Rostermageddon, Luca Q&A, Hoppe's annoying ceiling
Plus Cabin Fever after so long without a USMNT match.
Welcome to the Scuffed Newsletter, a weekly email guide to the U.S. men's national soccer team. Sign up free to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week we talk about fan apprehension over the soon-to-be-released roster, Hoppe’s ceiling as an annoying player, get a little QA from Luca de la Torre, and more.
Rostermageddon
As of Friday morning we don’t have a roster for the upcoming World Cup qualifiers, but we do have a growing sense of dread.
Michele Giannone, the TUDN reporter who’s close to the USMNT camp, said in his podcast he wouldn’t be surprised if nearly half of the roster is MLS-based players. There’s also a rumor that Djordje Mihailovic is, once again, the toast of the town in January training exercises. (He was fêted relentlessly by Paul Tenorio during Camp Cupcake 2019, before disappearing from the picture for three years.)
You don’t have to be a Certified Eurosnob to start to feel uneasy about this. The MLS contingent has mostly not played a competitive soccer game for two months, as Greg Velasquez explained so thoroughly in our roster preview episode, and at least in the midfield, specifically when it comes to the dual No. 8s, the MLS contingent has repeatedly come up short for the national team.
Sebastian Lletget has been on a downward trajectory since last spring, reaching his nadir in the pathetic 1-0 loss in Panama City. Kellyn Acosta dropped a steamer in that game as well. Cristian Roldan has looked overwhelmed in limited minutes in the midfield, outside of a decent performance last month in a friendly against an out-of-window Bosnia side. Mihailovic had a good season in Montreal, it must be said, but was one of several poor performers in the Olympic Qualifying tournament and has never convinced for the national team. We don’t KNOW that Berhalter is going to start some of these guys in one of the three upcoming matches, but we can’t rule it out. We do know that Berhalter has given hundreds of minutes of playing time to these players (plus Wil Trapp and Jackson Yueill) based in some part on their presence in January camp.
This preference for the close-at-hand MLS player over the fringe European-based player can be galling — again, specifically in the midfield. Luca de la Torre, a player who seems to fit as a savvy between-the-lines operator who can move the ball from the defensive half to the final third, has gotten only 13 minutes of playing time under Berhalter since the start of the Nations League semifinals in June. There’s little reason to think Alex Mendez, a player who’s come on strong in Portugal in the past two months, will get a call-up anytime soon.
We need new blood behind Weston McKennie and Yunus Musah. We all know it. Even Gianluca Busio, a player with 17 Serie A starts this season, has failed to convince when he’s gotten chances, specifically against Jamaica in Kingston. Us sickos who are scouring the footage for signs of improvement from players like LDLT and Mendez, and then crowing about it when we see it, end up frustrated at the possibility that Berhalter is so busy choreographing the understudies in Phoenix that he’s not paying the same level of attention. It gives me no pleasure to say that this could cost us. We need 7 points, at least, in this window, and we need Panama to collapse. If we get fewer than 6 points in this window we could have a very, very stressful couple of months ahead. And if that happens on the back of more mediocre performances from MLS retreads, we’ll all move a little closer to the crazy end of the fandom spectrum.
We do have some good news. After missing every match since Dec. 1, Tim Weah was suddenly back on the field for Lille on Wednesday. The former Paul Arriola backup should be called up and available for the upcoming games, at minimum, off the bench.
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Speaking of Luca de la Torre, I thought my interview with him on Monday was quite good. He’s a smart guy who obviously loves the game. Here is an excerpt:
Belz: Frank Wormuth was the German federation’s head of coaching courses for a decade. What's it like working under him?
Luca: It’s been really good for me. The main thing is the level of intensity that he demands from players, where when I got here, I knew I had to raise that part of my game, and also just, defensive discipline, as well. If you don’t have that, he’s just not going to play you, so that really made me improve that area of my game to a point now where I feel like I’m almost a completely different player than I was two or three years ago.
How do you do that? Is it just a matter of willpower and awareness?
You have to be willing to work hard and sacrifice, which I think I always have been as a player. And then you just have to learn how to defend, your role in defending in the team, which was kind of the part that took a little bit longer, especially with the position change for me.
When did Wormuth decide to move you into the midfield?
I remember the second day I got there, they signed me as kind of a wide player, and he told me that he sees me as a No. 8, not as a winger. The second day. For me, I really agreed with that. I felt like I was kind of pushed out wide at Fulham because I was a little bit smaller and quicker and technical, and in England they kind of like big midfielders that win a lot of headers. So I played wide at Heracles for the first half of the season, and then in January 2021 I switched to more of a No. 8 role, and that’s when my performances really started improving.
You can listen to the whole interview here. I recommend it. By the time you see this newsletter again, we’ll have already played El Salvador. Let’s go.
- Belz
Mailbag
I asked twitter what they consider the most important USMNT question:
What is Matthew Hoppe’s ceiling on annoyance? Will he get to Roy Keane and Eric Cantona levels or is he more of a Mario Balotelli/Cuauhtémoc Blanco level? -@garrickroegner
His ceiling is far higher than all of them. Those players are annoying, but annoying is not their primary essence. I’d argue they each had/have other things about them that were more important. Whereas annoying is Matthew Hoppe’s primary essence, and so the only thing that could possibly prevent him from passing those players would be his not playing long enough at a high enough level. Time will tell, but I am guardedly optimistic.
Is there an MLS quota? -@realbryhrndz
Yes.
What credit cards do they use for booking flights and hotels? Do they have multiple cards or all-in on one? -@FCAdverts
I have a real answer to this. I was complaining a while back about wanting to know more about how travel logistics for the team work, and someone credible seeming DM’d me to tell me they are all handled by a single vendor. It’s some company – a sports travel agency, I don’t know which – that does all the figuring out of the schedules and buying the tickets for all the player’s flights. So I suspect the Federation does not use their own card to buy the flights, but instead just pays the travel agency by wire in big chunks. I’d just think it’d be a part of travel agencies business that they’d want to accrue the points and so would use their own cards. I should be clear I am not a business person. If anyone knows more about travel logistics please get in touch. I think there should be a big long story about how getting all those players from all over the place together works. Seems like a serious undertaking. Can you imagine, for instance, from a continent away, having to get Sergino Dest to the airport at an appointed time?
Why does Berhalter continue to select MLS players that are either past their primes, never were the answer, or both? -@joshua_lewno
To meet the quota.
Which USMNT player would be most likely to own lizards and/or snakes? Do any exude snake guy energy? -@seamummies
Matthew Hoppe.
We’ll get to the rest of the most important questions next week. If you have any more please leave them in the comments.
- Watke
Discord Download/Midweek Minutes
The period between the close of Camp Candy Cane and today’s World Cup Qualifying roster drop was a fallow one for soccer content. The combination of two long months without competitive USMNT soccer and extended winter breaks in non-English European leagues provided Scuffians with precious little football to talk about. And we’ll be honest, there were more than a few occasions when channels in our Discord started to feel a bit too much like watching the Torrance family minding The Overlook Hotel.
So today we all thank The Maker for the return of USMNT action and European football getting back into full swing…and we look back on what we call Scuffed Discord’s Cabin Fever moments.
We swapped swatches for office painting. They say geniuses prefer the color green, and sure enough green was a popular office color for Scuffians:
Christian Pulisic and Nick Taitague’s wholesome and physically affirming bromance got a lot of the boys wishing we had bros in our life who see the cake we’re baking and aren’t afraid to praise it.
We talked urbanism. We talked urbanism until we got sick of it and then we talked about that some more.
The historian Robert Conquest famously said that “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” Similarly, on Discord it seems that every server, no matter its primary subject matter, sooner or later becomes a D&D fan space.
And when it all becomes just too much and one needs to restore their grip on humanity, there is always the #scute channel where paying Scuffians can follow the adventures of @Jabu’s new puppy.
@Jordan reading the tea leaves on Taylor Twellman’s unconvincing walk-back of his criticisms of playing soccer in St Paul … in January. Come to the scuffed Discord for the exhaustive list of stadiums in the same travel vicinity that aren’t likely to turn hamstrings into icicles;
Venezia are reported to have over ten positive covid cases in the squad right now, prompting the “CDC says” meme to enter the discord;
Belz followed up on his Monday Review assessment of Alex Mendez, providing the discord with a string of clips highlighting some really excellent two-way play against champions-league level Porto. Is Gregg watching? Trent Crimm, Independent, is less than confident;
Paul Arriola is looking more and more likely to end up at FC Dallas. Some may wonder how that will affect Paul or the USMNT, but a true scuffian asks the right questions. How does this affect Jesus & Paxton?
Disney World AND USA vs. Panama? It was almost too much for this resident Florida Man when US Soccer announced Orlando as the location for the potentially all-important qualification fixture on March 27th;
- Coach Beard, MJM-borne69 (Matt)
Weekend Playbill
It just keeps getting longer.
- Velasquez
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