Tag: Major League Soccer

Fredy or not here he comes!

So finally the long and seemingly painful search for a proven goal scorer has come to and end for the Vancouver Whitecaps with the loan signing of Fredy Montero from Chinese side Tianjin Teda FC.

This being MLS the details of the actual deal are about as murky and convoluted as an Oliver Stone movie but at least the former Seattle Sounder has a bona fide record of putting the ball into the back of the net.

The big question now is whether the Whitecaps can get the best out of him.

Carl Robinson has already said that he intends to use Montero as a number nine which begs the question “Exactly what kind of number nine?”.

Play him the way that Octavio Rivero was played (unsplendid isolation) and the Colombian will likely end up as a diminutive tribute act to the Uruguayan; all rolling eyes and forlornly outstretched arms.

But if Robinson can figure out a way to get players in support of Montero then the forward line could be formidable indeed.

And the positive news is that he now has exactly the kind of players to do just that with Reyna, Manneh, Barnes, Techera, Bolaños, Davie, Mezquida et al all far happier going forward than tracking back.

It’s debateable whether the coach will be willing to grant his team that kind of freedom but he could use his favoured double defensive midfield set up to simply allow all those ahead of them free reign.

It’s an exciting prospect for the fan but it’s probably something of a pipe dream.

For one thing Robinson just isn’t that kind of coach and for another the disappointing nature of last season may well instill even more initial conservatism into both him and the players.

Perhaps if he were given a cast iron guarantee that the fans and the media would show patience over the first few weeks if things didn’t quite work out as promised then Robinson would be willing to take more of a risk, but the memory of 2016 and Champion’s League qualifier against the Red Bulls cuts that slack down to almost nothing.

So we’ll probably see Montero playing with a high number ten with the two wide men operating as much as midfielders as forwards.

Not as great from an aesthetic point of view but at least a step up (both literally and metaphorically) from last season.

 

Eight, nine or ten for the Whitecaps?

Imagine for a moment that you’re the one in charge of all the big decisions for the Vancouver Whitecaps.

It’s already been a busy off-season; you’ve given the go ahead for little blue triangles to be added to the new white home shirt and you’re confident that you’ve hired the very best people to handle the streaming of the pre-season games.

But now you’re faced with the biggest challenge yet.

Financial restraints mean only one Designated Player can be added to the team and owners want you to decide if that should be a number eight, a number nine or a number ten.

Despite being  somewhat appalled at their slightly reductive way of looking at tactical positioning you set about pondering their question.

You first remember that a very briulliant blogger once argued that Matias Laba either can’t or won’t be asked to play the purely defensive midfield role so that would make a true box to box midfielder both a bonus and a liability to the team.

True, the team could definitely do with a player who added to the numbers going forward but if that was at the cost of leaving the back four as exposed as it was last year that could mean good money spent simply to stand still.

Anyway, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that Vancouver just need a good finisher to make everything okay isn’t it?

Well it kind of is, but while the Whitecaps definitely created chances last season a whole bunch of those chances were created by work rate and pace rather than creativity.

Slot a pure finisher into the lineup and it’s just possible that a numbder of those chances may suddenly disappear making his presence a lot less effective than we all presume it would be.

So perhaps a creative presence at number ten is the answer?

It’s certainly one area where Carl Robinson hasn’t had much success since he took over the coaching role with his two main options either being Pedro Morales (who lacked the quickness of short passing and instinct to get forward) and Nicolas Mezquida (who lacks the inate creativity).

So simply putting a genuinely effective number ten should solve all the problems?

Again what we really come back to is the way Robinson likes to set up his team; he seems to prefer “and a half” players.

In other words he likes a wide man who plays narrow and he definitely likes forwards who can play anywhere along the front line; somewhere between a nine and a ten.

But when he does play a straight up forward man then he prefers him to play facing the rest of the team rather than the opposition goal meaning that he becomes the de facto creative hub for the rest of the attack to play off.

So if the coach genuinely likes these “portmanteau” players then concentrating on signing their exact opposite may be detrimental to the team in the long run.

That means the best answer you can give to the question of whether to sign a number eight, nine or ten is to give no answer at all.

Good work!

 

Vancouver Whitecaps: Five milestones to consider

There are only two things I know to be undeniably true.

The first is that any character in a historical drama on TV who starts coughing in Episode One will be dead of tuberculosis by Episode Three at the latest.

The second is that anybody looking at a new Major League Soccer schedule will utter the phrase “Well, that could have been better”.

But I’m a firm believer in the philosophy that if life gives you lemons then you take those lemons and throw them really hard at somebody else until they at least feel even worse than you do.

So with that in mind let’s throw five lemons at the schedule and see if we can’t bruise at least a few of those dates into submission.

The first two home games- Normally it would be ridiculous hyperbole to claim that a Champions League game against the Red Bulls and a League opener against the Union were crucial but the Whitecaps were so bad at BC Place last season that they almost can’t afford to maintain that negative momentum.

If they tumble out of the Champions League and also fail to pick up three points the rot could set in before the clocks have even sprang forward.

Four road games in a row- MLS loves to send teams on expanded road trips and Vancouver get their first taste of this in April when they face Portland, Montreal, Colorado and Houston.

By this time we’ll at least know more about how the team is being set up and although the playoff structure makes it tough to find yourself behind the eight ball this early in the season a bad run of results in these games could at least see them approaching the eight ball with a hint of trepidation.

Four home games in a row- It really is feast or famine with MLS isn’t it? That road trip is then followed by home games against Kansas, D.C United, Atlanta and Dallas.

One of the main flaws with the team in 2016 was that they always seemed to fail to capitalize on their successes, so if they do manage to get a decent amount of points from those road games they need to build on that at B.C. Place.

In short they need to play with far more intensity over ninety minutes than they ever managed to do last year.

August and September- It’s become traditional for the Whitecaps to view these months in the same way a wounded tuna fish views a hungry shark.

Why that is the case is one of the great mysteries of the modern world but it may just be as simple as other teams working out Vancouver and Vancouver being unable to adapt to that problem.

Thus far Carl Robinson hasn’t shown himself to be a master tactician within games so let’s hope he’s used the off season polish his coaching skills.

The final run in- Four of the last fives games are away from BC Place so we could be left looking at a team that is slightly worse off than it appears to be.

If the Whitecaps are hovering around the red playoff line come the end of September then they are more likely to sneak into the post-season than they are to steam into it (and even more likely to miss out altogether).

Again it will come down to how hard Robinson pushes his team before this spell of games and whether he and they refuse to settle for less than they could actually get as they seemed to do far too often in 2016.

So that’s just a few periods of the season that could/might/won’t be crucial to how we feel at the end of the campaign.

But at least we’re nearly at the start now!

 

 

Yordy Reyna: Perusing what we know

Being a fan of the Whitecaps in this particular off season has been a little like being a truffle pig in a world without truffles.

But now at least we have something with Marc Weber reporting that the club have signed Yordy Reyna from the Austrian side FC Red Bull Salzburg.

It’s  true that all that most of us have to go on is Reyna’s Wikipedia page and some YouTube highlights but that feels like a whole plethora of truffles compared to what we had before (Yes I’m aware that the correct collective noun for truffles is “heap” but Plethora of Truffles sounds like a Prog Rock band who would have released an eponymous album in 1973 before splitting up following a particularly poorly received set at the Oxford Real Ale Festival).

So what can we learn and, more importantly what can we speculate on, given the meagre fare available?

Here are a x scenarios (Memo to self: come back and edit this when you run out of ideas, but definitely try to get passed one).

Giles Barnes is on the way out- Reyna looks to be a very similar style of player and will definitely mean less of a hit on the salary cap. And anyway, how many  “Is he really a forward or a winger” players do the team actually need?

The team needs another “Is he really a forward or a winger?” player- If the plan is to switch to a 4-3-3/4-2-1-3 in 2017 then a front three of Reyna, Barnes and Manneh could be a nightmare to defend against given that each is capable of playing anywhere  along the front line.

Position Bolaños centrally with Laba and Jacobson/Teibert as holding cover and it’s suddenly not inconceivable that the Whitecaps could score some goals and, with Hurtado, Davies and Techera all capable of playing in that forward position, Carl Robinson won’t be too hampered by the inevitable injuries and suspensions that will come along.

The system stays the same but with Bolaños as the number ten- The tried and trusted (by Robinson anyway) 4-2-3-1 could simply be tweaked to push Reyna or Barnes on to the right and allow Bolaños to become the main creative hub of the team.

Any other scenarios though would feel like wild speculation rather than distinct possibilities.

4-4-2? It could work but it’s hard to see the coach wanting his team to be that open (especially on the road).

3-5-2/5-3-2? Playing three central defenders is the fashionable tactic right now but any chance of that happening probably went out of the window with the long term injury to David Edgar.

It’s hard to imagine there won’t be at least one more signing (though at least two are probably needed) but as things stand the current starting eleven can at least be graded as “promising”.

Definitely not “great” and it’s open to question if it could actually deliver on any promises made but at least it wouldn’t be absolutely terrible.

 

 

Vancouver Whitecaps: From “meh” to Decemberists

“So when your bridal processional
Is a televised confessional
To the benefits of Axe shampoo
You know we did it for you
We did it all for you”

“A Singer Addresses His Audience” by  The Decemberists is the band’s take on the complex relationship that exists between themselves and their audience.

The ever raging conflict between devotion and disdain that seems to be an almost necessary aspect of the fan experience.

And as for music then so for football.

Let’s face it, if the way supporters of a club and the actual club itself feel about and behave towards each other were an actual human relationship it would be as twisted as a twisted fork.

One party shows nothing but studied disinterest in the other right up until the moment they need to take yet more money from them and the other party endlessly searches the internet for any news of how the other was behaving and then reacting to everything like a jealous spouse from the planet Paranoid.

“Look at what they are doing! Why aren’t you doing that?! Maybe you were planning to do that but just didn’t tell me?! Maybe you’re going to do something even better?! Maybe you aren’t going to do anything?!” etc. etc. etc.

The real problem though is that they both want different things or (to be more accurate) they both want the same things but almost always violently disagree about how to attain them.

With the main tug of war being between the concepts of time and money.

Yet this isn’t the long-awaited smack down between Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith but rather a seemingly impossible circle to square between the notion of spending money and developing talent.

When one party wants money spent the other preaches the virtues of patience and youth.

When one party spends money the other bemoans the loss of what was once personal and special.

And don’t forget all the fuss about behaviour with one party spending half their time telling everybody about how great their partner is to be around and the rest of the time trying to get them to “maybe rein it in a little bit”.

Yet through all this seeming incompatibility the relationship somehow tends to survive (although at times that seems to be out of spite as much as it is out of love) and I guess it ultimately survives because the game of football matters to both parties.

It matters in different ways and for different reasons to be sure, but it very definitely matters.

And deep down they both know they need each other in a weird kind of symbiotic/parasitic kind of way.

It’s sort of beautiful (if the light isn’t all that great and you really, really squint very hard).

It’s All Coming Up Whitecaps!

Well I guess that depends on what your definition of “up” actually is but safe to say that the off-season so far seems to have been an exercise in proving the maxim “no news is good news” to be bang on the money.

As if losing Brett Levis until the Summer wasn’t enough we now discover that David Edgar is out until the Fall with a knee injury caused by a hit and run driver in Arizona.

And it’s the latter news that really leaves Carl Robinson behind the proverbial eight ball (although if he was behind the literal eight ball that would just be weird).

Edgar was brought into the club last season for two reasons; to shore up a malfunctioning central defence and to provide some much-needed locker room leadership.

Now Robinson finds himself back with the central defensive partnership of Waston and Parker and no substantive change in locker room presence.

Thankfully there are two ways of looking at this.

The first way is burst into tears, run outside and bury our heads in the freezing snow until the City starts to raid local restaurants and bars for salt and the second way is to see every problem as simply an opportunity in disguise.

The first way definitely doesn’t work because I’ve tried it and while the second way may well be the kind of vapid life advice normally heard on morning TV it’s literally all we’ve got so let’s run with it.

For starters (in both senses of the phrase) Waston and Parker aren’t a bad central defensive partnership and maybe the best course of action would be to work on eradicating the errors of 2016 rather than simply trying to fix the problem with new faces.

And if the locker room needs a revamp then, once again, that could just as easily come from within the club as it could from importing “character”.

If Robinson learned anything from last season then it’s surely that he needs to challenge his players more and forgive them a little less.

And if the players learned anything from last season then it’s surely that they can’t just coast through a number of games no matter how generous the MLS playoff structure happens to be.

We are still awaiting news of fresh signings of course but the club will have known the extent of Edgar’s injury long before we did so we can assume that has been a factor in any scouting trips or negotiations thus far.

But if Edgar’s terrible luck does mean something then it surely means that minds need to be even more focused than they were before.

That might not be a bad thing in the long run (or it might be horrendously terrible).

Hard to say really.

 

 

 

 

A Vancouver Whitecaps Wish List

So I was chatting with the Christmas Genie the other morning when he handed me a very official looking document.

“What’s this?” I asked without bothering to read any of it.

“Well you could always read it” he sighed.

“Nah, best if you just tell me really.”

“Well, we within the Genie Guild have amended our traditional ‘Three Wishes and You Are Out’ policy to one that we feel is more in keeping with our stakeholders aspirations.”

“I don’t like the sound of that” I said frowning.

“Well turn that frown upside down because what we now offer is specifically tailored to each individual stakeholder, creating a bespoke wish list based on extensive data analysis and demographic research.”

“So I no longer get three wishes?”

“It’s even better! You now get five!”

“That is better!”

“With the mild caveat that these five wishes are limited to a particular area of interest”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we’ve found our stakeholders to be strangely unfocused when it comes to making wishes and that creates extensive administration costs for Genie Central. So, by streamlining the process, we are now able to offer two more wishes but within more tightly controlled parameters”.

I looked at him blankly.

“You get five wishes but only within an area designated by our state of the art software.”

“So in what area do I get my wishes?”

“The Vancouver Whitecaps!” he exclaimed with a generous sweep of his arm “Our state of the art software has assigned you five specific areas in which you can make a wish vis-a-vis the Whitecaps”.

“It all sounds a little bit limiting”.

“It is, but in a good way. And the worst case scenario is that you can turn it into a blog post at a time when literally nothing is happening in the world of the Whitecaps”

“Genie! You’re a genius!”

“That’s where the word comes from” he lied.

Here then, for the record, were my five  Vancouver Whitecaps wishes for 2017.

If you could sign any player in the world who would it be?  Forget the likes of Messi, Ronaldo and O’Shea. If I had the pick of anybody I’d bring in Luis Suarez.

Granted his character has been somewhat questionable but boy does he work hard on the field and probably no current player makes those around him better to the extent that Suarez does.

He can also kick the ball into the net which is a skill the Whitecaps have been lacking of late.

If you could have one coach to coach the Whitecaps who would it be?-  It would be hugely entertaining to watch a Klopp or a Conte on the sidelines at BC Place but I worry that they may struggle with the vagaries of the MLS squad structure.

So I pick Carlo Ancelotti. Not only does the avuncular Italian have family ties in Vancouver but he’s a coach who doesn’t impose his own style on a team but rather adapts his style to the players available to him.

Ancelotti would be the ideal MLS coach.

If you could change one thing about BC Place what would it be?- A grass pitch. Not because I hate the turf that much but just to take the mention of turf out of every discussion.

Player A gets injured. Turf!. Player B doesn’t sign. Turf! Player C hits the post. Turf!

The fact that the last two MLS Cup winners also play on turf is irrelevant to this argument; it’s always the turf that is to blame.

If you could change anything about the game day experience what would it be?- Free beer!

But failing that a little less of the in-game promos. I get that the club has to satisfy the sponsors but I don’t want to hear their names blasted through the speaker system and on to the big screen while our right back is struggling with the basic concepts of physics.

If you could change anything about the Whitecaps schedule what would it be?- Well; it would be nice to actually have it at least a month earlier since many fans base their vacations around the team.

But if not that then one which created a rhythm to the season. Less of the home, home, home, road, road, road, road thing and more of the home, road, home, road, home, road thing.

So they were my five wishes as designated by Genie Central.

I wonder which ones will come true in 2017?

Vancouver Whitecaps: Reasons to be Cheerful

If 2016 has taught us anything it’s that rational thought and tolerance to others will always win the day.

And so as the world heads into what will clearly be an extended period of unparalleled peace, prosperity and goodwill to all it behoves us to consider the good side of all things.

Last time out we took the darkest timeline look at the current Vancouver Whitecaps situation so, in the spirit of accepting that if you can’t find the flaws in your own argument then good luck finding them in those of others, let’s try to counter the main points of that piece.

Carl Robinson doesn’t appreciate the enormity of his task- Yeah right. The guy who will lose his job if results are poor doesn’t get how important results are. Just because he doesn’t sound phased by the situation doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand it.

Robinson isn’t flying around the world looking for new players because he thinks all is fine and dandy in Whitecaps world. He’s doing it because he knows upgrades are needed in several key areas.

Giving Robinson so much control over new acquisitions will create instability when he leaves- Well we don’t actually know that the coach has that much control but even so it’s hard to imagine him having carte blanche over who he brings in.

Aside from any financial limitations imposed upon him the very nature of the act of signing a new player means that a plethora of people will need to be involved.

So to cast the Whitecaps transfer policy as essentially a one man operation fails to take into account the realities of the modern world of sport.

Youth players aren’t being challenged enough- So the previous argument was based around the idea that the Whitecaps weren’t achieving any kind of stability and this argument is based around the idea that it’s better to sign in somebody from outside the club than to let the young players progress?

Aside from the logical contradiction inherent here anybody who has watched the Whitecaps will know that the young players don’t get an easy ride.

Ask the likes of Adekugbe, Bustos and McKendry if they feel they have had a fair run at establishing themselves in the first eleven.

Juggling results with bringing through players is tough task and the actual evidence is that the Robinson and the Whitecaps tend to favour the latter.

Robinson struggles to connect with the fans on an emotional level- Well cry me a river! Would this even be an argument if the results were going splendidly?

Nobody can watch Robinson on the sideline and imagine that the game means nothing to him so what he does and doesn’t say in post-game interviews is either irrelevant or your own personal Rorschach test defined by preconception and perception.

In the end all any of it comes down to is results on the field. The Whitecaps didn’t get enough of them in the League in 2016 and most of us won’t really settle until we see them getting better in 2017.

But can 2017 be any better than 2016? Hard to imagine such a thing but it might just be possible!

 

 

Vancouver Whitecaps: The Airing of Grievances

If the Holiday period is about anything it’s about people arguing over petty differences while terrible atrocities happen in all four corners of the world.

But it’s also about judging other people in a harsh and unforgiving manner and so, with that in mind, this seems a good time to look at a few of the things that are most concerning about the current Vancouver Whitecaps.

A lot of these stem from a recent interview Carl Robinson gave to the AFTN podcast (and you can hear it here).

There were two ways of taking the entirety of what the coach said; you could either choose to see a man who was unphased by the pressures of the role and who had a firm grip on the tiller of the team or you could choose to see a man who failed to recognise the enormity of the task and who also failed to acknowledge just how bad his team were in 2016.

In the spirit of the season let’s adopt the latter approach for now.

Robinson certainly admitted that the season could have been better but he persisted in his view that the Whitecaps just weren’t that far away from being the finished article.

I guess that depends what the definition of the finished article is but Robinson’s contention that his team were maybe just two or three wins (or a couple of silly late goals) away from making the playoffs and therefore having a successful season sounds like three parts revisionism and two parts lack of ambition.

If the definition of success is a one game “play in” game on the road then that seems an awfully low bar to set.

Did the fact that Portland and now Seattle had won the MLS Cup put pressure on him? Seemingly not. Everything was as then as it is now in terms of pressure (he feels very little was the overarching feeling listening to him speak).

Now all of this could just be a coach being wary of what he said to the media but Robinson does seem to struggle in connecting to the fans (or some fans at least) when it comes to putting across just how much the game actually means.

But away from spurious speculation about the coach’s media motivation it was disconcerting to hear him say that any new players signed wouldn’t be there to block the path of the youngsters coming through the system.

Translation: “If we get the chance to sign somebody better than Marco Bustos we won’t do it”.

Now either that just isn’t true (I suspect it isn’t) or it’s a foolhardy way of bringing through young players.

Emerging players need to be challenged as they develop. Not given a free pass to the first team with all obstacles removed on the way.

Again we’re probably in the land of milquetoast media replies than anything else but it didn’t do anythng to quell the notion that the Whitecaps on the whole are happier with the status quo than they really should be.

Finally there’s the whole business of player recruitment.

We obviously don’t know the intricate details of how the club scout and sign players (this is MLS after all and sometimes I’m surprised they even release the results of games without some kind of obscure regulation being involved) but it does appear that Robinson himself is, by some distance, the main protagonist in deciding who to scout and who to sign.

That system works to a degree but it does mean that if he were to leave (for whatever reason) the Whitecaps will have almost zero continuity when it comes to acquisitions going forward.

If everybody in the squad is essentially a Robinson signing that creates an unwelcome dynamic for the next coach to come along.

It seems far better to make the business of bringing in players more centralised within the club than to trust it all to the man who is arguably (by the unwritten rules of soccer) the most ephemeral figure on the staff other than the people who actually get to kick a ball on match day.

Oh well. Hopefully this hasn’t been too downbeat for the festive season but worry not but because next time out we’ll look at the “Reasons to be Cheerful”.

A far merrier subject to be sure.

 

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Is this a Winter of Discontent for fans of the Whitecaps?

More like a winter holding their heads in their hands and hoping the world would go away I suspect but sooner or later we all have to dive into the freezing cold pool of reality whether we have lanolin covering our bodies or not.

So let’s at least dip our toes into the icy pool of these two subjects.

What does the MLS Cup Final mean?- Well apart from it meaning hell on earth for the Whitecaps that is.

Is two of the higher spending clubs making it to the final indicative of a sea change for MLS as a whole or is it a single event signifying nothing?

Nothing of any import can ever be gleaned from one isolated incident of course but this does at least feel different in a large part because of the influence of two players.

Neither Giovinco nor Lodeiro have the name power to get MLS apostates buying tickets or changing channels but they do have the ability to win games for their respective teams and the initial moves by expansion team Atlanta United indicate that they too are spending money on “difference makers” rather than marquee names.

If Toronto have learned anything from this season (and it’s Toronto so it’s entirely possible that they won’t) it’s that the best way to insert a team into the wider consciousness of the public is to win games on the field.

If enough other teams around the league learn the same lesson then the arms race of spending may switch into something far more ruthless than mere marketing ploys.

And their rivals suddenly start to acquire players with a proven record in proven leagues then hoping to unearth hidden gems from the coal dust of lesser competitions will prove to be more and more risky for the Whitecaps.

Hurtado stays while others leaves- Official farewells have now been given to Morales, Perez, Aird, Smith and Carducci and enough has been said about all of them with perhaps the exception of Marco Carducci.

A talented goalkeeper who never really looked ready for the step up to MLS and one who fell behind in the pecking order to the more accomplished looking Spencer Richey but Carducci could well find a role in the up and coming Canadian Premier League.

The signing of Hurtado won’t get any pulses racing but he is what he is; a useful MLS depth player.

His failings last season were as much about the failings of others as they were his own. Kudo struggled, Perez couldn’t (or wasn’t allowed to) play on a regular basis and Rivero was away before summer ever really set in.

It may be harsh to say that asking Hurtado to lead the line on a regular basis is setting him up to fail but it is certainly asking more of him than he is capable of and there comes a time when a coach’s willingness to believe in a player slips over into bad man management.

I think that’s where we were with Hurtado last season but hopefully 2017 sees him playing the role to which he is best suited; a late impact substitute and a starter in a few of those games against Eastern Conference teams where the main striker(s) need(s) a rest.

For now though let’s forget all that and just try to get through this Final safe in the knowledge that the 2017 schedule, the signings and some actual games of football aren’t all that too far behind.