I don't often post these except in a post-game thread, but today's has some things of note in my opinion.
First on Freddie Ljungberg
"I gave Freddie the weekend off. I know that we weren’t going to use him this weekend with the situation he was in. And so I just told him to have a weekend."
In normal circumstances I would be all for that. Ljungberg doesn't need to play in a meaningless friendly against Celtic. These are no longer normal circumstances. Make an announcement or have him at practice.
Kasey Keller and Nate Jaqua also out against Celtic
"Keller won’t play tomorrow. We are going to try and let him have some rest. He said it felt much, much better today. So we don’t think it’s like what he had at the end of last year, so we feel good about that. Jaqua, it’s just a day to day thing but the likelihood of him playing tomorrow is small, if at all. But we do feel confident that Blaise [Nkufo] will give his debut tomorrow so it will be a nice day from that standpoint."
This also makes sense, and the lack of mention for Brad Evans surprises me. If Evans plays I would bet it would be a late second half replacement, but that is still unexpected. This means that the less used talents should get playing time, which should help us as we try to figure out if 2011 will be a potential multi-trophy year while 2010 is a single Open Cup at best.
"It makes it our seventh game in 21 days, so it’s a bit of soccer. But it is what it is. It comes along at this stage. We got some guys who haven’t played a lot of minutes. It gives them an opportunity to play. It also gives us the opportunity to get Blaise [Nkufo] out there, which is nice. So from that standpoint, it doesn’t come at the worst time and then we have got a week before we play Colorado, so that’s nice."
Guys that I expect we'll see more of tomorrow than usual
Terry Boss
Taylor Graham
Zach Scott
Tyson Wahl
I feel as if we've seen everyone else in a decent amount lately. Former trialists who might take the pitch are Jamal Wallace (playing v PDX U-23s that evening), Chris Eylander?