It’s back! Season number 28 of the MLS got underway this weekend and will technically still get underway Monday night long after you read this as Mother Nature decided to remind the entire west coast of who’s in charge.
I’ll add a few thoughts on this game, which the Timbers will host Sporting KC immediately afterwards. But for now, Saturday and Sunday kept us busy with tons.
It’s probably right for me to start with FC Cincinnati since I picked the Garys into the season as Supporters’ Shield winners. My rationale for making this call is that they basically brought back every key player from last year’s team – one that only lost once in the second half of the season and won one away game in the Audi MLS Cup playoffs (the only team to do that has achieved). the first round, remember) before you go to Chester and give the Union hell.
They have a Landon Donovan MLS MVP candidate in Lucho Acosta, two potential Golden Boots presented by Audi winners in Brandon Vazquez and Brenner, and a favorite for the very prestigious and coveted Extratime D-Mid of the Year in Obinna Nwobodo Award. They also improved the one point (right full-back) that they really needed from an offensive point of view. They’re going to turn a bunch of those draws in 2022 into wins in 2023.
Much of that was evident in the first half of Saturday night’s 2-1 home win over Houston. Santi Arias didn’t get much forward from right-back but Álvaro Barreal did it safely from his place opposite on the left and Acosta was the best player on the field for large parts of the game and Cincy’s forwards were constantly dangerous.
With that goal, the first of the season, head coach Pat Noonan wants them to play:
Win the ball and push forward with momentum, but not quite at the breakneck pace you’re used to from Red Bull-style teams. When Lucho is on the weak side, pinch the strong side’s full-back to become an ad hoc playmaker. And always, always, always running off the ball into the gaps between opposing defenders.
The second goal came minutes into the second half and it was just as pretty when Barreal lapped into a casual back-heel from Lucho that eventually resulted in Nwobodo’s lateral foot from 13 yards.
And at that point, winning 2-1 at home against a team most (raises hand) picked to finish near the Wooden Spoon race, it felt like it would start right away.
It definitely wasn’t. Houston was the dominant team the rest of the way, which Noonan said directly.
“Their three-pointers in midfield really controlled the game and you could see their ability to move the ball and get forward was just connecting passes more efficiently than we could,” explained Noonan. “If we flipped them too many times, we lost the next pass and we chased the game a bit.”
This chase resulted in seven turns for the dynamo, and they were dangerous on practically every single one. Tate Schmitt scored Houston’s only goal from a corner just before halftime; They had six more goals in the second half but only some heroics from Roman Celentano kept the three points for the hosts.
When the Dynamo get that kind of play out of Héctor Herrera (who obviously gives a damn on either side of the ball) and the gang – and remember, Ben Olsen’s DC United teams have always played hard as hell for him and always slayed on set pieces – then they will be better than most of us gave them credit for this season. They really were the better team on Saturday.
But that brings us back to the argument for Cincy as a Shield candidate because they now have the ability to brutally force some wins with sheer talent on both sides of the ball. That kind of performance of theirs was basically a draw every time in 2022.
In 2023 it will be three points.
At the start of this season, there were two reasons why picking Toronto to end up bottom of the table, despite the undeniable talent in the top half of their roster, felt reasonable:
- The top half of the squad is talented but older and injury-prone, and the drop behind most starters is steep. They seriously need 60 or so healthy games from Lorenzo Insigne and Federico Bernardeschi to stay on top.
- The way the midfield is set up makes it difficult for these two guys to make high-risk, high-reward decisions, as any turnover in poor position is an instant counterattack the other way. So you have $20 million worth of wingers who are playing more conservatively than they probably should be.
It took 34 minutes for those two concerns to materialize in a rather crushing 3-2 defeat at DC United on Saturday night by matchday one standards.
Let’s start with how rallies turn into goals against Toronto:
First thing is, there’s just no way to put instant pressure on DC left-back Mohanad Jeahze after Mark-Anthony Kaye sprayed the attempted pass straight at him (Kaye tries to put pressure on Jeahze, but he is flushed, and that moment is kind of just the difference between the 2022-23 version of Kaye and the 2018-19 version of Kaye). Thing two is that after Jeahze breaks containment the rotations are so, so slow and any attempted defensive recovery is even slower so of course Mateusz Klich just steps forward and has a rip of 25. What DP wouldn’t?
The insult was followed by injury 20 minutes later when Insigne hobbled away. I don’t know how bad it is – I don’t think anyone knows at this point – but it took a total of 34 minutes for the “this season is a potential nightmare if things go bad” version of reality about the Reds broke in .
Now they deserve credit for fighting back anyway and taking a 2-1 lead. This midfield can’t run but they can still shoot and Bernardeschi is so good that even if he has to limit his audacity he will win this team a few games on his own. But that’s pretty cold consolation (it’s no consolation at all, I don’t think) considering how the whole group completely collapsed in the second half.
I only post the winner of the game because the pattern is known: turnover; inability to contain the sidelines; inability to put pressure on the ball in midfield; Sean Johnson gets the ball out of his own net.
TFC head coach Bob Bradley took as positive an attitude as possible in the aftermath.
“You know, the game at the end, we do a good job of actually playing when they go up and Raoul [Petretta] tries to push a ball over the line to Ayo [Akinola], and then it falls a little short,” Bradley said. “We just didn’t play well enough in the transition and the ball was cut across. There’s a lot to do, but there are certainly positives in the way we’ve approached things and we’ll try to build on that.”
From DC’s point of view, there are obviously a lot of positives. Not only did they take the three points, but also scored goals from their two DPs, Klich and Christian Benteke, but they got some serious input from a horde of homegrown players, including a star turn from 21-year-old Ted Ku-DiPietro. who assisted Benteke’s equalizer before beating home the winner you see in the clip above.
There’s still work to be done – they desperately need Steve Birnbaum to get 90 minutes fit and stay fit 90 minutes because boy Victor Palsson isn’t a central defender – but nobody’s going to argue with three points and great spirits to start the year.
10. One of the questions about Inter Miami Heading into 2023, formation boss Phil Neville would challenge his team. He had promised two forwards – he explicitly stated in the off-season he wanted more goals and felt this was the way to get them – so perhaps it was a bit of a surprise they came despite Leo’s injury To see Campana come out in a 4-2-3-1 (he was a late scratch; Josef Martínez started as a lone 9).
Regardless, I think Neville will be happy with his side’s offensive performance in the 2-0 win over CF Montréal. I wouldn’t say Miami was in complete control of the game, but they did a fine job of being opportunistic, managing things consistently and never letting Hernan Losada’s Maximum Overdrive approach crank the pace of the proceedings wide open.
This performance is a perfect example of why picking Montréal for something like 12th in the East was perfectly reasonable. 1) Their lack of high-end attacking talent was glaring, and 2) James Pantemis struggled in goal, and 3) Losada’s system made Victor Wanyama, still Montréal’s best player, less influential overall (he had just 62 touches, what was). 8. most of all on the field).
I don’t think anyone should throw in the towel, of course, but I suspect that each phase of adjustment could be significant.
9. Talles Magno adaptation time Playing as a false 9 also mattered, and in Saturday’s 2-0 loss in Nashville he seemed to have made no progress from what we saw of him for NYCFC last year:
This touchmap generated by TruMedia via StatsPerform is not that of a dangerous centre-forward. I still think it’s fair to criticize Nick Cushing for playing his best player out of position when Talles is deployed anywhere other than left wing.
Gary Smith, on the other hand, didn’t even have the luxury of using his best player from the start, but still got his team on the pitch and got a very good all-around performance from them. Randall Leal was more than pulling solid threads as No. 10, while the incredibly fast front three of Jacob Shaffelburg (I called him the Canadian Cabral in the group chat and had to eat my words), Teal Bunbury and Fafà Picault were just a nightmare for them NYCFC backline. Any time Nashville had an opportunity to play forward, they did, and these three guys were relentless in both chasing space and harassing the Pigeons’ defenders on defense.
It was still a performance by Nashville as they received fewer passes in midfield than any other team that weekend and hit a higher percentage of long balls than any other team in the league that weekend and were under 40% that weekend.
But the energy they played with in that game was lacking on the track last year and that energy made it fun.
8. It wasn’t much fun to find in Orlando’s 1-0 home win over the Red Bulls, unless you’re a Pedro Gallese fan. El Pulpo put on a typically adventurous El Pulpo display, making a series of head-scratching decisions followed by brilliant saves and finally stopping Facu Torres’ PK in the 56th minute.
That was Orlando’s only shot on goal of the game. They were neither sharp nor dangerous.
The Red Bulls weren’t sharp either, but they were dangerous. The hope, of course, is that DP Dante Vanzeir – who didn’t play here because he was waiting for his paperwork to be done – will eventually turn chance appearances like this into goals.
By the way, I’ll enter the first “Luquinhas has to play better” note of the year right here.
7. Basically, all Austin FC have to play better, but wooo boy, poor Kipp Keller descended into the deepest circles of Hell during his side’s 3-2 home loss to St.Louis CITY SC. Knocked out in mid-air by Tim Parker on a corner to open the goal, Keller made the biggest slip you can make this season on the second St. Louis goal and was pinched by Klauss on the third.
It was an unforgettable performance at its worst, the kind of performance that can shake a young player’s confidence.
St. Louis, of course, put together an unforgettable performance in the best way, becoming the first expansion team to win their debut since LAFC did it in 2018. They were, as expected, very Red Bulls-y: they only had about 40% possession, hit a lot of long balls, pressed collectively and played vertically on almost every opportunity.
And they ran a ton and covered 75 miles as a group. Only one team – Atlanta ran 75.1 miles – covered more, and most of the others were around 70 behind.
Remember how many times I wrote this offseason that their clear identity and squad buy-in would be a built-in advantage, especially early in the season when the games are ugly? yes, there it is
6. The final stretch of Atlanta’s race was likely MLS Next Gen Stats watching the wild celebrations after Thiago Almada’s game-winning free-kick. Almada became only the fourth player in league history to score both an equalizer and a winner in the 90th minute or later, leading Atlanta to a 2-1 win over visiting side Quakes with two smashes.
I don’t think it’s worth diving too deep into this in terms of overall performance as so much of this Atlanta lineup is set to change over the coming weeks and months as some guys do their paperwork and others get healthy ( they need either Santiago Sosa or Ozzie Alonso to get Matheus Rossetto off the field, man). But from an execution standpoint…
That’s 20 shots for Atlanta, but only four from the box. And one of them was the PK Luiz Araújo who was sent to Alpharetta.
Almada saved her this week, but we saw last year that it takes more than raw talent to win games consistently. Atlanta needs to be better with both their final third patterns and their throwing discipline around the box because there’s no reason for such a big split.
As for the tremors… belly punch. But at the same time, don’t be too shocked if you end up on the wrong end of the goal line in a game where you haven’t created a single chance in the last 40 minutes.
5. Minnesota went to Frisco and, still without Bebelo Reynoso, FC Dallas retaliated a little for last season’s playoff elimination with a 1-0 win thanks to Mender Garcia’s 48th-minute goal after a poor rebound from Maarten Paes.
The Loons, who brought Robin Lod to Reynoso’s No. 10 spot, played for exactly that kind of moment – a scramble in the penalty area, a set piece or a quick substitution. There was no claim to anything else, nor should there have been. I don’t think you could ask much more from a team playing away without their best player against a playoff contender.
Dallas have had moments where they looked smooth in possession, but they struggled to convert each of their big overloads into real, high-level danger, and boy do they need Jesús Ferreira and Alan Velasco to run after every now and then, if for nothing else to give the midfield a little more leeway.
4th pass of the week to Joaquin Torres, who was considered redundant in Montréal because he just couldn’t complete that type of sequence with the last ball:
That was the icing on the cake of Philly’s 4-1 win over a Columbus team that came out of the gates and was really, really good for 45 minutes. But Jim Curtin dropped his team a little off the line of attack early in the second half, and with all the space the attackers could run into, José Martínez and Leon Flach went chasing turnovers in central midfield.
These guys are hard – borderline impossible – to play through, and some of the crew’s young CMs and CBs have had a hard lesson.
3. The Revs went to Charlotte and claimed three points thanks to a dying Henry Kessler winner after the Crown failed to clear their lines after a set piece in New England.
I think the 1-0 was fair, although Charlotte’s Kerwin Vargas will definitely want some of his better looks back (“can the wingers score?” remains the big question for Charlotte).
New England came out in a 4-2-3-1 and I can see why – I think it’s probably the best formation for them given their current line-up, especially with young Noel Buck looks like a starter written with a pen next to Matt Upholstery. But some of their movements off the ball were uncoordinated and/or too static, so the wingers would come in and just stand around when Carles Gil was about to drop low.
This causes the full-backs to take some wild risks with their positioning to create some attacking momentum, which in turn leaves the Revs open to potential counterattacks. That’s basically the story of how they were shredded last year.
Obviously it didn’t hurt them in this game, but that’s something I’ll be pondering over the coming weeks: can they consistently create danger without turning into a 2-2-1-5 for possession?
2nd face of the week for RSL’s left back Bryan Oviedo, who was on the field for the full 90 years RSL xDAWG won the ‘Caps 2-1 in Vancouver:
Vancouver was only miles better in the first half, going 1-0 at the break and never coming out of the dressing room for the second 45 minutes. As Damir Kreilach took the win in the 73rd Dami!), the result felt inevitable.
I liked this quote from RSL head coach Pablo Mastroeni, explaining his team’s tactical approach:
“When they watch their pre-season film, their wingers are always up front and that’s perfect for us as our outside backs are a bit higher. Again, I think we did a really good job preseason by exploiting those wide areas. The execution in the first half wasn’t good enough but I think in the second half we created some great chances that always start in the wide areas for us. Some really good finishes culminating in a good result.”
I’ll break down the game with one stat though: Duels Won.
You can’t be so physically dominated in this league or many others and expect to come out with points.
1. And finally I spent the whole winter writing about Seattle’s new tactical approach of pushing Nouhou inward to transition from a back four to a back three, turning more or less into a 3-2-2-3, with right-back Alex Roldan given full license to push forward.
We saw some of that in Seattle’s dominant 4-0 home win over Colorado on Sunday night, but they haven’t been as rigid about that postponement as they were against Al Ahly at the Club World Cup three weeks ago. What we saw instead was a pretty straight forward 4-2-3-1 and that’s why Brian Schmetzer has been a successful coach since Day 1: he doesn’t overcomplicate things.
What I’m saying is that when you have superior talent – and the Sounders still do most game days – you just have to stay put 95% of the time. Use your boys in a formation and within a game model they know and understand, and trust them to execute. Save the fancy stuff when you’re outmatched.
That’s to some extent what Robin Fraser was trying to do, running a sort of four-man rotation in central defence, with central midfielders Connor Ronan and Ralph Priso alternating deep dives alongside/between Lalas Abubakar and Andreas Maxso.
I understand why he tried but it didn’t work. Superior talent is, well, superior. And for this weekend at least, the Sounders have reminded everyone that the CCL-winning squad is damn good when they’re healthy and rested.