Cuando Diego Habla, Todos Se Callan

When Diego Speaks, Everyone Shuts Up.

The number one fan of Basile's team talked about the game yesterday in a brief interview by the media.

Diego said:

"The jersey is the flag, it represents the country. When we lose, it's also the country that suffers."

"This team will have to be the one to go to the World Cup. Not only would I say this, most of the Argentineans would say the same."

"We have a good team. Most of the boys are playing well. We have the wisdom of Roman and Messi to set Crespo up for goals."

"I did not like how the ball kept going to the back. And that for a while I saw a very slow team."

"It's the flag, the country we represent. Last night when we started to dis-sync, if they lost, it would of also been those the jersey represented that suffered."

As pointed out in the previous article, Messi and Veron's poor showing in the first half, together with many other issues led to our sluggish performance.

Messi did well to improve his game in second half and ultimately resulted in the brilliant pass, so the youngster deserved encouragements eventhough we criticized him. We demand so much from him because he's the hope. Messi is the future of Albicelestes! Aguante Messi!

But Veron would be a different story. Veron was bought back at the cost of Maxi! Maxi went through a long injury period and came back scoring 3 goals in LFP for Atletico! If Veron doesn't turn himself 180 degrees and show improvements IMMEDIATELY, bench him!

Milito and Ayala had also taken a lot of criticism. Gabriel Milito, like his brother, isn't an extrodinarily fast player. Never the less, we expected more from him. He did not initiate one attack from the backline, and struggled against a 2nd rated striker Eddie Johnson. Argentine defense traditionally lack the speed to cover African forwards, but US had only one player with the sort of speed and 2 of our CB could not cover him? Not only did they let the counter attack developing into a PK, they also allowed numerous stop ball opportunities and had to check Eddie Johnson continuously to contain him. Poor performance from 2 world class defenders. These two need to get better or we'll get the betters.

Back to the topic. The sync problem Diego mentioned was obviously the cluster fuck between Milito, Cambiasso, Mascherano, Heinze and Veron, at the defensive screen position towards our left. This was a complicated problem and was temperarily solved by, well, taking the ball away from them (and taking out Cambiasso all together). But it was done by sacrificing the defensive contribution of Cambiasso, and isn't a long term solution. The ideal solution is to strengthen offensive threat on the opposite side of field, and setup correctly for left waist to long lob to right front and initiate counter attacks., so either put on a more offensive outside midfielder pair, or use Gago instead of Mascherano to get better distribution. Or play some other formation :D