball to Maxi and Jack in space more. Most of their touches were under pressure, we have to work on our movement to open things up for them. Once we do that we'll hit the next level and become a problem for every team in the league.
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