Haji Wright and Josh Sargent continued their hot starts to the EFL Championship season.
Wright scored twice in Coventry City’s 7-1 home victory over QPR, taking his season tally to three in all competitions. Sargent scored Norwich City’s lone goal in a 2-1 loss to Middlesbrough.
Wright opened the scoring in the 12th minute after finishing Milan van Ewijk’s pass for a 1-0 Sky Blues lead.
The U.S. men’s national team forward made it 4-0 in the 37th minute, capping off a fast break.
He played 79 minutes in the match as Frank Lampard’s squad celebrated a lopsided home victory.
As for Sargent, his goal came in consolation as the Canaries suffered a home loss to Middlesbrough. He now has goals in his opening four appearances of the season in all competitions.
Fellow USMNT international Aidan Morris assisted once for Middlesbrough in its victory.
However, Norwich City has lost two of its opening three league matches under new manager Liam Manning.
Canaries fans will hope Sargent stays part of the team with the summer transfer window set to close on September 1 in England.
Both Wright and Sargent will hope that their strong starts lead to September call-ups to the USMNT.
Morris: MOTM
Good for both. Watching both so far and Wright is more dynamic, and his hold up play has improved drastically.
That was the big knock I had on him. Dude is good on the ball and can dribble you, he makes good runs and uses space well, and I’d argue he’s the best natural finisher in our pool and he can score with either foot or his head and he just has that knack and nose for it. But he just wasn’t near as effective as you’d expect for a Specimen-looking athlete like him at playing with his back to goal. He puts that together, he’s EPL all the way.
that’s also a clever and tidy finish on wright’s part. fed rightward across the net and he angles it back left from where he’d run. keeper is going to follow him across the net and be leaning the wrong way.
i like wright’s goal. sargent’s goal, i am going to repeat, i am unimpressed by the general quality of championship central defending. i mean you get beat over the top by the glacial sargent.
i have also seen wright/ pepi/ balogun score that same type goal for the nats. able to keep up with a running speed of play. tidy corner finishing hard for any keeper to get. so it scales up.
no NT worth a crap ever lets sargent get that break. but it’s good for him he’s producing this well, and given the analytics obsession — i ain’t making this decision — i fully expect he makes the soon to be issued september roster as the “hot hand.” for a team that cares about analytics we don’t seem to care who does and doesn’t score for the US when picking for the US.
Well if Balo doesn’t play tomorrow, he’s probably not being called. Pepi played 5 minutes so maybe you call him knowing it’s still a ways out. Agyemang is still out. That leaves Sargent, Wright, and White. Dike, Vazquez, and even McGuire injured. Ferreira doesn’t play forward anymore but he could cover for both CF and Tillman who is also hurt. Downs has been pretty poor missing two sitters already in three weeks, maybe Poch brings him because he didn’t get many minutes at GC. If Sargent does get called it will be because of injuries to a handful of strikers not analytics.
JR: you keep throwing around “he doesn’t play x anymore.” this is an adjunct to stats analytics. do you really think someone who plays x but had played y is incapable of playing y anymore? you’re following “form” and “how their team uses them” too closely. you are overrating specialization.
i am sure ferreira could remember how to play CF in about 5 seconds. a lot of this is like riding a bike. we may want for a good player to remember his bike as opposed to put a guy out there who hasn’t scored since 2019 through rote, unthinking use of a depth chart.
heck, i’d rather have reyna, puli, weah, mckennie, or those kind of guys deputized as CF than just brainlessly trot out “the next guy.”
you do get, per your insistence on harsh scheduling, that we will be facing japan and korea in 2 weeks, not some third rate caribbean island? you then need to consider lineups like that’s who we scheduled.
IV:
-Ferreira hasn’t played a lot of CF for the last two seasons. Could he play there, for sure. Is that putting him in the best position to be successful when he has maybe three practices to make his case for playing time at a position he’s not at his sharpest at. Probably not.
-when Poch goes to scout Ferreira he’s going to see him playing as a AM so not as likely he’ll even consider him as a CF. If he goes back to his US striker video he’s going to see him look great against Trinidad and Grenada,
-he’d be a good utility piece that could provide cover for either position. However, again that doesn’t set him up for success when he’s only been in a Poch camp for a few days in January. Now again in a handful of practices he has to learn the roles of both positions that are probably quite different from the expectations at Dallas and Seattle.
– Poch has seemed to ask his #9 to be a hold up player. Is that just because he had Agyemang? Maybe. If not Ferreira is not the guy. He’s not a back to goal player. He wants to run at people or be played behind the backline. I would love to see Ferreira called in but he doesn’t fit what we’ve seen from Poch’s strikers to this point.
IV: Balo starting today, so the math gets a lot harder for Sargent to get called up.
JR: the team at this point has the institutional memory of a gnat.
arena ignores klinsi’s germans and some of the kids he saw at gold cup at the end. sarachan calls the kids. GB ignores some of sarachan’s kids for years. poch ignores some of the people who qualified klinsi and GB.
the swiss whooping of poch’s B team suggests he lacks much grasp of the pool beyond the obvious. forced to replace vacationing As with his own picks, 1/2 of his B selections proved unworthy of the level. hence he is reduced to bashing the default A team about sitting out.
if we wind up with most of GB’s people and most of his system the ball hasn’t moved much at all.
we have a struggling team where the usual isn’t working. we are fixing to not have jedi (rehab), weah (OM), and reyna (BM). that’s a lot of his wing impetus. he needs to earn his darned paycheck. this isn’t State College where you are stuck with the kids in the program. knowing the 4th string sucks you can go off script. you don’t have to just walk the plank with obvious, ineffective solutions. to me there’s no point in calling sargent or zendejas to reprove they don’t belong.
“JR: you keep throwing around “he doesn’t play x anymore.” this is an adjunct to stats analytics. do you really think someone who plays x but had played y is incapable of playing y anymore? you’re following “form” and “how their team uses them” too closely. you are overrating specialization.”….i am sure ferreira could remember how to play CF in about 5 seconds. a lot of this is like riding a bike. we may want for a good player to remember his bike as opposed to put a guy out there who hasn’t scored since 2019 through rote, unthinking use of a depth chart.”
IV
There’s a reason Jesus ““ doesn’t play x anymore.” If he was so good at it he’d still be playing there.
Jesus had a nice long 22 game run at the #9 for Gregg.
He was found wanting.
The options for that position today are better than they were when Jesus was Gregg’s flavor of the month. If you don’t believe me consider that he was the USMNT #9 at Qatar ahead of Pepi.
Jesus scored 15 goals for the USMNT. 12 of them came against Grenada, TNT , and St. Kitts and Nevis.
His time to shine for the USMNT was in the Netherlands game in Qatar. A tired team could have used a lift. And he was anonymous.
Players develop and mature and I’m not opposed to giving him another shot but there are better options in line ahead of him now
“heck, i’d rather have reyna, puli, weah, mckennie, or those kind of guys deputized as CF than just brainlessly trot out “the next guy.”
At tis point Jesus would be that “next guy”
“you do get, per your insistence on harsh scheduling, that we will be facing japan and korea in 2 weeks, not some third rate caribbean island?”
You mean like TNT, Grenada or St. Kitts and Nevis?
You minimize Sargent’s goal because you’re “unimpressed by the general quality of championship central defending”, and then rave about Wright’s goal, scored against “championship central defending”.
Love it!
hyperventilate all you folks want. i literally listed the obvious choices: pepi wright balogun. i am not asking for crazy choices. i said agyemang and ferreira next.
the rest of this is noise by people actually trying to promote a demonstrably inferior candidate, no sane NT calls someone who hasn;’t score a goal for them in 6 years. that’s the “crazy” here.
and if you ever played striker you would know (a) balo’s goal is 5x harder than sargent’s breakaway goal and (b) sargent doesn’t have the jets to breakaway against a NT level team. the mere fact both scored on c’ship defenses doesn’t make them equal goals.
IV: so let’s circle back to when I said if Pepi, Balogun, Agyemang, Vazquez, and Dike are hurt Sargent is getting brought in along with Wright (or White). Sounds like at least Balo might be healthy and Pepi questionable. Sounds like basically you and I agree sounds good.