With the road win (nice by itself), FC Dallas now has 15 season-opening wins, tied for most in MLS history with LA Galaxy and Sporting Kansas City.
“I am so happy for the FC Dallas fans tonight. They came here and got to experience an amazing first game of the season.”
FC Dallas Head Coach Eric Quill
Let’s break it down.
Lineups and Tactics
FC Dallas in Quill’s expected 4-2-3-1 (matching our prediction). So no surprises in the XI.
Pedrinho for the struggling Bernie Kamungo at the 62nd-minute mark.
Tsiki Ntsabeleng on for Ramiro at 76′ in what had to be a minute restriction given how the latter was playing. I expected the sub 10 minutes earlier.
Lucho Acosta and Anderson Julio off in the 79th for Patrickson Delgado and Logan Farrington.
Lots of straight, like-for-like subs.
4-3-3 for Dynamo and the same style of play as last year.
Nico Lideiro on for Ibrahim Aliyu in the 62nd. Then in the 85th, Gabriel Segal and Franco Escobar replaced Amine Bassi and Daniel Steres.
Finally, Erik Dueñas on for Sebastian Kowalczyk.
Goals
0-1 Houston Dynamo goal. 18th minute. Dynamo switches to the right and a nice run by Sebastian Kowalczyk is tracked by Osaze Urhoghide. Griffin Dorsey, after a combo, gets the ball into the box and Ezequiel Ponce outmuscles Sebastien Ibeagha for the header. Amine Bassi follows it up for the tap-in.
1-1 FC Dallas goal. 55th minute. What an absolute gift from Ethan Bartlow for Petar Musa. But credit to the Moose for staying cool, calm, and collected. “Cool as you like,” I expected Warren Barton to say.
2-1 FC Dallas goal. 76th minute. Nice, um, tackle… by Petar Musa to start the play. An even better outlet for Anderson Julio at pace. Julio escapes the defense easily and finishes past the keeper.
Our counter attacks were really impressive in the second half, obviously the second goal came from there. But all night long we were dangerous on the break and on the road that’s sometimes what you have to be.
Coach Eric Quill
Lo Bueno
My Man of the Match was Anderson Julio. As I said in my 3 Things, he (along with Sebastian Lletget) looked the most game-ready in the final tuneup at Atlanta and he proved that again in this one. 71% passing is nice for a striker/wing. 2 shot-creating actions, 1 goal-creating action. 2 intercepts, nice. The game-winning goal with that kind of run in the 76th minute of a season opener is impressive.
Quietly perhaps, Ramiro has a terrific game. Can’t wait to see him 90 minutes fit. We had no idea what kind of player he was going to be but he did the business as a 6. 1/2 on tackles, 4 intercepts (aka good positioning), and 8 recoveries. Here’s my favorite stat: He had 30 complete passes (91%) and 10 of them were progressive. That’s 1 in 3 passes being a line breaker. Love it. Plus, 8 passes into the final third. Only 41 touches though to Lletget’s 67, hence the quiet part.
Osaze Urhoghide had a very good start. Only once did he get overextended and make a bad foul (quite late). He mostly played quite contained and tight to his teammates with some good coverage reads. 1/2 on tackles, 4 clears, 2 blocks, 73 touches (2nd), 90% passing, 5 progressive passes, and 1/1 take-ons.
Lucho Acosta is a crazy line-breaking receiver, always making himself available. Of his 36 receptions, a staggering 13 were progressive. 8 touches in the box, 2 shot-creating actions, 2 key passes, and 2/4 on take-ons. His partnership with Musa should only go up from here.
“We know Lucho is an amazing player and we know he can bring more creativity in the attacking moments. I am happy that I have him in my team and hopefully we can create good moments this season.”
FCD Striker Petar Musa
While we would all like more shots than the 8 FC Dallas got (according to MLS) the 5 shots on goal is an amazing rate. I love to see that part. The xG of 1.9 (FBref) would have been 6th last year.
Camino del Medio
I don’t mind that Petar Musa works hard and wants to combine with teammates but I do mind that he’s coming as deep as he is out of the center forward area. But it might be exactly what Coach Quil does want as part of his system is the wings running off Musa. The Moose ended up with 5 progressive passes but only 2 shots they were both good opportunities so his 0.6 xG is by no means bad.
Muy Feo
Dallas had some trouble linking and couldn’t get up the middle into the offensive third. Most of their success came wide. You can see here the lack of action in the center channel.
Or even here you can see how Lucho Acosta had to go wide to find the ball. (Perhaps also leaving room for Lletget and Shaq Moore working down the right.
I feel like we weren’t being ourselves with the ball and we had players outside of the central structure of the game. That may have been due to nerves and not wanting to be in the stress of the game. So we talked at halftime about dropping Lletget and Ramiro underneath the first line because they were dropping deep to get the ball from our center backs out of the structure. And we need numbers in the middle of the park to be able to go at the heart of their defense, to open up the wide areas more. You can’t be a one-trick pony and just run around the edges of the game. You have to find ways to hurt them inside the game and in the second half we did a better job of fighting in the middle of the field and having sharp combinations to break through and get to the wide areas.
Coach Eric Quill
A road win is a road win, but I think we can all see where some of the defensive issues still are (a goal off a cross). It is just week one so let’s file it under a work in progress and see what comes.
Bernie Kamungo struggled to find the game and then struggled again when he did. In 61 minutes, he had only 26 touches (1 per 2.3 minutes) and just 50% passing. 0 shots, 0 progressive passes, 0 progressive carries. He did win a take-on (1/2) and had 1 shot-creating action. Flipping the wings at the half didn’t seem to help. By comparison, Logan Farrington in just 11 minutes had 10 touches (1 per minute) with 1 progressive pass and 1 progressive carry.
Heck of a win. Julio, Lucho, & Oz look LEGIT. Bernie was a shock, will Leo Chu be able to play soon?
Chu was on the bench. He can play now. Coach’s decision he didn’t.
Off topic but is there any updates on illaramendi? Is he coming back?
There is no official word, but with the season starting it’s pretty clear he’s not coming back. Ramiro effectively took his place.
I’m not certain that the lack of passes out of the central attacking areas was necessarily “bad”. It would be nice to dominate all over the pitch but it seemed that Houston’s shape prevented playing through the middle so instead of forcing it Dallas went around it. What’s significant to me is that once the ball was progressed into the attacking third Houston had a much harder time preventing preventing Dallas from receiving the ball at or inside the top of the box. If you look at the Who Scored touch map it shows a lot more touches in the central attacking zone than the pass map, especially from 30 yards in. By my count, Dallas had 10 touches within 5 yards of the D, while Houston only had one. Additionally, Houston had only 16 touches inside the penalty box, while Dallas had 26. Dallas was significantly better in generating dangerous situations once the ball got within about 30 yards of goal. Houston dominated the ball where it mostly didn’t matter.
I put in the quote in from coach where he literally said it was a problem and that they made an adjustment to try and fix it in the 2nd half, with some success.
ok i see. Really missed the quote. I looked back at the touch chart by half – there did not seem to be much difference in the touches in the central attacking area outside of the box, so i’m not sure the data bears out that much changed. However, there were more good penalty area touches in the second half, so i could see where the coach might feel that way.