After a fast start that saw the New York Red Bulls amass 11 points over their first five matches, recent results have seen the team take a turn for the worse. With just one win in their last six matches, the stellar performances that the club enjoyed in the early going are beginning to feel like a distant memory.
The much-lauded up-tempo, high-pressing game plan that had been the key to their early season success has failed to bear fruit in the attacking third recently – the Red Bulls have scored just five goals in their last six games while suffering their second consecutive shutout in a 2-0 home loss to Philadelphia on Sunday.
No opponent has truly overwhelmed New York this season, but controlling possession and creating chances do little to help a team’s place in the league table without an end product to show for it.
While he’s not overly concerned, that’s a fact that is not lost on head coach Jesse Marsch.
“I’m more focused on the process – how we play, how we command games, how we handle moments, how we approach each day and each game and each day – than I am on pure results right now,” Marsch told reporters on Tuesday morning. “As the season goes on, obviously the results will become more important because that’s how you get yourself in situations to compete for a championship.
“It’d be hard to be too critical, other than purely results, with what we’ve done. To get overly concerned with the results at this point would be a mistake.”
Despite cooling off considerably, Marsch insists that the process he and his coaching staff have set forth will lead the team back into the win column. It may be hard to stand unwaveringly by a formula that seems to be faltering, but Marsch is not ready to back down anytime soon.
“I don’t think there’s any need to change what we’re doing based on the fact that if you look at the overall impact that we have on every game, it’s pretty strong, it’s a pretty strong grasp,” Marsch continued. “It’s just a matter of turning that grasp into more goals and more wins.”
Doing that is, of course, easier said than done. After getting the jump on some unsuspecting sides in the early stages of the season, opponents have gone to the drawing board and concocted a strategy that has managed to stifle the New York attack and taken advantage of their mistakes in the midfield.
“I think we started out strong and maybe surprised some teams,” midfielder Sacha Kljestan said. “Now teams are maybe a little bit more ready for us and they understand our game plan a bit.
“We have this high-pressing motto, but we also have to understand that when teams sit back that we have to have more patience.”
Goalkeeper Luis Robles agreed.
“I think in the beginning of the season we caught a lot of teams off guard,” he said. “Teams now game plan for us and they understand that we have quality players in the final third. They’ve found a way to frustrate us.”
While the New York players have noticed a change in the way opponents have prepared for the Red Bulls’ style of play, their head coach was quick to state otherwise.
“I would call what Philly did this weekend as basically survival mode,” Marsch said. “I wouldn’t call it a game plan. We were on top of the game from almost every level for 57 minutes.”
The frustration level may be high, but there isn’t any panic within the Red Bulls locker room. The veterans within the team have called for calm, placing their trust in Marsch to correct the issues that have befallen the team during their subpar stretch.
“It’s a long season,” Robles said. “We’re going to play the same [teams] over and over, so they’re going to have a better sense of who we are. But on the flip side, we have to have a better sense of how to break them down and understanding how they’re going to play against us. That’s something that I know the coaches are intelligent enough to figure out for us. Then as we implement it, I also believe in the quality of this team that we’re going to find a way to break teams down when they play like that.”
