Re: [nas] USA-Korea -tactics.......

["Eric Wang" <erw90@hotmail.com>]

Jeff <MRMOORE01@PRODIGY.NET> writes:
> Neither was it blindly drab and overly critical and seeing
> through "RED" glasses.

    Sheesh.  Struck a nerve, eh?

    I'm as American as you are.  I don't go out of my way to find
    fault with American teams or players.  (You may notice I
    haven't said a bad word about Agoos or that cheesy guy :)

    I comment on what I see.  What I saw was Friedel having to
    save us repeatedly.  If that's going to happen to us every time
    we play a faster team, it's worth dissecting.

> For all Korea's this and that.....they still cannot finish.

    Agreed, although it's not fair to judge them on one match.
    More accurately, "they did not finish against us".

    OTOH, does this mean you agree that they created numerous
    finishable chances?  :)

    Korea also has a tendency to drill hopeful shots too soon from
    way downtown, instead of working the ball more patiently around
    the box.  They've evidently chosen speed as their strategy to be
    competitive, and work at being the faster, fitter team, that runs
    you to death instead of slicing you apart with finesse or technique.
    (In other words, they're the anti-Colombia :)  This does suggest
    that they haven't had time to also develop "goalscorer coolness"
    when they do get opportunities.  Pick your poison and roll the dice.

> However, tactically, I would say that statement is rather
> naive. We LET them run around like damn chickens with
> the heads off ...

    Aren't you the one with red, white, and blue glasses on now?
    Your writing consistently denigrates and downplays everything
    the opponent does, and tries to cast it in as unflattering a light
    as possible, as if it's all bad, insignificant, their stupidity, or our
    cleverness.  That just makes your writing seem partisan and
    biased, and not a whit more insightful or informative than anybody
    else's analysis.

> hoping they would run themselves into the ground, get frustrated
> along with their crowd, let them run, pressure..in the heat ...

    That would have been a pretty foolish plan, and you must think
    Arena is insultingly out of touch to even consider it.  Anybody
    who's been paying attention for the last 12 years could have
    foreseen that we would tire out before Korea did, which, in fact,
    is exactly what happened.  Running harder than the other team is
    their specialty (as opposed to, say, finishing :).  And we frittered
    away plenty of chances to make them chase us around.  I think
    you're just yet again stretching to fabricate any excuse you can to
    badmouth the opponent and make USA somehow look better.

    More accurately, say that we bunkered because we just didn't
    have any other option.  We knew perfectly well that Korea
    wouldn't get tired before we did.  We were just hoping to ride
    out the storm and escape with a result.  And we were also
    hoping to keep possession a bit and break out a few times, but
    we couldn't make that work.  That worries me a bit.  Realistically,
    though, that kind of ball control and passing game is the sort of
    thing that takes years of preparation and a concerted effort to
    develop and instill, so if we don't already have it by now, it's not
    the sort of thing we're going to fix overnight.

> Some tactics are designed to allow some possession.

    We weren't _planning_ on committing all those silly turnovers
    in the midfield that gave Korea opportunities to catch us out on
    the counter.  We just weren't good enough to consistently make
    that many passes in a row under pressure.

    It's one thing to deliberately let the other team have possession
    after you've done something constructive with the ball, like take
    a shot.  It's quite another to turn the ball over when you're just
    trying to string together a few basic holding passes.  Our inability
    to hold the ball even when we had it was a major factor in forcing
    us to pull back and bunker down, sooner and for longer than we
    wanted to.

    We obviously conceded midfield possession in the second halves
    of both games, when we pulled 8-9 guys back and didn't match
    either opponent's numbers around midfield.  Hence, after any
    turnover, we didn't have a guy within 30m of the ball, and Korea
    had 2/3 of the field empty to stroll through, so they walked it up
    to our third and set up shop.  That's clearly by design, and
    certainly a reasonable idea, since it was basically the only way we
    could "counter" their speed advantage and nullify their constant
    threat of breakaways.  I don't worry about us doing that. (And
    it's certainly wiser than what Poland tried against either team.)

    What does concern me is that, even the when we are bunkering,
    we're obviously looking to break out, and we couldn't do it
    consistently.  Breaking out requires that we string a few passes
    together, and we made too many "unforced errors" to sustain any
    counterplay.  Almost the only running Korea did in the second
    half started around our 30m line, since we had to let them stroll
    up that close uncontested.

    Ultimately, our bunker worked twice, so it paid off.  But it took
    Tall Man From Planet X to do it this time.  "Next time he might
    be only human" goes without saying -- but then, "next time"
    should be in the second round.
--
Eric Wang


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