Tommy Heinemann Surgery

Adam Jardy, Columbus Dispatch, reported today that Tommy Heinemann had arthroscopic surgery on his knee last week. Positive sign is that he will not need further surgery (according to Coach Warzycha).

Arthroscopic surgery isn't a serious procedure but for a soccer player it can take a bit longer to recover, I would imagine. Maybe expect 4-6 weeks out? Time will tell.

Anybody who happens to read along with Helltown knows that Tommy is a favored player. Hope he gets back out there soon.

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Adam Jardy's "Covering the Crew" blog for the Columbus Dispatch. Link.

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UPDATE 4-13-12: Reported that Tommy has a fracture in his knee and will be out for the year. Also reported that William Hesmer will be out for 6 months with a similar fracture in his hip. Frustrating news. Hope to see both of them back and healthy.

Scouting, Appropriately

Back in December I decided to take a look at a handful of players currently plying their trade in the United Soccer League Pro division. The reason being; I am frustrated with the lack of attention Major League Soccer teams pay to existing professional league soccer in this country.

The theory I'm employing is to utilize the existing footballing infrastructure that's already in place, in our very own country. It's surprising how hard that is for some to comprehend.

This post is the 2nd follow up to a group of talented players I singled out (1st post, Link). I'm still frustrated with how MLS sides largely ignore the USL and NASL but some of the guys I identified four months ago have moved "up". Others, still available for any MLS club looking to improve!

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01 : Luke Mulholland, 23 ATT MID (England)
Starting and playing with NASL side, Tampa Bay Rowdies. Hoping the NASL can continue to settle. It is very important to the soccer well being of this country. I expect Mulholland to have a great year and move to MLS.

02 : Jhonny Arteaga, 25 F (Colombia)
In the starting 18 with the NY Red Bulls now! Woohoo! Columbus had a shot at him, tried him out even. Playing behind a couple heavyweights in Henry and Cooper but I expect him to get his chance.

03 : Matthew Delicâte, 29 F (Wales)
Still with Richmond Kickers. Like a true Welshman, never stopped playing all winter. Was one of the leading scorers on his indoor soccer team during that time. I expect good things from the Kickers again this year. Crew. Sign him already.

04 : Jorge Ivan Becerra, 27 D (Mexico)
Having a hard time finding Iván Becerra right now. Last seen with Wilmington Hammerheads.

05 : Henry Kalungi, 24 D (Uganda)
Still playing for the a strong 2012 Richmond Kickers side. Also, played all winter in Uganda.

06 : Rob Valentino, 26 D (USA)
Still with USL Pro Orlando City. We'll see how well that team does this year. They are making lots of noise about getting into MLS. From what I saw of Orlando a few weeks ago? Not a great move for the league.

07 : Paul Nicholson, 25 CDM, (England)
Resigned with Wilmington Hammerheads. He is one of those players that has you scratching your head as to why MLS teams even bother with drafting college kids. Sign this guy instead.

08 : Sainey Touray, 21 (Gambia)
With Harrisburg City. Just fractured his wrist, but hopes to get back to action soon.

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One of the Other guys from my original post... Jose Angulo, 23. He signed with NY Red Bulls. Good stuff!!

Crew Game 4, Bad Loss (NY)

NY Red Bull 4 - Crew 1. Only five times since 1996 has the Columbus Crew lost by 3 or more goals at home. Most recently it was in 2010... 2005 saw a pair. Finally, go back 16 years to 1996 to get another -3 game at home. If the loss yesterday felt a little different than other losses, that's why.

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THE GAME:

New York had no problems working the ball up front. They were interested in one thing yesterday; scoring. They got what they wanted. NY put goals in freely yesterday and the middle of the pitch was to blame. Urso and Mirosevic, yes. But it also falls on Renteria and Vargas for not helping disrupt some of the buildup.

All the preparations going into this game about NY being on a scoring binge. Who do the Crew forwards think they play for? No team in MLS can dangle two forwards up top like that. Is it Warzycha? What gives?

NY had little if any interest in playing wide outside of Dane Richards. Anor and Gaven didn't have much to work with. Urso, Gehrig and Francis were turned inside out. Miranda looked slow and off on his passes and Mirosevic was getting outplayed. It was a mess.

2ND HALF

The game settled into a low intensity training session for the first 15 minutes of the 2nd. New York seemed perfectly content with a 3-0 win. Around the hour mark Warzycha subbed in Dilly Duka and Ethan Finlay and some fresh legged energy returned to the game but nothing came of it.

The Crew's lone goal came in the last couple minutes from Chad Marshall's head.

Thierry Henry, of course, responded within the next 2 minutes. His second of the game and 4th NY goal scored directly at Gruenebaum's hanging towel.

THE END, NOTES

• Gruenebaum got rattled easily. His handball out of the box was a manifestation of that. He looked very much the longtime backup yesterday.

• The towel he hangs in the net should get MVP. Not sure why Columbus goes with black netting but putting a white towel up there only creates a target. Pet peeves.

• Four games in and only one goal from Vargas and Renteria. Though, I don't think it is entirely on them as Crew are scoring at same rate as preseason (regardless of who was up top). The club seem's hell bent on making the so called "Three Headed Monster" of Vargas, Renteria and Mirosevic work - but so far, not working.

• More on scoring: The constant in pre-season and four games into the regular season has been Mirosevic. Asking him to go box to box in the diamond MF might not be his thing. Especially if Urso is only going to be the 5th defender and not a MF presence.

• Last note on scoring, Toronto, Montreal and NY are tops in the league in allowing goals. 2 wins good. Low goal count, warning sign.

• Thierry Henry is a good player.

• Team needs players like Heinemann and Hesmer after a soulless loss like this. Heinemann especially. Looks like the team will need more options up top.

• Crew face the worst scoring team in MLS next weekend in Philly. Good timing after a three goal loss, fur sur.

Crew Game 4 Program, NYRB

8 Correct
2 Mulligans (early Red Cards, man! cut me a break)
2 Wrong (flat wrong)

2 Correct this year. Rapids and TFC
1 mulligan (Montreal!! grrr)

Tchani Exposing Crew Limitations

The game against NY this weekend is a reminder of the mid-season player transaction Columbus made in 2011; Toronto FC's Tony Tchani for Crew players Andy Iro and Leandre Griffit.

As things stand, this trade was a waste of valuable time and resources for both teams.

For TFC: Iro and Griffit aren't only out of Major League Soccer, they are out of the professional game all together. For Columbus? Well, let's look at that.

Tony Tchani was a talent that was identified early in his life. He became a Generation Adidas player and was drafted into the league as a 2nd overall pick in 2010 by the NY Red Bulls. While with NY he saw time in a significant number of games. 2011... couple games into the season saw a desperately rebuilding TFC pick Tchani away from desperately sinking NY. Tchani, at that time, was seemingly just along for the ride on the DeRosario roller coaster trade.

On April 23th of last year, Tchani scores his first career MLS goal for TFC. Against who? The Crew (how do you do). He also gets his first Red Card seconds later for an embarrassing kit waving celebration with fans.

Columbus signs him a few weeks later.

After the signing with Columbus he spends half the year recovering from an inherited knee injury that the Crew either overlooked or accepted, Tchani inexplicably makes his first Crew club start in the 2012 playoff game against Colorado. Predictably, the Crew lose.

Enter the off-season: Crew brain trust decides that asking Tchani to become Team Captain is a smart idea.

Yes. That happened. Two time MLS Defensive Player of the Year on your team in Marshall, MLS Cup Goal Keeping Winner - Hesmer, and ever steady Eddie Gaven on the team - and one start, twice traded in one year Tchani is asked to lead the team.

It wasn't surprising that Tchani slumped away from the mere thought of being team captain. What was surprising was how far he fled from the responsibility. Also surprising was that the conversation became public. In effect, it left Coach Warzycha standing there with egg on his face.

On a subtle level, this Tchani / Captain event is one of the strangest misfires I've seen in professional sports.

Around that same time Tchani developed a mystery illness the night before traveling with Generation Adidas and their tour of Holland.

Tchani's development as a player has been a downward spiral. He now plays, essentially, as a six figure Reserve Team Crew player whose league mandated salary eclipses all the other Crew Reserve players, by six figures.

The Crew, as a franchise of Major League Soccer, have shown a tendency to choose players like Tchani. Players that they had simply seen have a good couple games against them (recent example: Olman Vargas).

Columbus is a club that's rooted. Front Office and Coaches have been with the team nearly since the beginning. Even TV and radio play callers have been around since 1996. It is important to have that kind of consistency so it isn't surprising that the Crew's recent player finds are through sons, relatives (Warzycha, Iribarren, Gehrig) or asking existing team players to make recommendations (Miranda for Mirosevic, Renteria for Anor, Indiana for everything).

Arguments can be made for bringing in friends and player recommendations (and have been made, Soccernomics Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski) but putting that together with the Crew plucking away players that caught their eye playing their own team tells me is that the Crew have little, if any, functioning scouting network. Relying on recommendations as over 50% of your new signings is not sustainable. It's no wonder recent Crew castoffs are not just sent packing from Columbus, but professional soccer in general (also speaks to the real need for team affiliations at lower levels. Imagine baseball without the minor leagues).

Young players. Ben Sippola, Kevin Burns, Andy Adlard, Andy Iro, Leandre Griffit, Alex Riggs. All 2011 Crew players, none of them playing soccer professionally. Santiago Prim is barely hanging on with only 16 minutes of pro soccer this year.

Crew still make the playoffs. Resource wasting trades and the final bus stop, et al is probably more a testament to MLS's insistence on playing puppet master. Something for another day, perhaps. Not sure how to start it but here's how it will finish...

Open aperture. Wide shot... Hold that. Show a Sea World whose better days are clearly behind it and an evacuated / bankrupt Orlando.

Ghost text "MLS Expansion City?" over top of "For Lease" signs on 20 story hotels. Pan down to $100 million dollars in cash in front of Disney World.

Fade to black. Add text "NO COMPROMISES FOR COMPETITION, MONEY TALKS" in IMPACT font. Queue AC/DC's Money Talks.

Credits. Legal.

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Found object from the Internets. "John" from Ohio puts this whole thing really well, the actual day of the Tchani trade to Columbus. The lone comment under a Goal.com column:

"The crew management only picks players that scored on them. Tchani sucked that's why the other teams got rid of him and Columbus loves to take leftovers. They got rid off Griffit for that. The only reason Columbus picked him is that they think he is a horse that will run and never stop. Balchan is the same kind of player like Tchani but both don't known how to play real soccer. Balchan now is hurt because he ran like a maniac on the field. This is american futbol not creative soccer."

He is right. Balchan out for the year. Tchani is a misfire, to this point. Even O'Rourke isn't immune in playing, what has become, an impossible CDM Crew spot.

Let's hope Urso doesn't kill himself out there.

The Burning Red Bull

Remarkably, Columbus Crew and NY Red Bulls have 2 common opponents in just the first 4 weeks of the season.

Colorado and Montreal.

Below are a few tid-bits about how NY and Columbus fared against them:





Win Loss
2-0: NY (Home, Home)
1-1: Crew (Home, Away)

Goals For
9: NY
2: Crew

Goals Against
3: NY
2: Crew

I guess what we are looking at here is a classic 9.0 Sporting Earthquake for Real Fire to only 1.886733 Glenlivet sipping that's older than Major League's FC(s) dynamo galaxy!

"But I must go on, for it is never finished. Even when I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming as I move and speak and eat my dinner. I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me now." - Lady Amalthea

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Illustration credit Jenny Robbins.

MLS Round 4's Conditional Formatting

UPDATED April 5th to include Sounder at Heart, Oshan and Jeff Sagarin. Links at bottom.The power ranking above takes the player rating of each player and averages them up by position and groups by team. The 1-19 rating is the rank by field assignment as classified by STATS, Inc. I think it works well. At the very least, it's Christmass'y.

OBSERVATIONS:

• Variance between positional rank tells me Vancouver and New England are unpredictable right now. NY and Houston not far behind them in crazy.

• MLS more than any other domestic pro sport, doesn't have need for power rankings. Un-balanced schedule this year but everybody still plays everyone at least once. Just use the table and throw in a inflated or sour pick on a popular team like Portland, LA or Seattle. They'll call you an analyst. Advance yourself in the name of helicopter entertainment over actual competition and honest evaluation through proven tools (never mind that USMNT city burning behind you, wait... Did you say burning? We'll sell commercials!). Go with it! GO! $$$$

• Teams gamin' my system: Portland and Chivas USA. Ranked 3 places higher on my POWER RANK than the true table.

• Teams undervalued by my thingy: DC United, New England and Colorado. I've got them 2 or 3 places lower than league table.

• Locked in to spots (My power ranking, positional rank and league table rank = match closely), Best to Worst:

1. Sporting KC
2. San Jose Quakes
7. Columbus Crew
11. Chicago Fire
17. Philadelphia Union
19. Impact Montreal

If your team isn't on that list then the maths are telling me that you've got plenty of table movement in your future (up or down).

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UPDATED April 5th: Other rankings are sprouting up for Round 4.

• WV Hooligan. Crew 13th, United 14th. Link

• Pro Soccer Talk. Crew 13th, United 10th. Link

• MLSsoccer.com, Crew 10th, United 13th. Link

• OregonLive.com, Crew 10th, United 13th. Link

• Sounder at Heart. Crew 15, United 12. Link.

• SB Nation / Jeremiah Oshan. Crowd = Good. Crew 13, United 14. Link. Beastie Boys.

• Jeff Sagarin / USA Today. Good all round. Crew 9, United 12. Link.

DC United Picture

Jailteeth. AKA Smitty. Took this pic at RFK last Friday. United 4 - bad guys 1. Hope it alright I post it. Major League Soccer is better when DC United is playing well.

Crew Game 3 Recap (Win)

1. Keep Starting Bernardo Anor

2. Eric Gehrig is Good at Soccer

3. Fox Sports Ohio Disappoints

Columbus traveled up the road to visit Toronto FC for MLS Round 4 (game 3 for Crew snd TFC) and earned a 1-0 win. Bernardo Anor provided the game's lone goal.

This was the only game on at 2 PM Saturday afternoon so any neutral viewers coming into it expecting any semblance of fireworks probably left disappointed. Crew matches at BMO field tend to be low scoring, oft sluggish affairs and this one wasn't much different. 7 total meetings, 13 goals between the two at BMO. 2 Crew wins, 5 draws. 2007 was the other Crew win.

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1. Bernardo Anor's starting record is now a team best of 5 W, 1 D, 2 L going back to the start of last year (starters >5 games).

Anor isn't known as an overtly hard worker or a bruiser or an emotional player. Nor does he carry an 'aw shucks' shoulder slump and he isn't from the mid-west. He wasn't splash signing. In fact, he's practically devoid of all the qualities the Crew faithful usually gravitate towards.

Yesterday he was matched up against an above average MLS player in Richard Eckersley. Most of the game on that left side those two battled it out. It wasn't always pretty but Anor outplayed him.

Anor's touch sometimes lets him down but he knows where to be. He knows how to get the ball into dangerous areas. He knows how to pull that RB out when he has to and forces him to stay home when he should be advancing on the attack. Most importantly: Anor know's how to Win at the MLS level. A characteristic that his counterpart Dilly Duka (4 W, 4 D, 10 L) decidedly does not know how to do.

Watch the Vargas goal from last week closely. Anor shields (obliterates) the Montreal defender allowing Vargas space to swoop in. This is not something Duka has ever shown the willingness to do to this point of his career in Columbus.

2. Eric Gehrig had the best game of his professional career. Involved a lot and yesterday. His confidence was through the roof. He is one of those guys that just keeps improving as time passes.

With that performance, Gehrig has earned more starting chances. O'Rourke, to me, should stay in the CDM spot, Urso's current home. With Julius James still seemingly a ways out I think the CB tandem of Marshall and Gehrig is one we may become familiar with this year.

3. Fox Sports Ohio didn't travel their announcing team to Toronto. My suspicions arose when the green screen cutout was worse than normal at the start and then confirmed at half when they showed the game callers at the all too familiar FS OHIO game desk.

I don't know where that desk is located exactly (near Cleveland I think) but it is a very familiar setting for the Cavs and Blue Jackets fans. It's disappointing that the play callers didn't travel.

Don't think the Dispatch beat writer traveled either.

If that's the case than we had remote coverage on a televised game which was covered in the paper by a beat writer watching that remote coverage. If this is the case going forward than FS Ohio should just broadcast the 2008 games over again.

On the announcing: Dwight Burgess.

It could have been the fact they weren't at the game but he read the game poorly. He also has a hard time not talking yesterday.

Knowingly or not Duncan Oughton often has to provide somesort of explanation to counter a Burgess "negative pass" (back pass, I'm assuming) comment or misguided [player x] "...having a horrible game" in a grating/berating coach sort of way.

Mr. Burgess has been with the Crew for a long time. He is part of that family. He is a serviceable play caller but listening to him is too often like traveling back in time to American Soccer 1998.

Let the game do the talking.

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THE END, NOTES

• More important 3 points earned from a team the Crew can beat. The summer portion of the schedule will be brutal for the Crew this year.

• Francis and Miranda stayed home for most of this match, good coaching, that.

• Can't argue with two consecutive shut outs but you can argue with only 2 goals during run of play in 3 games. Similar rate as last year and 2012 preseason and not good enough to raise the team to higher levels. Still wanting more team play from Renteria. Both he and Vargas had quiet games but too much holding play is still stopping with Emilio.

• Urso is playing his role well enough. It does seem as if the game is being played around him at times. Mirosevic is going box to box and still nabbing balls that Urso should be taking care of.

• After lots of turnover over that last 1.5 years and many injuries, nice to see similar 18 dressing for two weeks in a row (Gehrig only change over last week). It's the little things.

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Further analysis on Bernardo Anor's contributions to the Crew. Link.