Tomas Ostrak, and why I forgot about him three separate times

Tomas Ostrak. The man. The myth! THE LEGEND!

And why with all due respect, I forgot about him three separate times when I was creating my first post for this blog.

Ostrak has been a bit of an enigma for me to judge. He's highly rated based on comments from Lutz, and as stated before my trust in Lutz knows no bounds currently. And I have an ironclad rule that I'm slightly breaking when I write this blog; if you wear the jersey and are on the team, I want good things for you and will cheer for you. When Niko was going to ground when someone merely entered his five foot square (DnD reference) I refrained from criticism even while I intellectually acknowledged it was in somewhat bad taste. When Johnny Nelson was playing himself out of his job I would be like, "but hey man, that performance against Cincinnati!" and hoped he'd turn it around.

With Ostrak it's kind of like that, except there's really nothing for me to (not) criticize, because even in the games he's played in I honestly can't remember about 80% of his touches on the ball. When he's played so far he's been just a cog in the machine to the point that he's just sort of a human shaped blur in a CITY jersey.

And that's not a bad thing! Necessarily. There's no real lowlights for me to harp on, and he's perfectly adequate when he's been on the field, but we just haven't seen the ceiling we could potentially get yet.

He's been so average that (story time) when I was coming up with the tiers for my first blog post, just jotting stuff down, I completely missed that I hadn't included him. I didn't realize until I went to actually write the blog post, at which point I was like, "no worries, just put him in a tier as I write this" and then I forgot to include him again.

Then, as I created this blog and copied the first post over, I was glancing through it for any needed edits and realized I still hadn't included him. No worries again, says I, just put him in before I hit publish. AND THEN I FORGOT HIM AGAIN.

So when I woke up this morning and realized my vaunted first blog post had a big Ostrak shaped hole, I decided to make it up to him by giving him his own post.

Above is Ostrak's scouting report for the last year, per fbref.com

And this is Aziel Jackson's. They played roughly similar minutes last year, Ostrak had 1,151 minutes while Aziel had 1,119. They mostly play similar positioning, either centrally as the 10 or on the wing.

As you can see there's a lot of areas where they are similar, but there's WAY more areas where Aziel was strictly better. The one I especially want to highlight is Shot-Creating-Actions; Aziel almost doubles that stat compared to Ostrak. And I know what shot creating actions they're talking about. The only ones I can specifically remember for Ostrak minus the goals he himself has scored are the assist to Miggy to seal the game against Vancouver and the pass to Indy to score the 4th goal against kansas.

With Aziel, everytime he's on the ball, you know something is gonna happen. It might not be all good, but damned if it isn't memorable.

I do believe Ostrak has it in him to live up to what we need; it looks like in pre-season they're using him less as a 10 and more like an 8, and he's been decent so far like that. He might even get to start for the beginning of the season while Löwen gets back into gear from his extended break getting his green card. I hope he does well in that role, because having him be a dependable role-filler for us might be the difference maker as we fight for like 5 different trophies. Plus if he starts making Aziel-type plays consistently, the highlight reel when those guys play at the same time would be bananas.

That's all for now folks! Thanks for reading!