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The Official Houston Dynamo / MLS Thread

Discussion in 'Other Sports' started by Beavis Stiffler, Jan 10, 2015.

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ferrari77 Contributing Member

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rhino17 said: ↑

Orlando City did the smart thing and hired Jason Kreis immediately. Too bad this organization doesn't put much thought into any kind of decision
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They could have stuck with Wade as the interim coach but didn't need to officially give him the post for the rest of the season until interviewing and possibly getting Kreis...unless they tried to talk to Kreis and he didn't want any part of the Dynamo?

Does anyone know if any of the Dynamo beat writers/MLS journo's in the know have discussed whether the Dynamo considered and talked to Kreis? If they did and Kreis rejected them then I can deal with that but if they never reached out to Kreis then that's no bueno.

#521 ferrari77, Jul 20, 2016

leroy Contributing Member

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Some news...

Dynamo acquire Eric Alexander from Montreal

chron said:

The Dynamo have made their first addition of the summer transfer window.

Houston on Friday acquired midfielder Eric Alexander from the Montreal Impact in exchange for general and targeted allocation money.

Alexander, 28, has made 178 career MLS appearances since 2010. He helped the New York Red Bulls win the 2013 Supporters' Shield, appearing in all 34 regular season games. He has two caps with the United States National Team - one in 2011 and another in 2014.

From October 2012 to June 2015 he appeared in 80 consecutive regular season games and started all five MLS playoff games for the Red Bulls in 2014. Alexander scored his only playoff goal against the Dynamo in 2013.
Montreal acquired Alexander in a trade with the Red Bulls before the 2015 season. He has played in 32 games the last two seasons, including 12 this year. All of this year's appearances have been starts.
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and apparently there's been overseas interest in Giles Barnes...

Barnes receiving interest from abroad

It is unclear which teams abroad are interested in Barnes but he is a quality player that could play anywhere in the world. The Houston Dynamo may also be interested in acquiring a nice transfer fee for the forward who has made numerous contributions to the team. A transfer away from MLS, could bring money to the Dynamo to help rebuild their squad going forward for the future.
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It appears the Dynamo aren't interested in moving Barnes, though. This season is toast and they need a complete rebuild. If they get an acceptable offer, I see no reason why they shouldn't move him.

#522 leroy, Jul 22, 2016
Kam Contributing Member

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Dynamo needs to build within, as in improve their academy. Is the goal keeper the only good academy player? He was an academy player, right?

#523 Kam, Jul 22, 2016
ferrari77 Contributing Member

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Kam said: ↑

Dynamo needs to build within, as in improve their academy. Is the goal keeper the only good academy player? He was an academy player, right?
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The academy is just alright I guess. It could be better but in terms of talent, we won't know until they have a coach like Oscar Pareja in Dallas, that is willing to give the youth a chance to prove whether they're up to the task.
Ibeagha, Bradley Bourgeois (recently releseased) and Christian Lucatero are all former Academy players.

I think all three will regret signing with the Dynamo prior to this season .

#524 ferrari77, Jul 24, 2016
ferrari77 Contributing Member

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SwoLy-D said: ↑

Anyone heard Andres Guardado might be considering a move to the MLS?

R.I.P. his career, a'la Giovanni Dos Santos.
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This does not compute for me. Mexico don't seem to be averse to selecting players that choose to ply their trade in MLS. Gio has been called up to the Mexican team since he signed with the LAG, he just chose not to accept, for whatever reason. His MLS career could be better, he hasn't been Giovinco but he hasn't been Pirlo either.

#525 ferrari77, Jul 24, 2016
SwoLy-D Contributing Member

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Gio's skill and speed have diminished.

#526 SwoLy-D, Jul 26, 2016
rhino17 Member

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Giles traded to Whitecaps

#527 rhino17, Jul 30, 2016

REEKO_HTOWN I'm Rich Biiiiaaatch!

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This team is just unwatchable now. Hope they come back strong in 2-3 years.

#528 REEKO_HTOWN, Jul 31, 2016
leroy Contributing Member

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REEKO_HTOWN said: ↑

This team is just unwatchable now. Hope they come back strong in 2-3 years.
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They have been since Dominic left. At least under him, you knew they had heart and always had a chance to win. They lost that when he left. Coyle was a terrible choice and Barrett is only making things worse.

I'm ok with this trade, though I think the return is a bit light. Next move needs to be the trade or outright release of Bruin.

There isn't a position of strength anywhere on the field right now. They could release the entire roster and coaching staff and I wouldn't shed a tear. Every position needs to be upgraded, all the way into the front office. It's going to be a long rebuild as they are currently at the same spot the Astros were in when Drayton decided to sell. No talent and aging roster with terrible coaching and little to nothing coming up from the youth ranks. It's a total rebuild that needs to be done. Is there a soccer version of Jeff Luhnow anywhere?

#529 leroy, Jul 31, 2016
rhino17 Member

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leroy said: ↑

There isn't a position of strength anywhere on the field right now. They could release the entire roster and coaching staff and I wouldn't shed a tear.
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Exactly how I feel, this team is BAD top to bottom. Beasley is the only guy on the team that is even a regular MLS starter and maybe Boniek as a utility player. Maybe Cubo too but who the hell knows, he literally never plays, which I still just don't get.

Dump everything, especially coaching staff

#530 rhino17, Jul 31, 2016
daywalker02 Member

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What does it take to acquire star players?

#531 daywalker02, Aug 1, 2016
leroy Contributing Member

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daywalker02 said: ↑

What does it take to acquire star players?
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Starts with a willingness to go after them. Outside of Beasley and Torres, the Dynamo have never been in the conversation about any of the marquee names that have come over. It seems as if they aren't even aware there's interest in a player wanting to come to the MLS.

A big part of it was AEG's ownership in the team. They clearly favored LA and appeared to have no interest in growing the Dynamo brand outside of downtown Houston. The thought was that dedicated ownership would change things but there has been absolutely no proof that's going to be the case. They need to make major changes in this off season or they're going to see attendance continue to decline dramatically. Houston is a bandwagon kind of town (with the exception of the Texans). If you aren't winning, people aren't coming.

I believe that they need to wipe the entire slate clean...from the top down. Cannetti has done a lot of good things for this club but it's been a long time since any move has paid off.

#532 leroy, Aug 11, 2016
ferrari77 Contributing Member

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I think Leroy will definitely enjoy the thoughts on Will Bruin in this article

http://www.topdrawersoccer.com/the91stminute/2016/08/the-tragedy-in-erick-cubo-torres/

MLS is full of cautionary tales so quiet and barely whispered that they dissipate before rising to an auditory decibel level. Who weeps for Omar Salgado? Or Danny Mwanga? In a league that struggles for abiding storylines, there is barely enough room for Michael Jordans, let alone Sam Bowies.

And yet even as the league’s narrative generator struggles to kick online, what has happened to Cubo Torres in MLS remains one of the saddest unfurling what-ifs in MLS history. And it is getting worse.

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, we’re introduced to a young, handsome socialite caught between two worlds: the hedonism of Lord Henry and the quiet, humble asceticism of Basil Hallward. If the latter represents a cautious, structured pathway through life’s burning hallways, Lord Henry advises Gray to throw his caution to the hurricane and simply be, whatever that would be.

Gray chooses Lord Henry’s beguiling unstructured world view and is undone by its relentless, overwrought bidding. With no guiderails he is undone and crumbles under his own weight. It is a tragedy, in the end, that Gray was unprepared to face. And it ended him.

There are acres of Dorian Gray in Cubo Torres.

Released into the unkempt wilds of MLS’s worst-run franchise in 2013, Torres still managed to plant himself in rocky soil and bloom in Southern California. He scored seven times for Chivas USA in his first 15 games in 2013, then exploded for 15 goals in 2014 and was named to the MLS All-Star Game as a 21-year-old.

But more than numbers, Torres was young and vibrant and everything MLS strove to embody in the fading wake of the Era of the Olds. In a social media era where most MLS goals and highlight clips fail to crack 10,000 views, you couldn’t buy this kind of advertisement.
Torres went like this for two years, an Omaha-class cruiser rolling through the Chivas USA collapse with more latent success than any player had a right to. MLS failed Chivas USA (or perhaps Chivas USA failed MLS, whatever your interpretation), but it had a chance to salvage a diamond from the wreckage. Torres, for all his Mexican marketability and explosive high-flying acrobatics and infectious smile and baby face, had a chance at a reset in Houston.

How MLS hung on to Torres following Chivas USA’s death in 2014 in the first place was a bit of a coup. Houston secured his permanent signature from Chivas in exchange for a brief six-month loan. And this was where the trouble began.

Torres joined Houston after six months with a wagon train of baggage trailing him. He’d played more sparingly than Houston would’ve hoped, and he arrived dragging fitness issues and dogged by sexual assault allegations. Those were ultimately dismissed, but by the time he’d returned to fitness, Owen Coyle stood astride the team selection sheet. And he did not like what he saw. And in this we see Lord Henry enter the fray.

The Houston soccer market is a strange beast, soccer-mad through a deep immigrant population and yet largely unwilling to hitch its train to the Dynamo in significant numbers. Houston’s stadium is a glorious monument to the SSS movement in the U.S., situated brilliantly near downtown and surrounded by urban amenities. And yet the stadium is routinely half empty, even when the team is performing reasonably well, and Torres’ arrival was supposed to be a boon to all that. Remember Cubomania? Me neither.

Coyle, who left his post with Houston to return home to the UK earlier this summer, is an avowed pragmatist and, from an outside perspective, one of the most stubborn coaches in recent MLS history. And by ignoring Torres at critical junctures over the last year, he precipitated his demise. Here is how.

If we give Houston the benefit of the doubt for 2015 – a year steel-forge hardened by a difficult loan situation and intermittent injury issues – then there is no excuse for a disastrous 2016. Houston has been miserable for most of the year, occupants of the Western Conference cellar for months and bereft of attacking ideas. That starts with Coyle essentially cutting Torres loose for no reason other than blind, dumb preference.

Coyle switched from his English Common 4-4-2 to a 4-2-3-1 for 2016, and Coyle was a Bruin Guy. With Will Bruin playing the lone striker, Christian Maidana underneath and Giles Barnes and Andrew Wenger pushing width, Torres was seemed surplus to requirements. Even when Barnes and Maidana were relegated to the bench, Coyle changed nothing about the formational ethos and still kept Torres on the bench.

Coyle, frankly, was a disaster for Torres, Lord Henry allowing all of his ingenue’s insecurities to bubble to the surface without the playing structure that would save him. Even as Coyle praised Torres’s progress, he destroyed his confidence by never once playing him for 90 minutes and never once giving a satisfactory answer as to why. Even as Bruin’s struggled through the worst season of his career, including his rookie campaign in 2011, Torres has always been a bitter, half-forgotten afterthought.

It took Coyle leaving town to get Torres 90 minutes under interim Wade Barrett, but Torres’s painting revealed cracks worn into wide furrows by the passage of time spent rotting on the bench.

On July 23, Torres played 90 minutes in an MLS league match for the first time in almost exactly 21 months. How do you think it went?

Torres paired with Bruin – always Bruin – up top in something resembling a 4-4-2, and it was unremarkable. Torres completed 21 of his 30 passes, registered a couple mostly conspicuous shots. He pulled off a back-heel in the box once, as if to dust off the corner of a once-magnificent Star Destroyer downed and then buried under blowing sand.

Torres’ performance for Mexico in his time with the Olympic team this month has been the final punctuation of a sad passage of time. Torres, frankly, looked like a ghost, drifting in and through passages of build-up with his rusted touch and creaky mechanical movement. He did not score and frankly didn’t look in the mood to do much of anything. Mexico was dogged out of the tournament in the group stage in a 1-0 loss to South Korea that Torres started.

And so Torres slinks back to Houston now, hoping the future is better than the past.

There is an abiding sadness in all this, that Torres’s playing time and future were not guarded better by men who could do something about it. In two short years he has turned from an All-Star and the No. 2 player on the 2014 MLS 24 Under 24 list to a bench player attempting to catch his fleeing confidence in a moth-eaten butterfly net. He was shuttled off to a dying star by Chivas, rode it to its point of collapse, was thrown back to the mothership only to be patently ignored for LigaMX matches, and then given to Houston only to be told that you do not fit the dogma here. Trade? Sale? No. Sit down.

If it feels like a very long time since Torres has had a professional champion in his corner from the ranks of his own team, then perhaps that’s not a coincidental feeling.

At 23, Torres’ last 20 months held vital importance to his progression and he was allowed, first by a strange relationship with Chivas and then by an estranged relationship with Houston, to kill that time with fire. And now, spat out by the Olympics and sitting quietly in Houston, the future is suddenly a glass window with a blackout shade pulled down.

The moss Torres picked up over the last two years is only maybe reversible. Strikers are creatures of confidence, and it’s entirely possible he breaks the chains that have held him and becomes the All-Star he was in 2014. But you understand how far we are from those days, and how much ground Torres has to make up to get back to that point.

One can only hope that Barrett is truly willing, as he’s said he is, to see the abandoned good in Torres and give him time. Because time, that fleeting menace, is the one thing he has had so little of in these passing days of shadow.
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#533 ferrari77, Aug 11, 2016

leroy Contributing Member

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Didn't really give Bruin the lashing he deserves for being on the level of a rec soccer player just learning how to play the game at age 62.

#534 leroy, Aug 12, 2016

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leroy Contributing Member

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One small step forward (first road win of the year at San Jose) and 2 big steps back (tie to weakened Seattle team at home and another home curb stomping by dallas).

There can't possibly be any way that Wade Barrett gets to stay on after this season...is there?

#535 leroy, Aug 28, 2016
ferrari77 Contributing Member

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leroy said: ↑

One small step forward (first road win of the year at San Jose) and 2 big steps back (tie to weakened Seattle team at home and another home curb stomping by dallas).

There can't possibly be any way that Wade Barrett gets to stay on after this season...is there?
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Lol no absurd decision is impossible for the Dynamo FO right now. I hope not but I wouldn't be surprised if they do retain him.

#536 ferrari77, Aug 28, 2016
Beavis Stiffler Member

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I just realized that despite last night's loss to Dallas, the Dynamo still won the Texas Derby. Since the season series is tied (1-1-1), they own the tiebreaker due to aggregate goals scored (Dynamo won 1st game 5-0, tied 2nd game 1-1, and lost the 3rd game 1-3. Overall: 7-4). That means "El Capitan" cannon is returning to Houston.

#537 Beavis Stiffler, Aug 28, 2016
SwoLy-D Contributing Member

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Guess what subject F*C* Dallas failed?

Stay in School!

#538 SwoLy-D, Sep 1, 2016

Beavis Stiffler Member

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SwoLy-D said: ↑

Guess what subject F*C* Dallas failed?

Stay in School!

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Hey SwoLy-D, are you going to watch the Dynamo-Chivas game on Sunday. I heard there might be thousands of Guadalajara fans in Houston. I'm gonna skip going there and watch it at home because I don't want to get into fights with some Chivas fans.

#539 Beavis Stiffler, Sep 2, 2016
Beavis Stiffler Member

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Cubo is going to Cruz Azul on loan.

http://www.chron.com/sports/dynamo/article/Dynamo-loan-Erick-Torres-to-Cruz-Azul-of-Liga-MX-9201806.php

#540 Beavis Stiffler, Sep 4, 2016

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