AC Milan saved its UEFA Champions League knockout stage hopes for at least another day, but could very well be without star attacker Christian Pulisic until after the November international break.
Christian Pulisic started and played 90 minutes in the match before being substituted off with an apparent cramp in second-half stoppage time. The U.S. men’s national team star has been diagnosed with muscle fatigue following his exit in Tuesday’s 2-1 home victory over Paris Saint-Germain.
He has been ruled day-to-day going forward.
Despite Milan Skriniar’s opening goal for PSG, AC Milan rallied and boosted itself back in front.
Rafael Leao’s 12th minute equalizer helped make it 1-1 at the San Siro before Oliver Giroud propelled the Rossoneri in front 2-1 just five minutes into the second half.
The 25-year-old Pulisic won seven of his nine duels and made five recoveries before being replaced by Alessandro Florenzi. Fellow USMNT star Yunus Musah started for the Rossoneri, playing 84 minutes in the match.
Pulisic’s latest injury worry comes at a crucial time for the USMNT. Gregg Berhalter’s squad will face Trinidad & Tobago in the Concacaf Nations League quarterfinals as the Americans seek a third-straight title in the competition.
Berhalter is scheduled to announce his November roster on Thursday before the pair of showdown with the Soca Warriors.
AC Milan travels to Lecce on Saturday in its final match before the international window. The Rossoneri will also host Fiorentina (Serie A) and Borussia Dortmund (Champions League) later this month.
Hopefully the coach is right and it is only a cramp.
Nevertheless this underscores the need to use meaningless friendlies to audition people for backup roles rather than always play the same people. Every soccer games is Russian roulette and players can go down for extended periods at any time. Coaches get paid to prepare for contingencies such as this. Fortunately our next matches should not prove difficult. It’s Trinidad and Tobago after all. What could possibly go wrong?
LOL, I think that’s what Bruce Arena said about T&T..
IV: you confuse that the C/D team could handle this with will US Soccer do that. Barring Koleosho switching I can’t think of one uncapped player that has given an indication that he’s better than a guy on the regular callup list. Marlon Fossey is playing but is he going to play over Scally or Dest. Your guy Alex Mighten has 115 first team minutes for the worst team in Belgium. This isn’t 1995 we know who these guys are because we can watch them week in week out.
oh come off it i was also the one you told reyna wasn’t ready and who dissed my suggestion of balogun as unlikely. and lund has surprised people. quit pretending the all-knowing machine has it all sorted.
more pointedly, dude, the best way to ensure we DON’T win the next world cup is keep the roster exactly the same. we know this particular group didn’t beat holland or germany. we have to try some stuff or that is the ceiling.
One of IV most moronic comments. “to me “week in week out” resonates as stats watching” what you blanked out on was “we can watch them week in week out”. That’s actually evaluating their skill levels, their strengths and weaknesses by watching the matches. You are the one who only cares about stats, like who scored a goal in 2014.
to me “week in week out” resonates as stats watching when what we need is a longer term view of actually watched talent regardless of where they play. what they add, including some wrinkle other than what we already have. for example, the proverbial “reyna backup” where we don’t feel compelled to counter-productively change tactics and formations just because we make a sub. GB always strikes me as paradoxically aware of player “profiles” and yet often led around by stats numbers. hence he struggles to include his 9 in his offense because he is trying to field hype players and scorers but not people designed to cohere with each other.
i think this has actually been a new naive period in the team where we struggle to deal with abundance and field an analytics all star team instead of the best unit to win soccer games. that defensive shape and talent might matter. i also see a sort of fanboy circularity where the coach elevated certain players to their notoriety level but having gotten regular status fanboys struggle to think there is any other option. essentially the coach starts them ergo you take for granted he should do so. it’s not even they shouldn’t make the team necessarily, it’s the mix is wrong. some of these guys should be situational subs.
last, this being an official concacaf event you’re missing its value as cap tying.
IV,
“to me “week in week out” resonates as stats watching when what we need is a longer term view of actually watched talent regardless of where they play. what they add, including some wrinkle other than what we already have. for example, the proverbial “reyna backup” where we don’t feel compelled to counter-productively change tactics and formations just because we make a sub. “
Gregg often makes like for like subs but that’s because we’re usually playing some college level weakling and the drop in quality doesn’t mean anything. But when the USMNT plays real teams, they don’t have sufficient quality to replace their starters, like for like, so they have to “change tactics and formations”
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“GB always strikes me as paradoxically aware of player “profiles” and yet often led around by stats numbers. hence he struggles to include his 9 in his offense because he is trying to field hype players and scorers but not people designed to cohere with each other.”
?? “he struggles to include his 9 in his offense” ?? That’s because he only has one legit 9, Flo. The rest are learning or are flawed, some seriously fakata.
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‘i think this has actually been a new naive period in the team where we struggle to deal with abundance and field an analytics all star team instead of the best unit to win soccer games. “
Bullshit. There’s no abundance. There’s a lot of guys who look promising but are not there yet. Some of them have a nice little run once in a while, but overall, consistency is lacking in the player pool.
Argentina. That’s “abundance” We have a bunch of guys competing for the #9 and Flo is the only proven commodity and even he is not THAT proven. If Gregg were happy with his final 23-26, which is overall quite young, he wouldn’t be capping as many new players at the rate he has been. There’s a still a HELP WANTED sign out there for the USMNT. Which suggests that “abundance” as you define it , is not a thing. This team is a very, very long way from abundance.
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“that defensive shape and talent might matter. i also see a sort of fanboy circularity where the coach elevated certain players to their notoriety level but having gotten regular status fanboys struggle to think there is any other option. essentially the coach starts them ergo you take for granted he should do so. it’s not even they shouldn’t make the team necessarily, it’s the mix is wrong. some of these guys should be situational subs.”
?? That’s a crock.
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“last, this being an official concacaf event you’re missing its value as cap tying.”
That’s low on the list of priorities. Making sure they get to CA is #1. Everything else is incidental. This team needs to focus on that. They aren’t good enough to be trusted otherwise. This team has hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time. They are getting better at it but they don’t do well if something goes wrong.
Any reason why you’re all talking about a roster and not about the fact that Pulisic suffers an injury every few months? When can we have this conversation that americas best player has never played a full professional season in his life. His injury history is laughable at this point.
Because their is an upcoming Nations League game sir. Puli will be okay after he gets rest. Why are you dragging him? People gotta chill dragging John O’Brian, Reyna and Pulisic for being injured its part of the game. Plus they always have him down.
They always hacking Puli down like a christmas tree tree 🎄, claro a player taking that would be injured like crazy all the time.
Thinking in the long term, this could be good for Pulisic that he has a (hopefully) minor injury and avoids CONCACAF hacking. Yes, I continue to think that the physical stressors of playing in CONCACAF add to the injury woes of our skilled USMNT players like JOB/Gio/CP. You can go all physio on me all you want, but the proof is in the day-to-day lineups historically.
So, Striker91, historically, Pulisic does seem to pick up quite a few muscle strains/tears/pulls etc. It would be good for him (and USMNT fans – like me) to play a full year – or even part of a year – without a muscle worry or knack. I haven’t seen it yet – at BVB, Chelsea or now at AC Milan. It is troubling.
“Any reason why you’re all talking about a roster”
Because the game everyone is concerned with is with TNT and it’s for COPA America qualification . The USMNT needs to beat these guys.
TNT is a shit team several levels below the USMNT, which is not to say they can’t get a result against the USMNT. But if Gregg can’t beat TNT like a drum in such a vital game, even w/o Pulisic . and maybe several other starters, then he should be sent to bed without his dinner and made to wear a white lab coat and Uggs on the sidelines.
With the right B team, and if he medicates himself properly during the game, Gregg should be able to massacre TNT.
“not about the fact that Pulisic suffers an injury every few months?”
+ Are you saying he does this on purpose? What is anyone going to do about it?
Why aren’t you ragging on Weah who is always just about to breakout and then he gets hurt? Why don’t you laugh at him?
+It’s a boring topic, like listening to Carragher and Richards squeal in lieu of having any intelligent, articulate commentary . They just squeal and scream.
Pulisic’s injuries were only of note because they were keeping us from seeing if he could be the kind of leader for his club that he is for the USMNT.
I think he’s done enough for Milan since the start of this season to prove his worth, more so than he did when he was at Chelsea. He’s consistently been arguably their best attacking threat. Out of 11 Serie A games and 4 Champions League games he’s only missed, as best ,as I can tell, one game so far. What is the issue now is his powers of recovery. This is part of that consistency that he still has to work on developing.
“His injury history is laughable at this point.”
Who’s laughing? You? Why? You think this is funny?
At this level of the game and at this point in the season, everyone is “injured”; some are worse than others.
The important word there is “history”. From now until the day he retires, Pulisic is always going to be one wrong move from hurting himself. The long lived pros learn how to adjust their game so that they can minimize the chances of injury and still be effective.
If CP11 misses significant time and Milan suffers and Pioli gets fired, then sure it’s a problem. But the hope is that Pulisic has learned enough about himself and his body so that hopefully. he will have minimized the damage and not be out too long.
But don’t worry, Musah is getting enough PT and getting older now so soon he’ll be the next one with the run of injuries.
this is exaggerated. he doesn’t have adams-level problems. he plays often enough. he plays well often enough. this does underline my concerns about finding 25-30 guys we can rotate in, including other LF options. you have JR above dissing trying new things. well, we have to deal with this sort of thing regularly with everyone (not just puli) which means you really need 3-4 guys on a depth chart for every position who you have tested and trust. you do not help things telling me puli is obviously better and run him out every friendly. what if he cramps or pulls something and we can’t call him? NT aren’t supposed to be designed on “ooops” fanboy principles. the idea is know what plans B and C are before the problem arrives.
“you have JR above dissing trying new things.”
???
There you go again making up shit to fit your narrative and cast you as the aggrieved genius.
JR is just pointing out that the USMNT player pool is currently painfully short on proven credibly established top line regular pros.
Lots of “sizzle”
Not very much “Steak”
You’re the one who promotes valuing USMNT experience above “Club” form to the extent that Julian Green is supposed to be in the USMNT picture because he scored a goal in the World Cup nine years ago.
Just because most of your posts are inarticulate, barely literate scrawls, it doesn’t mean that everyone else is unaware of your so-called “positions” which change as needed.
Yeah we never try new things. It wasn’t like we sent 22 of 23 guys to the GC that aren’t even in the top 4 on the depth chart at their position. Wasn’t like we played 3 matches in the first quarter of the year with majority MLS rosters. The naive one is you who thinks you can better evaluate a player by watching one national team match than Berhalter’s staff who watch every game for the entire pool.
We should be able to beat T & T with a B team as long as we take the game seriously and the manager doesn’t screw up.
I’m going to remind everyone our last three matches with Trinidad is a 19-0 aggregate. Including just a couple months ago when Jesus “Pirate of the Caribbean” Ferreira had a first half hat trick. TnT just gave up 5 goals to Curaçao.
October 10, 2017
A tired team playing in 3 inches of mud and a coach with a gigantic ego.
We would have still won the aggregate in 2017 if it was simply a home and away. Even if we only win by 3 or 4 at home there is no way Trinidad can top that away. An all MLS squad all over 29 could handle this task.
Roster drops this Thursday! Would be nice if some new peeps 25% of roster is filled with new faces who have not been capped would get a call up.
Most of those type guys will be with the U23s. Who are you thinking?
With Pukisc, De la Torre, Weah out I think we will See this:
GK: Turner, Slonina, Horvath
D: Dest, Scally, Richard’s, CCV, Ream, Trusty, A.Robinson, Lund
M: Mckennie, Musah, Maloney, Cardoso, Busio
A: Balo, Pepi, Tillman, Brendo, Reyna, Paredes, Zendejas
you’re all over the shop on this. we have it in the bag. we can risk nothing. we should keep rolling with the same folks who just couldn’t beat germany because they can likely beat TnT — which is backwards. meh.
i mean isn’t the implication of your JF argument we could use our backups and win this? why not call 30-something and do a canada-cuba? the studs play the home game, build the gap, try some things game 2 away. or do we have to squash everyone like a bug?
i get in theory folks might be with U23 but the history of that is it’s one team now and another team next year — it’s fake “gel” work.
rumor is taty castellanos is looking to switch to USA but i think he has the same “richard rodriguez” 5-years problem as acosta since he’s gone back abroad.
2tone, I think you have the roster except I don’t think it will be Busio. Dare I say it may Julian Green instead … what will IV say??? I think Tessman is ahead of Busio and Teessman I dont think Gregg tought Tessman did very well recently when given the chance in the freindlies two windows ago. Green is playing consistently and contributing to goals pretty consistently right now. I don’t see anyone still involved in MLS playoffs getting called in but IMO Luna, TTillman, Mrob, and Ferriera would probably be selected ahead of Trusty, Aaronson, Zendejas, and Maloney if not for the MLS playoffs.
How in the world did Milan play him for 90 minutes when he just came off at halftime in the last game?? He wasn’t even playing well. Seriously, what were they thinking…
Also, why do we fret about who plays Trinidad? Ok, I know why. But we shouldn’t.
Saw this coming. Pulisic has never been able to stay healthy all season. Hope he isn’t out for to long.
Imperative for more talented wing options to emerge for the USMNT.
Weah, Pulisic, Reyna, Adams all have chronic muscular injury issues. None can be relied upon to be an every game starter at the club level.
Whoa, impressive analysis. You really have a nuanced understanding of the US teams injury issues.
Hey thanks. I’m here whenever you need it. Have a blessed day.
But he isn’t wrong. It just didn’t take him 25 paragraphs to get there.
With Weah out I would strongly suspect we’re going to see McKennie switch over to right wing because he’s without question one of our best 11 at the moment with the injuries we have…with Gio at the 10 and probably Musah and Cardoso starting as co-6’s. Malik Tillman can fill anywhere across the front but I think he’s probably Gio’s relief at the 10.
We’ll likely start Aaronson on the other side of McKennie – I doubt we see Pulisic this cycle and I’m fine with that – against T&T this combo should be plenty – but with De La Torre also out we’re looking for two more wingers, another 8, and another 6.
Who you guys got? My guess is you can pretty much pencil in Zendejas and Kevin Parades at this point but I also really want to see Diego Luna. I was watching him with RSL against Houston the other night and he is just a different creature than anybody else on the field and in terms of movement, technical ability, incessant pressing, physicality, dribbling ability…the dude was just on another level. Oh, and he finished fifth in the PK shootout – by his own request. And won it. If we just bring 2 keepers again we can sneak Luna into the roster and we absolutely should. His upside is off the charts. I genuinely think he’s one of the most talented guys in our pool and could be a generational player in a couple of years…and maybe sooner.
We could see Busio get a call at the backup 8 spot if McKennie does move to wing this cycle as I suspect he might, and the backup 6 will probably be Tessmann or Malonney.
Scuffed Pod looked it up you have to have 3 keepers for this competition.
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I expect Diego to go to Spain with the U23s to play Morocco (and Amir Richardson) and Iraq.
Q, I said the same the thing about McKennie as a wing on another post pre Pulisic injury. However, with Pulisic injured, I expect to see an old school 4-4-2 with Reyna at the 10, McKennie and MTillman wide, and Musah as the 6 (I could see him putting Johnny at the 6 and having Musah wide instead of Tillman for better defending). The drop off to the backup wingers is pretty big and with a 442 he can start Pepi who in my opinion is a far better player right now than any of the winger choices that I don’t already have assigned somewhere else. I think this gets his best 10 field players on the field togethor.
Tele57, I understand your thinking. However, it won’t happen and doesn’t need to. Aaronson can easily slide into one wing spot, Zendajas to the other and with Reyna\MTillman pulling strings we will carve up TnT. I mean Mihailovic, Busio, and Ferreira dominated them 4 months ago.
JR, I am not saying it has to happen. The US will have vastly superior players. The lineup they choose to use will have minimal impact on the final score. The team can lay an egg or win big against TandT in any formation they choose. Getting your best players on the field is probably the most important thing an international coach can do and playing Aaronson ahead of Pepi sends a bad message to the team. Right now Pepi is a much better player than Aaronson who, if called (and I expect he will be) would only be due to the lack of depth at the wing combined with other better options now being in the middle of MLS playoffs. Why doesn’t Gregg always play a 4231 like he did at Columbus like you always point out? He doesn’t hate the formation but he has one player in his pool that can play the 10 well (maybe 2, pulisic can do it) and limited options at the 6 (perhaps Johnny and Maloney will step up) but a 4231 puts either McKennie or Weah on the bench; two of the best players on the team. I think he will play a formation that allows Pepi to start ahead of Aaronson but we will see.