Jesus Ferreira will have enjoyed his homecoming, I imagine, getting his new club’s first road win (and 2nd overall) on the season.
For Dallas, this was a bad loss against a team on paper they should beat at home. This will be a loss that will take some serious self-analysis on their part to figure out what went wrong and how to go forward.
“We were trying to do a lot of things, and some of it worked, some of it not so much.”
FCD’s Logan Farrington
Dallas now sits 8th in the West with 11 points and a -1 goal difference.
Let’s break it down.
Lineups and Tactics
Coach Eric Quill, sort of stuck with the Diamond-4 (or 4-3-1-2 as he calls it). I say sort of, because the broadcast, which gets to talk to the coaches ahead of time, said it was going to be a 4-2-3-1. And yet on the FCD pre-game show, Steve Davis said that despite the 4-2-3-1 talk on the pregame show, he thought it would be more like the diamond we’ve been seeing. Which it was. More on this down below.
Kaick was the choice to replace the injured Sebastian Lletget (out approximately 8 weeks,) making his first MLS start. Anderson Julio, predictably, came in for Leo Chu.
47th minute, just before halftime, Logan Farrington came on for the injured Petar Musa. Coach Quill says it’s an ankle sprain, but the severity was TBD in the post-game.
58th minute, Leo Chu and Show Cafumana came on for Kaick and Patrickson Delgado.
75th minute, Tsiki Ntsabeling and Pedrinho came on for Ramiro and Nolan Norris.
Seattle was in a 3-4-3 with our old friend Jesus Ferreira on the wing.
At halftime, Seattle brought on Kim Kee-Hee and Danny Leyva for Pedro de la Vega and Jackson Ragen.
73rd minute, Reed Baker-Whiting and Cody Baker came on for Danny Musovski and Kalani Kossa-Rienzi.
Then, one last late one to help close out the game, Georgi Minoungou came on for Paul Rothrock.
Goals
0-1 Seattle Sounders goal. 17th minute. Pedro de la Vega, who isn’t closed down by Patrickson Delgado, pings it off the post. Danny Musoski – who is apparently also called “the Moose” – reacts quickly and puts in the rebound. No, he’s not offside.
“We gave away too many chances from distance, and they found confidence in our inability to close them down. They scored a great first goal from a guy being open in space, and our reaction to the turnover is why he was open and scored.”
FCD Coach Eric Quill
Oddly enough, the 17th minute is the exact same minute that Atlanta United scored last week. What’s up with that?
Lo Bueno
My FC Dallas Man of the Match was Maarten Paes, mostly for this absolute stunner of a save. True world-class on that one. (He did have 3 saves total.)
Nolan Norris and Oz Urhughide continue to be the bright spots defensively. 2/2 on tackles each, 1 and 2 blocks, 2 and 3 intercepts, 7 and 6 recoveries, and 4 and 3 clears. Oz threw in 6 for 6 on Aerial duels. Norris did get his 1st yellow card of the season, and that’s probably why he got lifted. With Marco Farfan hurt, Quill can’t risk a Norris suspension.
Camino del Medio
Tactically, it felt like Coach Quill tried to have his cake and eat it too, getting caught trying to have Delgado play two positions as a hybrid 8/wing. It didn’t really work. You can see from the shape where Delgado is listed as LW but was actually playing (as Steve Davis warned us) as an 8. Yet his efforts to move up pulled Ramiro and Kaick out of the middle. Musa and Acosta ended up holding hands quite a bit, when Acosta wasn’t going wide looking for the ball, and Moore got a whole half the field to himself… with which he did nothing.
Meanwhile, you can see Seattle set up to clog the middle and easily accomplish the objective. How Dallas, a team that doesn’t want the ball, ended up with 57% possession against a team that, coming in, had the 2nd highest number of passes and percentage of possession in MLS is hard to fathom.
“I don’t think we’ve got up to the pace of the game, we were too stretched, and we didn’t really have that fighting mentality when we went down. We normally can come back from games, but that didn’t happen today. We knew that they were going to press high. It is just disappointing that we didn’t really play the way we know.”
FC Dallas’ Osaze Urhoghide
Lucho Acosta didn’t save the day, but perhaps not from lack of trying. His numbers continue to be mind-boggling. Even in this one, 7 shot-creating actions, 10 progressive passes, 5 progressive carries. If there was a failing, perhaps it was going 2/10 in take-ons, getting just 2 shots, and having the bulk of his play out near midfield.
Tsiki Ntsabeling, attempting to play left back, was comical. We’ll leave it at that.
I was looking forward to seeing Show Cafumana back, but he looked like he wasn’t moving all that well to me. Man, what happened to that guy for it to have taken him this long to even get his limited minutes? Still, the 91% passing was nice. He did have one progressive carry and kept it pretty clean with just 1 miscontrol. 25 touches in 33 minutes, so at least he was involved in the game.
Muy Feo
Getting outshot 16 to 10 at home and 4 to 1 (or 0) on target isn’t good. Dallas simply couldn’t get forward and into good spots. They even struggled to get out of their own half all night. Fbref gave FCD 0 shots on target, MLS gave FCD 1… to Ramiro.
“I felt like they had a better mentality that we couldn’t match, and we let it dictate the game… …It was a choppy game with no rhythm, and we did not generate enough in the attack. We need to figure out why.”
Coach quill
I was looking forward to Anderson Julio being back, and he only did marginally better than Leo Chu the last 2 weeks. Julio at least had 1 progressive pass, 3 progressive carries, and was 1/2 in his take-ones with his paltry 27 touches. His 3 shots in 90 minutes tied Petar Musa’s 3 shots in 45. Ugh. Although neither got one on target.
Patrickson Delgado simply couldn’t find the game. Norris and Urhoghide behind him at 59 and 63 touches, Lucho Acosta in front had 77… and Delgado? Just 33. He did manage 5 progressive passes into the final third with the limited amount of the ball he saw, but it wasn’t impactful with only 1 shot-creating action and an xGA of 0.0. Defensively? Little to show with just 1 intercept and 1 clear. 0 tackles, 0 blocks, 0/1 on challenges. Not good.
This is the first time I can recall whoscored.com saying a team did nothing well. Not great, Bob.
I’m sorry but Acosta was awful. He killed most of the attacks by over dribbling or trying to force passes into areas where there wasn’t any space. You can rack up a lot of stats when everyone feeds you the ball, but it’s what you do with it that matters and in this game he was incredibly wasteful. It’s like a basketball player that scores 20 points but takes 25 shots to do so. It’s totally inefficient and usually means you lose – which is exactly what happened in this game.