Look, I get that Marvell Wynne is an extraordinary, maybe even world class athlete. I get that. I’m not blind. I’m not cruel. I’m not stupid.
But I think it’s quite clear that he’s just not a very good soccer player. Quite honestly, I thought he was the kind of “one-tool” player that MLS had passed by at this point, and yet there he was tonight, stumbling around aimlessly in the penalty area and directly responsible for Chile’s lone goal. Grant Wahl called him “out to sea” on that first goal, but really that’s an insult to the sea. The Pacific Ocean covers 63.8 million square miles. Wynne can’t cover three square yards.
I hope Colorado likes having him around because they’re not going to have to worry about losing him to international duty for long time. Gary Smith and company seem to like him at center back and that’s good for them. They stumble-bummed their way to an MLS Cup win, after all. Great champions, yada yada yada.
But if Wynne wants to represent the United States again, he needs do so in a sport better fitted to his ability to perform occasional feats of outstanding athleticism in between longer periods of positional aimlessness and technical incompetence. Maybe, and I’m being only half-facetious here, he should take up the decathlon or bobsled, something that just uses his skill-set to greater effect.
Moving on to Dax McCarty. He actually looks like a good player then. I’m still not quite sure what position he most belongs in, but he’s now impressed me the last 3-4 times I’ve seem him play on TV. It doesn’t mean I’m ready to start throwing rose petals down on ground in preparation for DC United’s “inevitable” march back to the MLS Cup final, but at least he gives fans some hope.
Speaking of hope, Teal Bunbury and Juan Agudelo ought to giving fans palpitations of hope. I loved the way Bunbury stepped up to take the penalty and I liked the way Agudelo drew the, admittedly softish, penalty. As I said when Agudelo scored against South Africa, it’s only a matter of time until we start hearing the chorus of “HE’S GOTTA GO TO EUROPE RIGHT NOW RATHER THAN THROW HIS CAREER AWAY BY STAYING LONGER IN MLS!!!” Right, ask Dominic Cervi how that’s working for him? He’s seen so little match time that he was left out of this game for two guys who played their last matches before Thanksgiving. Let’s hope that the Wizards (you bet I’m in denial) and Red Bulls don’t sell either of them off anytime soon.
Finally, US Soccer says they drew over 18,000 to that match. Really? Did it look like that in the stadium? If so, booze and hookers to the sales people who got that done. That’s an achievement when the most well-known and intriguing guy involved in the entire match is other team’s coach.
Fighting Talker 
’twill be a big part of my own post, but yeah, that was a legit 18,000+.
Would that Brek Shea not play any sport.
Overreacting to a single-game bad performance, making loud opinions, overrating flavor-of-the-moment forwards who’ve scored just a goal a piece for the Nats…
Oh, yeah, that’s right. I am on bigsoccer.
It’s clear you watched almost no Rapids games this season, so I’ll let you know that Wynne had easily 25-30 solid-to-great games for the Rapids at center back over the course of the season and playoffs. He had one bad game tonight, and one bad game does not make a bad soccer player. He’s got a ways to go to re-earn another cap-chance after his performance tonight, but let’s at least try to keep some perspective on this.
As for Agudelo and Bunbury, shall we wait until they play in a non-friendly situation against better competition before anointing them the great new hope? Or possibly until they show some measure of consistency beyond 2 games? If memory serves, we all jumped on the Eddie Johnson, Edson Buddle and Herc Gomez bandwagons when they got hot for a few months, and I think we know how that turned out.
That will be the excuse for every bad performance for the next 3-4 years: “We won the Cup with him, didn’t we?”
My impression of Wynne’s rookie year in New York was: he made a lot of mistakes, then used his speed to recover from them. Which you can accept from a rookie playing fullback. From a centerback five years later…?
Wynne has probably the worst first touch ball skills I have seen for a professional player and no left foot to speak of. After one of his poor previous performances for the US National Team a Spanish co-worker of mine commented that he would never make the youth club teams in most countries due to his poor skills.
After less than 90 minutes of professional soccer experience, forgive me for not jumping to the conclusion that Agudelo is too good for MLS. If he leads the reserve league in goals or even gets an occasional appearance as a substitute with the big boys, then I’ll reconsider.
Until then he’s just some kid who, somehow, got called up to the national team and was able to ungracefully fall to the ground for his 15 minutes of BS Saviour status.
Those of you still involved in youth Soccer will still today see many players heralded as great players simply because of their speed or tanacity. What I see in that player is, often, a player who can’t hit his target on a pass, is only able to beat youth players in spite of his lack of touch because of speed that is slightly better than the majority. I believe the problem we see with Wynne, we will continue to see because of some sort of misguided, American vision of a Soccer player.
thank you aaron for saying what needed be said for sometime.
Why take up another sport? The fact is, he’s more than good enough to make a living in MLS even though not good enough for international play. Plenty of players like that in MLS. Everyone gets that if it wasn’t for his superior speed and strength, he wouldn’t be playing. So what? If only technical skill was important, guys wouldn’t be retiring from the game until they are in their 50’s.
Because being contrarian is so fun, I have decided to take the position that Wynne is an excellent option for the Nats. I blame his mistakes to this point on coaching. He is just not being put in a position to succeed. It’s round peg sqaure hole stuff here with Marvell.
(And his foot skills are actually not that bad, he just looks a little awkward sometimes. Seriously, that is not his issue.)
Why pick on Wynne? Yes, he definitely makes his share of mistakes, but tell me, what other US centerback hasn’t made a bunch of bad individual blunders resulting in goals against over the last couple years? You can’t say there’s one defender out there that has consistently played well and not turned in a shaky (or worse) performance or two along the way. At least Wynne has a potential huge upside with his speed, unlike most of the other CB suspects.
What an embarrasing blog post you’ve written. Shameful.