Ok that was pretty sketchy by Coundoul.

You are right mostly, but we'll see about the liability part... he's made several awful mistakes that he was lucky to not get punished on.

Riley having a shocker

Dane Richards is so fast, but just so bad. he wasted his one awesome goal in a preseason game.

OK Coundoul ty for making my hate look LOL.

omg **** you dane richards

ty for giving my hate some reason coundoul


he's living dangerously, and he's too old to consistently make those kind of mistakes.

36k sounds pretty quieeeeeeeeet.

w0000t 2 and 0.

Ream and Lindpere continue to impress. Petke and UBI played well too.

wow nyrb looked really good, minus coundoul obv

First road win for NYRB since May 08. Seattle is a pretty impressive place to get that win.

What Seattle needs: Balls. You could probably count on 1 hand the number of balls in the air that their midfield or forwards won. Ideally they'd get a nice physical forward who can also let Ljunberg drop back into the midfield. The Seattle attack has some great touch, passing, speed and finishing, but they are, for lack of a better word, soft. Someone needs to body someone up to hold the ball, win a long ball, overpower a defender, do something.

Also, Seattle needs Riley to stop trying to connect on long balls. Christ, that was painful.

What NY needs: Wing play. They have two strong and physical forwards (hey look at that Seattle!), they've got the center midfield to control a game and make the passes on the ground, but there's no one to send in service from the outside. Richards is obv dangerous with his speed but he hasn't gotten any better despite the promise and Ubiparipovic is probably +0.1 VORP at best. If van den Bergh does go back there, which I can't figure out why he wouldn't, it'll be a HUGE get for a team that already looks much better.

Huge start to the season for NYRB. Obv would have snap accepted a point before a ball was kicked. Not only is it a road win, it came in one of the hardest places to play in MLS against a damn good team. Good stuff.

you forgot a new GK.... god this is really irrational.

You know what? He didn't take his own goal kicks for awhile... that also really bothers me. lol i can't stop.

We failed I am way too tired to talk about the game, will do tomorrow, but just wanted to say well done the RB team looks much improved, Lindpere was quite impressive. Also have some interesting comments on things that happenend in the stands. Good night everyone and happy easter!

bump for as many wins as we had through August last year.

Bouna's Weakness

Frankly, it's just not his kicks that are bad, his footwork and positioning is awful. He can make up for with his athleticism some... he's also gotten pretty lucky.

re: VORP

There isn't a formula to calculate VORP for soccer ... is there?

"I think our fans learned a lot from that game"

"Very important for US soccer and the re-emergence of Columbus Crew is the fact that somebody else came into their house and in many ways, they took it over."

Hahahaha epic

SBI had a great article about Seattle's needs today. Now, I assume that anyone who cares enough to read a thread about MLS on a poker board also reads Ives but in case not here's a link.

http://www.soccerbyives.net/soccer_b...-sounders.html

Also, for people who follow one team especially closely, what sites do you read? I'd love to get a list of blogs for each team if that's possible.

TFC

The 24th Minute
The Footy Blog
some canadian guys writing about soccer (funny)

Did you miss my VORP question?

Yeah, sorry.

I have never seen anything even approaching VORP style rating for soccer players. I know that JaredL was building a formula about team strength and I think he and a couple others (me included) had thrown around ideas about how to create something like that but I don't know of anything that ever came of it.

Soccer is such a dynamic sport where players are reliant on their teammates that I'd be hesitant to even know where to start. There are some obvious metrics that seem to make sense like strike rate, passing accuracy, etc and then various levels of "well how important is this and how much is it position/team/strategy/formation dependent?" like tackles made, crossing accuracy, foul ratio (suffered:committed, which I also think is a great indicator of forward prowess), to even stuff like distance covered, time on the ball, and directional passing percentages (how does a center mid who is 65% forward, 35% square, 10% back compare to one who is 50/20/30 if the have similar accuracies, etc).

So yeah, it's a big undertaking and that intimidates me enough (plus a lot of that data seems hard to find freely) that I haven't taken a stab at it like I have Elo ratings, even if those are also flawed.

LMAO

TFC is turning into a joke. MO must go and the dealing with FirstWave Sports are pretty damm shady.

http://blogs.thescore.com/footyblog/...s-a-bad-taste/


Also, Kristian Jack is a badass. I think the guy started out as a beat reporter in the UK. He's a guy who does TV stuff just for the EPL but somehow he always scoops the dirt that happens at TFC before anyone in print media who covers the team daily does.

Yea I agree with all of that ...

I think the one way something like that would be possible is with access to ProZone stats and great programming(?) skills ...