Montreal, Philadelphia, Pontius, Piatti (Tinker, Tailor...)

Y'know, I'm seeing the likeness now.

[Montreal Impact v. Philadelphia Union was one of three games I took in this weekend. If I'm watching 'em, shouldn't I be writing about them? Otherwise, why was I watching it?]

Hey, let's throw another log on the raging bonfire of Everything I've Gotten Wrong. Last week (was it last week? nope; there it is), I dubbed the Philadelphia Union the team to beat in the Eastern Conference. This past Saturday, the Montreal Impact kicked one leg after another out from under the platform. Then they kicked Philly's prostrate body one more time for good measure.

Jesus, was that a brutal loss. By the end of the 5-1 rout, the Impact was toying with the Union. (Albeit with a few liters less piss-and-vinegar than Sacha Kljestan poured on New York City FC in another of this weekend's routs). It wasn't all terrible news for Philly – Keegan Rosenberry showed flashes of one-on-one defending brilliance and Josh Yaro stepped up sharply and smartly as you like a couple times; both good signs – but one key problem stood out from the Union's point of view: they simply could not keep Montreal's attackers in front of them. The Impact went vertical at will (am I using that word right? I know I didn't coin it, so, relevant), by which I mean they repeatedly found ways to run straight at the Union's defenders and to send them reeling toward their own goal.

Portland v. LA: The Open Secret to LA's Success

That one that hit the easel? That's me on Vancouver.

[Portland Timbers v. Los Angeles Galaxy was one of three games I took in this weekend (on that, didn't go well). I'm trying to do better about writing up the empirical stuff.]

I wrote up Portland versus LA elsewhere, if mostly from the Timbers' point of view, but even that post was lousy with the central truth about LA: they are one hell of a sound defensive team. Small wonder, then, that they're crawling up the Western Conference standings, small wonder they're rocking a now-four-game winning streak. As noted in that post, LA has allowed three goals in their past eight games, a tally that pencils out to 0.375 goals per game. In other words, good.

Just 19 goals allowed so far, less than a goal a game. They have 34 goals for on the other side of the ledger; only five Major League Soccer teams have more...all of which rolls into a theme I'll discuss in the weekly post when that goes up – e.g. how very, very wrong I can sometimes be when I speak/write. Think I said something about LA "not being all that good" a couple weeks ago, and in a public, recorded forum, so, yeah...

Ben Olsen Will Not Die

First, we exchanged information. Then we talked about Ben Olsen...

Sometime during the broadcast of DC United’s grim loss to the Philadelphia Union this weekend, the color commentator (I think) casually let slip that Ben Olsen has been coaching DC for six years.

[Cue sound of record scratching and a 13-car pile-up just outside the window.]

SIX FREAKIN’ YEARS? Ben Olsen? Benny-Ball is almost done with kindergarten? When I dropped this into the podcast, the way Cody responded told me I wasn’t alone in finding this...well, unbelievable.

We attempted a brief segment on coaches - e.g. what gets a coach fired and, most critically, who’s the next guy to fall off a hot seat) – but we only hinted at how Olsen fits into that discussion. The answer: he doesn’t. On some levels, he sits outside of it.

Clint Dempsey & Hero Theory

Clint Dempsey's self-visualization.

This post has an Alpha, an Omega, and shit-ton of Greek letters in between, at least conceptually. Still, I hope to keep it brief…

When I watched the Seattle Sounder’s midnight-of-the-soul-loss to the Los Angeles Galaxy (because close enough), a couple things stood out – among them, LA’s sometimes impressive efficiency, and on both sides of the ball. There was something about the Sounders, though, the way Clint Dempsey appears to operate on the assumption that his teammates are second-best to him in all ways, a reality that, obviously, obliges him to handle everything from getting the ball out of the back, to approach play, to finally scoring the sweet, sweet goal that sends the fans home singing!

I picked up the phrase “hero-ball” somewhere – again, probably from Matt Doyle (because that’s all I read) - but that’s all the attribution that I have time for. I’m condensing it to “hero” here because it fits better. Now, to my point…

After recording the Dangerous Balls Podcast, I thought harder about what the “hero” concept means to me. Some players – and, here, yes, absolutely, I would include Dempsey, but also the Colorado Rapids’ Jermaine Jones and Toronto FC’s Sebastian Giovinco – want to put the game on their shoulders and carry it to victory. It’s just in their nature. Sometimes, this pans out – see, Giovinco through all of 2015 and up until…is it six games ago? See Jones’ (pre-meltdown) time in New England (e.g. before his messiah complex caught up with him?), and see Dempsey in the good games in the Copa America Centenario and through the Oba-Deuce year(s).

There’s an aside in all of this: coaches love “hero” players, at least so long as they can pull it off and probably for a few years after. It simplifies a coach’s job when a player can, say, both start and finish a play the way Dempsey sometimes can, or when Jones provides enough presence in midfield to make it effectively a vast no-go zone for the other team. Sounders’ coach Sigi Schmid enjoyed two years of looking like a genius for no better reason than writing “Dempsey” and “Martins” into the starting line-up. Really good players are short-cuts, basically, players with enough talent and sense/belief in what they can do to sort of dictate a new game-plan for their coach; it saves him from thinking, wins them more money, adulation and random hate for five lifetimes, etc. I'm not saying it's win, win, win. I am, however, saying that Klinsmann defaulted to this this past June…the lazy fuck.

What happened against LA, though, highlighted the increasingly real limits to the Dempsey’s “hero” time. The way he showed to receive the ball in the middle third limited his useful availability in the final third where the Sounders needed someone to link play, or, if nothing else, another runner in the box. Here, it’s less that he’s no longer capable of doing something he once did (think it’s true, though, just sayin’), than he’s undercutting some important work that his current and future teammates need to learn – e.g. how to get the ball to either him, or literally any other attacking player/fullback going forward. And, yes, it goes without saying that covering all that ground will get harder for Dempsey with each passing year.

Sometimes, the best way to help another player is to let him learn his job. So, yeah, back off, Clint.

Philadelphia, and Taking One’s Chances in the Shooting Gallery

Opposition defenses feel this, with even less comfort.

In my last "todo MLS" post, I clocked the warning signs that the long season and a little special attention might be catching up with the Philadelphia Union's stout-of-heart, green-in-age defensive outfit. Exhibit A in this argument came with the blind-side losses to the Vancouver Whitecaps in Philly and to New York City FC in New York, to games where the Union scored two goals and coughed up three. It looked like a pattern: after all, even Andre Blake, the man most likely to in conversations involving, say, Nick Rimando or Bill Hamid, slipped up a couple times.

That same game contained the seed of the flipside argument for how Philly survives into the playoffs (and maybe even goes deep): they score more than they give up – something they did against the Chicago Fire just a few weeks before. Yeah, yeah, that failed against the 'Caps; I have seen the Union's attack when it's firing and it's a lethal, glorious thing.

Philly fully embraced a "shooting gallery" approach to their games in June. They went 2-2-0 over the month, scoring goals, coughing 'em up, with eleven falling on either side of the ledger. No doubt, it took some quantity of cigarettes and booze to steady their nerves, but, when they considered those games, I like to believe that every man on the Union's roster knew he had lived that month, and well.

NYCFC and the Power of Modest Adjustments

Irrelevant. Also, accidentally awesome result from a search titled, "Plans Gone Wrong."

Late last season, the Portland Timbers may or may not have made The Switch, aka, the subtle little coaching decision that set them off on two months’ worth of success and, ultimately, an MLS Cup. I’ve torn this idea apart in earlier posts, so elaborating on it now, well past the date of its relevance…my point is, Portland has moved on, for good or ill, and so shall I.

When mid-season loomed into view, and with results not being all they could be, a few teams adjusted how they fielded their players in order to fix this eternally-recurring slip here or boost this danger there. Here, I want to focus on the teams who made one specific move to shore up their respective defenses, specifically by moving to the 4-1-4-1. A couple teams have gone this way, DC United by dropping Marcelo Sarvas behind Nick DeLeon and (on a good day) Luciano Acosta, and the Houston Dynamo did it by parking Collen Warner on top of their oft-shaky back four. One other team went this way and with far, far better results than the two just named: here, I’m talking about New York City FC and Andoni Iraola.

As Cody pointed out during the podcast, this wasn’t a complicated choice. So long as NYCFC insists on fielding the elderly (Andrea Pirlo/Frank Lampard), they’re going to need cover, i.e. someone to do the running they won’t, or can’t so long as they want to remain forward-looking and/or relevant. It’s working pretty well so far – four straight games worth of better-than-OK results (also called wins) – prior to NYCFC’s recent loss to Sporting KC…of which, I know nothing.

RSL: Revenant Salt Lake

As with RSL v. Montreal, we are all winners here.

The very end of Real Salt Lake's crunching draw/near-win against the Montreal Impact featured a nails-'n'-claws duel between Laurent Ciman and Yura Movsisyan. Nothing came of it in the end, which is to say Ciman won the duel, but that's the kind of battle that makes any game of soccer worth watching. In my notes, I recorded this as "Godzilla v. King Kong." (What? Fuck you, I'm not old!)

I put out a poll before last Saturday's evening games kicked off, one where I asked what games people would like me to watch and report on. Sadly (perhaps even stupidly...um, no offense?) people directed me to watch New England Revolution v. Columbus Crew SC. While that game was better than the one I chose on my own (Seattle Sounders v. Los Angeles Galaxy), and even better than my default (all Portland Timbers games, which, against the New York Red Bulls...it was sub-epic), it didn't pique my interest nearly as much as the 20-minute highlight reel of RSL v. Montreal. A lot happened in that one, near as I can tell: Montreal looked like the team that started the season, sharper than a Ginsu knife in the counter and capable of as many cuts, etc.