Friendly: Japan vs Canada - Friday, October 13th - 6:35am Eastern / 3:35am Pacific - Niigata, Japan

[costarg]

2 hours ago, Bigandy said:

Are you sure? How many chances did we create? Not many. 

How did they score their goals? Through forcing mistakes.... not from breaking us down.  Japan's entire gameplay is about forcing dangerous turnovers and countering.  

I think the spirit of your post is that our issue is our defence and not our attack. Which theoretically is correct based on the quality of our players. However, our attack gets blunted pretty easily against a low block. Our attack is phenomenal with counter attacking speed but we lack creativity. On the flip side, our defense struggles alot against counter attacks but performs arguably to expectations when we defend in a lower block (which is a lower expectation based on the lack of defensive quality). 

I love this take, it's a good point.  I feel it's a lot of both really.

Lots of teams are successful with no creativity and pure opportunistic counter-attacking.  I think it suits our squad better, and we'll probably do better with that kind of system.  We've shown we can keep possession vs some better teams, but even then most goals were coming off a quick break.

[gigi riva]

52 minutes ago, costarg said:

I love this take, it's a good point.  I feel it's a lot of both really.

Lots of teams are successful with no creativity and pure opportunistic counter-attacking.  I think it suits our squad better, and we'll probably do better with that kind of system.  We've shown we can keep possession vs some better teams, but even then most goals were coming off a quick break.

Morrocco was a great example of that most of the goals came from a quick break 

[BearcatSA]

On 10/15/2023 at 5:40 PM, costarg said:

I love this take, it's a good point.  I feel it's a lot of both really.

Lots of teams are successful with no creativity and pure opportunistic counter-attacking.  I think it suits our squad better, and we'll probably do better with that kind of system.  We've shown we can keep possession vs some better teams, but even then most goals were coming off a quick break.

You have to know when to press on the fast break but also to know when it's not on so that you cycle through some possession to take the heat off and reset.  Sometimes when you try to force a fast break, you end up losing possession in poor areas and put the heat on back yourself again.  The first goal seemed like that.