Posts tagged as:

Match Fit USA

Give Us Klinsmann…But Not Yet

Jürgen Klinsmann will be a great USMNT coach — but U.S. soccer won’t be ready to take full advantage of him until after the next World Cup cycle. There aren’t yet enough technically adept players (or players in the MLS to Euro-second-tier-league pipeline) to take advantage of Klinsmann’s abilities to mold a “technically cunning squad” — four more years would improve both those situations, and put him in a better position to gut and remold the USSF. With an eye toward forming a title contender by 2022, hire Klinsmann…but not until 2014. (Jason Kuenle/Match Fit USA)

{ 0 comments }

What if Bob Bradley Had Never Been Born?

Resolved: That Bob Bradley shaved at least two years off the timeline for the United States to become legitimate World Cup title contenders. Consider the case of Ricardo Clark…and how advanced his career would be had Bradley been applying his philosophy of youth cultivation and instigating player movement for eight years instead of four. Bradley’s legacy seems humdrum, but he actually “moved the US from being a regional power…to the cusp of an international power helping scatter players throughout the world.” (Jason Kuenle/Match Fit USA)

The World Cup and the Wrong End of the Telescope

The World Cup imposes tunnel vision on us — we unblinkingly view our respective national soccer cultures through its tiny, four-week-wide lens, hopeful and fretful, mistaking the iris for the whole, especially if the side seems to underachieve. Then the whole apparatus appears defective; and then the telescope swings to the pipeline of talent that is or isn’t in place for the next Cup, poring over careers in their pupae stage for markers of future success. The madness of the nearly blind. (Jason Davis/Match Fit USA)

Bias/Objectivity: The Death Match

The analyst pities the homer, whose mind is shut tight as Sarah Palin’s mouth during an oil spill to the slightest suggestion that her team is less than perfection. The homer loathes the analyst’s pretensions to objectivity, her refined appreciations, her formation charts and abstruse literariness. “Call it reciprocal cannibalism, a strange phenomenon where each feeds off the other, and would be left to an agonizing death by starvation of conflict if the other didn’t exist.” (Jason Davis/Match Fit USA)

Bad Beats: Developing a U.S. Soccer Culture

Yes, skills and access are important, U.S. soccer fans – but where’s your appreciation, asks Jason Davis at Match Fit USA, for “the most important factor in the country’s ability to produce world class talent — time”? Meanwhile, there’s “awkwardness to spare in U.S. soccer culture,” says Clive Longbottom-Fellow from Nutmeg Radio, and we need to move beyond this second-hand situation — starting with our supporters’ music.

Fugoalzi

Fuck youth soccer and MLS: The punk rock ethos of American street soccer is the vital underbelly of sport — playing on a rocky pitch in West Philly until you’re bleeding and its one in the morning, the Sons of Ben American soccer helping force MLS to give their city a new team, bloggers and podcasters filling the gaping hole left by MSM coverage. “The American soccer landscape is…a movement…shaped by our status as perennial underdogs.” (Kevin Hickey/Match Fit USA)

Philadelphia Story

The myth of the abusive Philadelphia fan — booing Santa Claus, booing national anthem singers — is a media-fanned distortion (the Santa thought it was a joke). Philadelphia doesn’t hate losers…it just hates people who don’t live up to their potential. So Piotr Nowak’s decisiveness with mediocre players will go over well, and his Union have a fairly long rope…for now. (Keith Hickey/Match Fit USA)

Specific Weight

Is the soccer-specific stadium the key to success for Major League Soccer? Or should poor attendance last weekend in cities with such stadia — Columbus and Dallas — give MLS pause? Match Fit USA blames owners the Hunts Sports Group for these failures and says soccer stadia root the game in American sporting culture; Sounder at Heart isn’t so sure.

A British Nanny Strangles American Soccer in its Crib

Paging JP Dellacamera: The head start England had in soccer — and the inferiority complex of Americans concerning anything English — is still retarding the development of an American soccer culture; we in the United States have probably “passed to point of no return on becoming hopelessly conditioned to English football over American soccer.” (Jason Davis/Match Fit USA)