Philadelphia's pipeline shines, NYCFC get creative & more from Matchday 19 | OneFootball

By Matthew Doyle

It was an abbreviated and wonky matchday – how many of you knew there was a game on Thursday? Be honest! – because of the FIFA Club World Cup and the Concacaf Gold Cup, but MLS never stops!

So. In we go:

Escape Velocity Protocol

The Union have fully evolved back into the bullies (not Broad Street, but still) sporting director Ernst Tanner promised they’d be this year.

They officially went top of the Supporters’ Shield standings thanks to Saturday’s 2-1 win over Charlotte, leaving it late for Markus Anderson to volley home the winner eight minutes into second-half stoppage time. The drama!

Gritty would be proud; Phang definitely is.

Has it been pretty for this Union team? No, but of course it’s not supposed to be. This highlight, up above, is the Union at their best: the legs are dead and the game is frazzled, and it’s time to pour numbers into the box with everybody going goblin mode. It is the game as they script it and an outcome they trust themselves to get.

“We've seen a team now that's changed the complexion of games later on in the second half and just through sheer desire and will and quality off the bench,” is how head coach Bradley Carnell put it in the postgame presser. “When they introduced me here at the Union, we're going to create internal competition and we want [them] to train like they were played.”

I could leave this segment right there and it’d be enough. The Union win these types of games against these types of teams (Charlotte are a good, not great side) because they are conditioned to.

Given the number of players the Union have out on international duty, though, Carnell had to dig deeper into that bench than most teams could, and that’s worth digging into a little bit deeper because it gives me the chance to bang the drum on the value of really committing to an academy pipeline. In this instance it paid off not just with that depth, but with the way Carnell was able to change the shape of the game with that depth.

Jeremy Rafanello and Cavan Sullivan are two ends of the academy spectrum: Rafanello is in his mid-20s, started in the Union’s system in 2017, and has been a squad player for years. Every MLS team should have a handful of guys just like him on the roster. He came on in the 77th minute.

Sullivan is a wunderkind with a global profile, a full decade younger than Rafanello and starting to get meaningful minutes at age 15. Producing prospects like him is the result of building a culture that prioritizes player development via competition with a clear path to playing time. He came on in the 92nd minute.

That’s them combining in the half-space in the moments before Anderson’s winner.

Anderson, in a more oblique way, is also a product of that culture. He’s been a little-used reserve who’s spent most of his time playing in MLS NEXT Pro with the second team. But that, too, is part of any good academy system – identifying and integrating players with potential from outside your direct pipeline – and the Union have been reaping the rewards for a long time.

Back to the game: Charlotte got a 78th-minute equalizer from Wilfried Zaha and settled in to hang onto the point for dear life. They’re actually kind of built for that, which is why Carnell brought on Rafanello and Sullivan, two guys who are less suited for the Tactics Free Zone™ and more for giving the game some structure.

And it worked.

“We had to be a little bit creative tonight and try and change things up in the second half with a little bit of a different approach,” Carnell said. “You saw Rafanello coming into the game and finding a little space between the lines and calming the game down on the ball. And I think that's very important. And I think Cavan has that quality as well, just to calm things down and then go 1v1.

“We [still] had a bit of the chaos up top with Markus and [Chris] Donovan and Bruno [Damiani]. So just thinking about how we can get, now, a little bit of quality between the lines. And for those moments, they played a great contribution and I thought they did really well.”

It’s now 10 unbeaten for the Union, who haven’t lost in more than two months. Their next three are on the road, all against good teams. Take seven points out of that and they might achieve escape velocity and put real distance between themselves and the chasing pack in the Eastern Conference.

Charlotte are ostensibly part of that pack, but are now just 2W-7L-0D in their past nine league games. They have two more away dates coming up (this was the third of a five-game road trip), and are suddenly way down in 11th on PPG.

They thought they’d be fighting for trophies this year, but really, they’re just fighting for an Audi MLS Cup Playoffs spot. They need to start playing like it.

Risk Assessment

The typical Atlanta pattern: They play somewhere between ok and pretty well for the first chunk of the game. Then they have an individual breakdown, which digs them a hole. That is immediately followed by a sort of panic that leads to unjustifiable risk-taking (which, to be fair, sometimes does result in an equalizer). If the equalizer does not immediately come, that period is subsequently followed by a mental/emotional breakdown that just cooks the game for good.

That cooking took place over the span of five second-half minutes during Thursday night’s 4-0 loss at New York City FC, with a goal – really, a wonderful, Gerd Müller-esque pure No. 9’s goal – from Mounsef Bakrar, followed by a brace from Hannes Wolf. It was 1-0 to the Pigeons in the 54th minute; by the 60th it was 4-0, and the game was done.

This, of course, is the way it became 1-0 to the hosts in the first place:

I was on This is MLS with Sacha Kljestan a few weeks back, and Sacha called Atlanta “a bunch of potatoes.” That’s probably all that needs to be said. Hasn’t mattered the formation or the line of confrontation or the build-out patterns (though, again, I will encourage Ronny Deila to re-think his reliance on Brooks Lennon) or the personnel: they’re exactly what their record says they are: a 13th-place team under 1 ppg with fading hopes of sneaking into the Wild Card match.

The Pigeons, meanwhile, have climbed into the “good” part of the graph over the past month, and have some unexplored upside that head coach Pascal Jansen is working through. The fun wrinkle from this one:

That’s a true 4-3-3 with Julián Fernández (No. 11), who’s usually a winger, playing as a free 8. The numbers didn’t really show it, but I thought he was quite good. Same with Andrés Perea as a true No. 6.

“I hope you can see the progress we're making as a team because consistency is still our most important word for this season, becoming more consistent,” Jansen said afterward. “It looks like it's heading in that direction, but we have to be aware of the fact that we have to work so hard in order to get these achievements done.

“The guys who had to step up today, I see them every day in training, and I know for a fact that it's very hard to accept that there's a better player on your spot. You have to be patient and give your best at everything that you have inside you every day in training in order to be competitive, and that's what they do.”

I’m not saying Jansen’s about to scrap the base 4-2-3-1 for this new look and these new players, and neither is he – once Keaton Parks is back, the 4-2-3-1 is back – but they had answers with the ball in a way they usually haven’t without Big Bird. They are starting to stack positive data points.

Ultimately, though, this team’s test will be whether they can find regular goal-scorers to complement Alonso Martínez. Wolf is on a jag right now, but we’ve seen him get hot before. Can he stay hot?

“I think you can see, for Alonso, there's a lot of pressure because in the start of this season – he was almost the only one who scored. I know I can find the net,” Wolf said. “I always scored goals wherever I played, but sometimes you lose it for a bit, you know, and I try to get back to my best.”

So far, so good.

A few more things to ponder…

11. Let’s just rehash my overall take on the Timbers thus far this season:

This all has added up to a team with a pretty high floor and has compensated for decreased production from their DPs (not just the raw stats drop-off from Evander to Da Costa, but the essentially season-long absence of Jonathan Rodríguez, which is now going to be a factual season-long absence given this week’s news).

The problem is, this team still isn't comfortable using the ball to kill games off, which is why there are some pretty frustrating draws sprinkled among their results. And if one of the four bullet points above goes missing, the margins are suddenly very thin and points will be dropped.

As so:

Pantemis has been excellent all year. His team had been playing at home, at something pretty close to full strength, and up a man for 40 minutes. This should not have been a 1-0 game; this should’ve been the type of lead that meant he could have that horrible flub and still walk away with all three points.

The Timbers need to cross that threshold.

Which is to take nothing away from the Quakes, who continue to be both fun and good, have lost just once in all competitions since the end of April, and fully deserved the 1-1 final from this one on Friday night.

This was the third time in the past seven league games, by the way, that San Jose held their opponents under 1.00 xG. In their first 11, they didn’t even hold a single opponent under 1.5 xG for any league game.

I thought Bruce Arena would figure out the defense first, then move to the attack. He did it in reverse.

10. The most entertaining match of the weekend was one between two teams that sure look like they’re going to miss the playoffs. And the reason it was so entertaining is they showed all the reasons they’re going to miss the playoffs, on both sides of the ball, for basically the full 90 minutes. And that is how you get a 3-3 draw in St. Louis between the hosts and the last-place LA Galaxy.

Pass of the Week from Marcel Hartel here, though there were three or four other passes from this one game that could easily have gotten the nod:

Both teams have been better lately, but not better enough.

9. FC Cincinnati got a first-half goal on a textbook near-post run from Kévin Denkey and then made it stand up in their 1-0 win at New England. That ended both Cincy’s four-game winless skid and the Revs’ nine-game unbeaten run.

I thought Cincy were really well-organized through midfield and controlled any of New England’s attempted off-ball runs in behind, especially in the central channel (save for a 52nd-minute Luis Díaz breakaway that probably should’ve turned into something more than it was). Those are the runs that open up the game for playmaker Carles Gil, who was more or less anonymous.

New England were without starting striker duo Leo Campana and Ignatius Ganago, which was a big piece of the problem.

“Without kind of a true nine, you could see when we got crosses, there really wasn't that box presence, the guy to win those aerial duels,” head coach Caleb Porter said. “So, we have to figure that out. Hopefully we get, after the break, a few guys back.”

8. It’s really a shame we didn’t get to see a full-strength version of the Crew vs. the Whitecaps. Maybe in MLS Cup?

Still, Saturday’s 2-1 Columbus win was entertaining as hell, with a couple of classic Crew team goals, a Daniel Ríos banger and two teams out there committed to playing good soccer.

The way Jesper Sørensen went about it, though, was different from usual. He’s had his ‘Caps side playing mostly out of a 4-3-3 this year, even when missing pieces, but went to a 3-4-2-1 that really was more like a 5-4-1. It’s a look he’s used before – against Monterrey in the Concacaf Champions Cup comes to mind – and in a lot of ways I think it was the right choice here, too.

They’re just missing too many pieces, and so they picked up just their second loss of the season while slipping out of the top spot in the Shield race.

Their upcoming schedule is brutal, by the way.

7. So I definitely thought there’d be a lot more of this from Austin this season:

That kind of deep possession, with the winger and fullback and one of the central midfielders creating an overload, and center forward Brandon Vazquez timing his runs to the near post? I thought the whole idea of their acquisitions was to build the team around that pattern of play.

Hasn’t really been much of it until the past couple of weeks, but it’s starting to show up a little bit more. And it defined the first hour of their 2-1 win over the Red Bulls.

“The idea in the plan was the same from the beginning,” head coach Nico Estévez said. “Sometimes you can do it more often. And I think the other day against Colorado, we saw some things like that; against San Diego in the second half, the same. And I think we have to keep being consistent on creating those overloads and penetrating as we did, and to create our scoring opportunities."

The Verde & Black still let go of the rope a little bit too much after reclaiming the lead with that Vazquez goal – I want to see them own central midfield more, and not just work in their defensive third. But there’s no question things have gotten better.

RBNY, who had just one shot on goal, saw their three-game winning streak come to an end.

6. I wrote last week that I was going to load up on Houston stock for the second half of the season, and so on Saturday Prince Owusu showed up and stuffed them into a garbage can. The big No. 9 grabbed his first goal on the break at the half-hour mark – basically the first time Montréal even entered the attacking third – then scored another via a towering header two minutes later. Jalen Neal then got one on a set piece 10 minutes into the second half.

A consolation goal from Ondrej Lingr made for the 3-1 final. I, very obviously, did not have a "Montréal win in Texas" on my Bingo card.

Houston have now lost two straight home games against teams they should’ve beaten with ease, and did so while generating (and missing, obviously), chance after chance after chance. Good chances, too.

This all comes after they’d taken 10 points from four games, including a couple of really impressive wins (2-0 vs. Minnesota; 3-0 at NYCFC).

I can’t figure them out.

5. A few Minnesota fans got upset at my Supporters’ Shield column from a week and a half ago when I didn’t list the Loons as a team that had a credible shot at winning the thing. Their performance in Saturday’s 4-2 home loss to San Diego is why.

When all you can do is sit in and absorb, you:

Against mid and bad teams? Minnesota are a wagon. Against good teams? I don’t think you can concede this much of the ball in good spots, because good teams know how to turn that possession into good shots:

4. RSL broke their seven-game winless skid with a pretty comfortable 2-0 win over visiting D.C. United on Saturday night. There was a lot to like about this one from the hosts, though nothing more than 18-year-old homegrown attacker Zavier Gozo getting on the board yet again:

That is a really well-disguised finish.

This is Gozo’s best spot right now – he’s more of a second forward (notice how he instantly recognizes to attack the space in behind when Ariath Piol drops in with his hold-up play) than any kind of a winger or a playmaking 10 – and Pablo Mastroeni has done a good job of weaponizing him a bit in the past few weeks.

3. Orlando made an early Martín Ojeda goal in semi-transition stand up for a 1-0 win at Colorado, snapping a little two-game losing streak. Absolutely nothing fancy about this from the Cats, who went in with the idea of a 1-0 and came out with three points and a job well done.

The Rapids give up a lot of goals in transition and semi-transition, and they really miss Zack Steffen. They are now fractionally below the playoff line on PPG.

2. The Fire are fractionally above the playoff line in the East on PPG despite what must’ve been a pretty disappointing 2-0 home loss to Nashville (at least it wasn’t 7-2 this time). They squandered multiple chances to go up 1-0 in the first half, including a golden opportunity from Jonathan Bamba about 20 minutes in, and then a great look from the other winger, Maren Haile-Selassie, just before the break.

And so they got punished. As has been the story for almost three months now, Hany Mukhtar and Sam Surridge got their looks, and Hany Mukhtar and Sam Surridge finished their looks. Nashville are now 11 unbeaten in all competitions and up to third in the East.

“We weren't good enough in decisive moments,” Fire head coach Gregg Berhalter said in the postgame. “I think we played a good match. I think there were really good moments in the match, but in the deciding moments, in the penalty boxes, we weren't good enough.

“We had a number of opportunities to score. We didn't do so. We gave away, I think, two poor goals, if I’m honest. And when you do that, it's difficult to win games.”

The Fire had been 6W-1L-1D in their last eight across all competitions heading into the weekend, so this was a bit of a wake-up call that there’s still a gap between them and the best in the conference.

And Nashville are very much part of that group. Not only are they winning (or taking quality draws), but they’re doing so in different ways. As Ben Wright pointed out for SixOneFiveSoccer, the final 30 minutes from the ‘Yotes wasn’t absorb-and-counter; it was, instead, a vicious press with which they smothered the hosts, upping the intensity and taking Bamba and Brian Gutiérrez out of the game.

1. And finally, what better way to celebrate your MLS debut than with our Face of the Week?

That’s 20-year-old Brazilian center back Álvaro Augusto, who went the full 90 in FC Dallas’s dominant 4-2 win at Sporting KC.

I’m not sure exactly what to read into it – the vibes are still good for Sporting, but they’re letting everybody get on the ball and have fun these days – but it was los Toros’ first win since late April. They’ll happily take the three points and hope this time, the performance leads to something sustainable ahead.