Formatting was a challenge, brought over from word bullet points.
Going to be honest, have had mixed and weird feelings about the club since its inception.
I really, really have wanted to be excited about this club and team and professional soccer coming to my home state. I just haven’t really found that much to grab onto that has sustained my excitement or hope since the announcement. This is largely in part due to missteps by ownership and management more than anything in my eyes.
I’ll save comments on the largely soccer illiterate fanbase till things play out more. It is also a bit of a miss that there seems to be a lack of any high-level discourse around the team. No Athletic writer or any in depth coverage there, no sbnation page, no youtube content, there really isn’t anything to help new fans to the club, let alone the game, get a good feeling for what’s trying to be accomplished.
I’ll also say after spending the last couple weeks really immersing myself into the MLS structure and how everything works, the league is quite unapproachable regardless of any previous soccer understanding. This shit is convoluted and confusing.
With that being said I watched the first two games pretty closely to try to get some understanding of what we’re trying to do, and how Miguel is trying to accomplish his vision. I took notes throughout each game with timestamps, and have rewatched the first half of the second game. My general high-level thoughts and takeaways from games one and two:
• Pressing triggers seem jumbled and mixed
-Miguel talked a lot about his high press coming into the year, I haven’t really seen much of this, and we seem more than fine dropping way off their CBs, letting them pick a pass and then try to press the wingbacks/full backs, but the press is weak due to spacing. Reyna specifically gets a lot of my hate on this
-We dropped our line of engagement to our 45/40 fairly frequently
• Think we’re really going to be susceptible to teams who have a good midfielder who can quickly switch sides
-We really get narrow and compact when the balls get to the wide spaces, there was a combination
-First note of this was ~10 min into the DC game
• Makoun I really don’t like, and think is a major weak link in what I think could be a suitable backline
-He’s not comfortable enough on the ball to hold the center of a back three and be responsible for advancing the ball to a dropping 6 or 8, he takes way too long to make up his mind on the pass, and often passes to a man in pressure. A few times to Bronico in the first game were just inexcusable
• Reyna both games seemed genuinely lost, I get that he played basically everything from a striker, to inverted winger, to defensive winger, but Christ he looked lost more often than not. He gives nothing in the press and I’m not sure he’s sure where he’s supposed to be in certain times
• Midfield makes the defense look worse than they are. We got absolutely overrun in the midfield against LA, and to a lesser extent D.C.
-Also, they hurt the overall team as their moves in transition are wild. Even in Franco’s goal that was called off, it took too damn long for players to get up the field, and everybody fell more into defensive positioning than getting up the field, there were 3 people in the frame of the TV when the ball was hit
-Same goes for 26:35 in the same game, have a good transition with an early cross into 2v8.
-It’s almost like their first reaction when winning the ball is to think two steps ahead on what happens if we get countered, and fill that space rather than filling open space ahead.
-In transition going the other way, they get run past and are unhelpful and are unable to fill space wide or centrally correctly to account for a shifting CB
-This is most noticeable for me with the midfield, but it’s in general, we give the man on the ball far too much time
-This was most obvious on Douglas Costa you have to get in his shit and disrupt him, don’t worry about being run past, let your cover help, we played off him and he killed us with his passing instead
• The team seems to find something when playing more direct and I’m confused by the tepidness of this, most of our genuine “chances” were off of a mistake where we could play a line cutting ball to somebody in motion, now, the player receiving the ball will too often stop once they get it, but they seem to get too mechanical and tepid when slowing things down.
• It was interesting to see how Miguel ran them out over the last 45 minutes
-It’s good to know he’ll make tactical and formational changes when needed
I need to double-check, but it seemed like Mora was dictating a lot of the defensive structure due to what my initial reaction was a zone-specific man-mark by him in the second half
• The cupboard is bare going forward
• Finally, do we not have any long set-piece routines?
-I didn’t hate the short corners, but the end of the LA game left me confused.
