Re: Huoston Open & Harvey?
- Thread starter Johnnyt
- Start date
Lmao. The whole world rather see Asia vs Europe anyway. Mosconi cup is a joke BECAUSE america is in it.
Jason
I am a bit confused, the US Open, named after the country it's in and is on the top of many American players as something they want to win, will not count towards US team points for Mosconi Cup for US players? Is that what is happening? US has a Euro coach, and US Open does not count for US players. To quote a movie, when did we get to Disneyland? Seems things are a bit odd here.
America already lost the Mosconi Cup even if they win it. If US loses, we lost even after getting the best coach we could get, if US wins, it's because of a European coaching them. Nice setup there Matchroom, very nice. Oh, and keep on having the "host" country have two teams on the World Cup event, when the tournament has had a whole two countries host over most of it's existence. You may as well say "England will have two teams in the tournament" and just make it official. Last 4 were in England, the 4 before that were in Philippines.
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Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. If Barry Hearn's decision was based solely on having a good event with competitive teams that people actually wanted to see then Barry would have ditched the US several years back because the US is a joke who is no longer even close to competitive and most of the rest of the world wants to see somebody else in it with the Europeans instead. The US isn't doing Barry the favor, Barry is doing us the favor by trying to stick with us since we were one of the original teams but I don't expect he can keep doing that favor for very much longer if we don't get more competitive as he is losing too much money and too many viewers compared to what he could get if he replaced the US with another team who would be both more popular and more competitive.
The US Open is not being used by the coach to help select the team simply because he wants to have the team selected and training before then. Wrong or right he feels that if he waits until after the US Open to pick the team that he will not have enough time to work with them. I don't know if doing it this way will help or not but what we have been doing hasn't had good results for a decade so I'm willing to go along with it and see if it makes any difference.
Same with having a European coach. Considering the lack of luck we have had for a decade, and the luck this coach had with the European team, I'm curious to see if he can make a difference. In any case I think this is a last ditch effort to try to get the US more competitive again before giving up on us and making it "Asia vs the Europeans" or some other team as the US's replacement. With that in mind I am glad he is giving the European coach a shot instead of giving up on us and moving on which I think was the only other alternative in his mind at this point. We are lucky to be getting the chance to try the European coach in that respect.
The luck they had with the coach has more to do with messing with break rules and allowing jump cues than the actual coach. Outside of having a pick of top players from many countries vs just one.
I can see the idea about picking a team to work on earlier, but I still think the US will lose if they win. You think any of the European fans will take a win by the US as being accomplished by US players or by their European coach? There is no way for the US players to win. Like I said, if they lose, it will be a harder loss due to the stacking of the coach, if they win, it will be a win because of a European coach. The players get the short end of it no matter what.
That, unfortunately, makes a lot of sense.
But in the record books, 2017 would be the year usa stopped the bleeding. There wont be any footnote that attributes any pert of the win to the coach, will there?
Yes, they will be the winners, and LeBron is listed as a Challenge of Champions winner in some book also :embarrassed2:
I don't know how much role the coach played in Europe's victories (I suspect some but was probably not the biggest factor), but I don't think the US has been losing because of break and jump cue rules. We have lost because we have been less skilled and less cohesive.
Yes many smaller countries that when added up still have less total pool players than the US does. The amount of countries is immaterial, it is the amount of people that are in the pool of players that you can pick from that makes for an apples to apples comparison. The US has more pool players than all of Europe combined. Any unfairness is to the Europeans but they have managed to overcome it for a decade now.
While some people may choose to see it this way (and some won't), I don't think there is any question that having that hanging over our heads if we happen to win is still better than the alternative, which is the US gets replaced by another team and therefore never gets a chance to win again at all with any coach. I think we are right at that point and this is the last ditch effort to get the US competitive before replacing them with another team. I would rather have a shot to win with a European coach than to have the whole team be replaced and not have another chance to win at all and I'm guessing this is what Barry was deciding between this year.
To see how the jump shot and break rules have affected the outcome of the matches you can watch some of them and see how many times a jump cue has been used to pocket a ball and win from there, or make a hit off a safe or how many "illegal" breaks the US dealt with. Not just Mosconi cup but also World Cup of Pool. There is a match with US vs Japan I watched, US had two illegal breaks where they broke hard and pocketed a ball, then had to sit and watch the other team run out.
The jump cue has no business being used in a pro tournament, and 95% of the pro players themselves say that. I just don't see how the tournament directors did not get that memo. Many fans don't like it, the players don't like it, why is it still in use?
I am all for break rules, the soft break is crap, so is pattern racking, and the rules have specifically stated the balls are to be racked randomly so pattern racking should have been out of the picture from the start. But the thing with 3 balls past the line causes as many issues as it fixes. Or just play 10 ball and rack on the spot again.
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81% of all statistics ar made up.
Whether the jump shot or break rules have been good or bad, both sides have had to play by the same rules and I don't think they favored one side more than they other and certainly not enough to explain the same side losing every single year for a decade straight. To think that those rules explain the last decade is absolutely ludicrous. The actual cause for the last decade's losses is that one side always had lesser skills, lack of cohesiveness, and possibly crappier coaching, and those things are probably also listed in the correct order of importance for how much they contributed to the losses.