All Hat and No Horse

I like Freddy Adu. Really. I think he's a wonderful player who could have a spot on any MLS team. I don't agree with the people who have labelled him a failure (like Darren Rovell here:(http://www.cnbc.com/id/18276686 ) but I understand their frustration.

Freddy draws defenders, has great technique and is a very useful player to have on your team. He probably costs too much (his salary is upwards of 500k-- a lot by MLS standards), but he's still a nice player. He's still a teenager.

But I roll my eyes every time I see a few quotes from Adu: "My role had always been being the guy, scoring the goals, and I got away from that."

"Now I'm trying to get it all back. It's weird. How did I get so far away from doing all that? I'm a completely different player now. Now, I might be overdoing it on the field sometimes, but I'm trying to get back to where I was." (from Arroyave's excellent blog here: http://blogs.chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/soccer_redcard/2007/04/adu_trying_to_g.html )

Get back to where you were? Where was that? What was the last time Freddy was really THE go-to guy on a team? On the U-17s? Adu is nostalgic for a past that never really existed. Adu doesn't need to "get back"-- he needs to "move ahead". The fact that he doesn't understand that suggests a fundamental reason why he hasn't improved as much as we all thought he would.

He's already a very good player-- he'll have a long career **somewhere** even if he never improves on what he's already got. But his problem isn't that coaches have played him out of position-- it's that he's not in that upper echelon of players from whom we'll tolerate various antics. He's not good enough to play central mid over the league MVP Christian Gomez (which was the problem he ran into at DC United). He's not good enough to justify not ever playing defense (which is one of the problems at Real Salt Lake). He's not good enough to be the go-to guy. Maybe he'll respond to more responsibility, but I think responsibility starts at home. Freddy's got to understand that.