Schelotto’s Arrival: Roster Space, Check; On the Field?

By: Jeff | May 2nd, 2007

Scroll past the stuff about Danny O’Rourke’s tribute to a departed friend and you’ll find some off-the-field machinations that have made possible Guillermo Barros Schelotto’s arrival in Columbus; which, as the article notes, was scheduled for last night. Long story short, it’s raining green cards in Columbus, with Stefani Miglioranzi being the latest recipient (Miglioranzi looked good, by the way, based on what I saw of him last weekend…excepting the short-range shot he hoofed). The article also jogged my memory about Duncan Oughton and Joseph Ngwenya’s green cards.

The upshot of all that is that the Crew still has one senior international spot open on their roster; anyone think they’ll use it any time soon? Personally, I doubt it; then again, I’m not looking all that closely either.

But Schelotto’s arrival still has me thinking about where he’ll play on the field when he comes - and, between the high-profile pursuit and the Crew’s need for goals, it’s fair to confident he’ll play on the field often as he’s able. My previous stab at this turned on a sort of “stuck-on-stupid” premise that Schelotto was a midfielder and that was the one and only place he could play; hence the talk of jettisoning the most recent soccer player to start his path to citizenship, Miglioranzi.

This blind-spot at least explains (pardons? c’mon, be a pal…) missing the obvious: Schelotto should play at forward, where the Crew definitely have more question marks than able players. That the Argentine ain’t young as he used to be recommends the move, especially given the low likelihood he’s got the legs to be a two-way player in MLS. For all that, however, it also seems wise to give Schelotto some space in which to operate - which drew me to the idea of using him as a withdrawn forward setting up behind two front-runners. And this takes a body on one of those strange, yet familiar, journeys through formation changes and the like. Perhaps the windiest path taken involved switching the Crew to a 3-4-3 (more like a 3-4-1-2, actually) that lined up like so:

GK:Gruenebaum
D (L to R): Rusty Pierce, Marcos Gonzalez, Frankie Hejduk
M (L to R): Ricardo Virtuoso, Ned Grabavoy, Danny O’Rourke, Eddie Gaven
F (L to R): Kei Kamara, Schelotto, Joseph Ngwenya

Coming off the top of my head, that’s kind of negotiable, but, fortunately, that journey lasted only as long as it took to get halfway through the latest edition of Sirk’s Notebook, a must-read feature, by the way, that runs in the Hunt Park Insider. The arresting passage:

“Our defense has been great all year, and I don’t just mean Andy and the back four,” said Hejduk. “I mean our entire team defense, from the top on back. The key with DC is to plug up the middle on Moreno and Gomez, and I think Danny, Ned, and Eddie Gaven did a great job of keeping them contained.”

Knock out the specific line about DC and focus on the “Andy and the back four.” It’s often tempting, especially in the arm-chair manager’s game, to tinker with formations and speculate about moving around players like easily interchangeable pieces. In truth, though, it’s hard (y’all) to get the players used to gaps being where they weren’t before, changes in position, where one expects the passes to go, etc.; moreover, changing a system that’s working well makes even less sense.

So here’s what I’m thinking: try Schelotto as a second forward and see what happens (alongside Kamara to name my preference).