Week 14 of the 23rd MLS season has now entered the books. We're now solidly into mid-season, with nearly 40 percent of the year completed.
Let's dive in:
Know Your Truth
I'm old enough to remember way back to the middle of this decade, when FC Dallas were MLS darlings. They had a young and fast and creative and hungry and well-balanced team that mostly went out there and won soccer games. They won enough games to claim 60 points in 2015, and then did it again in 2016. That made them the first team in MLS history to post back-to-back 60-point seasons, and while you don't get a trophy for that you can at the very least say "You know, we played a lot of good soccer and sent our fans home happy a lot of times."
I've been a fan. I remember rooting for miserably bad teams, and for mediocre teams, and on very rare occasions for pretty good teams. And I have to tell you, being happy from March to October is pretty great. Sure it can get ruined with an unlucky PK shootout or an unluckier injury come the playoffs, but you just can't beat eight straight months of good soccer.
The above is why I love the Supporters' Shield – which Dallas won in 2016, along with the U.S. Open Cup – beyond all other trophies. It means you gave your fans a season's worth of entertainment. Sure, it doesn't have the climactic feel of a MLS Cup title, but I'll take one season over one game.
Dallas, after an almost inexplicably awful 2017, are just about back to where they were two years ago. They won three games this past week, starting with a savvy, 1-0 counterattacking win in Toronto two Fridays ago, then a hold-on-for-dear-life 3-2 over the Galaxy in LA on Wednesday, and then finally a 2-1 over visiting LAFC on Saturday night. They are now 7-1-5 on the season – the only team in the league with just one loss – which is good for second in the West. They are unbeaten in six (4-0-2) and while they haven't been overwhelming (all four of those wins are by a single goal), they've done what Dallas used to do: Get a lead, then counter teams to death when the opportunity presents.
Now, above and beyond anything else I'll maintain my ongoing belief that Oscar Pareja fixed what broke inside of this team last year by finally remembering how he got here (Play Your Kids!) and finally implementing a certain amount of squad rotation. Hunger and commitment are often meaningless cliches but you can not look at this Dallas team and fail to see a bunch of guys who look like they're playing to keep their jobs. Nobody's getting a free ride like they were in the second half of last year, and that matters.
Beyond that, though, Pareja deserves some credit for how he's inventively deployed playmaker Mauro Diaz in recent weeks. Diaz is, of course, a No. 10 – a central attacking playmaker. But we've fairly often seen him wide on the left, which is a deployment that's sometimes started from the first kick and sometimes has been an in-game adjustment.
Here is his heat map vs. the Galaxy, a game in which he started at left wing and picked up two assists:
Here's his heat map from the win over LAFC, when he swapped to the left wing at about the 20-minute mark:
That's... not where you gameplan for Mauro Diaz. He starts central and drifts left; he doesn't start left and drift central.
But now he does. And now Pareja's prepared to throw both different looks at you over the course of a single half, let alone a single 90 minutes.
“They came out with a lot of people in the middle,” Pareja said of LAFC. “We tried to match that with a variation and it did not work. When we moved Mauro to the left as a false winger and moved Roland Lamah into the middle, I think we settled then.”
They did. Dallas have officially put last year's nightmare and this spring's Concacaf Champions League embarrassment behind them thanks to better luck with injuries, better coaching from Pareja and both hunger and commitment. And while there might not be a trophy waiting for them at the end of this particular journey, they're giving their fans a reason to go home happy most every weekend. That's a great way to spend the summer.
Make the Unsafe Choice
Real Salt Lake, like Dallas, earned themselves nine points this past week. It started last Saturday with a 1-0 win at Seattle, which was followed up with a late and gutty and a little bit fortunate 2-1 home win over Houston midweek. Then they beat Seattle 2-0 at home this past Saturday, which rocketed the Claret-and-Cobalt all the way up to third in the Western Conference on points (they're fourth in PPG).
They've won four of their last five, and have done it while sort of rediscovering who they are. They didn't have Albert Rusnak the past two games, for one. And Bofo Saucedo – the greatest Bofo in MLS history – has come into the rotation with Joao Plata nursing injuries/underperforming, and has staked his claim for the full-time job. Brooks Lennon is undergoing a full conversion to right back, and Danny Acosta is finally out of Mike Petke's doghouse (and if he keeps playing like this he will never be in it again) and Corey Baird has beaten out veteran Luis Silva and high-priced winter import Alfredo Ortuño to be the starting center forward.
Plus the central defense is working again:
As it stands there are now five Homegrown Players (Saucedo, Lennon, Acosta, Baird and Glad) in the RSL starting XI, which is exactly how you want to see an academy investment pay off.
The offseason signings haven't paid off quite so handsomely, but Petke found what looks like a workable solution over the past couple of games by using Damir Kreilach higher upfield. He seems to have scrapped the lead-footed Kreilach/Kyle Beckerman central midfield pairing that caused this team so many defensive issues through mid-May, and playing Kreilach as a No. 10 has actually had a positive impact on the team's overall attacking bent:
That's a network passing graph from RSL's 2-1 win over Houston made using Opta data. Each circle represents the location of the aggregate touch of the corresponding player – Kreilach is No. 6, Beckerman No. 5 – and the thickness of the lines connecting them represents the volume of passes exchanged. You can see that RSL were plenty balanced and compact, and that Sunny (No. 8) was protecting the defense.
That, plus Acosta being one of the league's better defensive fullbacks, and the Glad/Silva combo getting healthy probably means we're going to see RSL start looking more like the team that was the West's best in the second half of last year. Acosta's just got to be consistent and Petke's got to avoid the temptation to put Kreilach and Beckerman together again.
We'll see how long this keeps up. Just as with Dallas there will now be players, young and old, who will need to scrap their way back onto the field. Beckerman is still a liability in an open game, there's no trustworthy third center back, and who knows if the kids will keep scoring. RSL have questions.
But for the past five weeks they've also had a lot of answers. Granted, it hasn't been against murderer's row – Seattle have scored seven goals and been shut out eight times so far in 2018. Still, you play the team in front of you. And in RSL's case these days, you beat them.
A few more things to ponder...
10. The Revs didn't have quite as good a week as RSL and Dallas, but four points from two games – home games, but still – against Atlanta and RBNY is pretty damn good, and went a long way toward steadying what had become a slightly wobbly ship.
New England were fortunate to get the draw on Wednesday, trailing most of the game and getting an outstanding performance in net from Matt Turner before a late Teal Bunbury penalty gave them the 1-1 result. On Saturday they came back from 1-0 down to win 2-1 over visiting New York.
Bunbury got another goal in that one and, well, he's been doing that a lot lately:
Bunbury's now got eight goals on the season, one off his career high set way back in 2011, when he was a 21-year-old with a lot of potential.
He's now 28 and entered the season wearing a "fell short" tag, and I'll go ahead and admit I did not expect this. But then again, maybe I should have – we have been, are, and looks like we'll remain the nation of late-developing attacking talent.
9. In addition to their 3-2 loss at Dallas, the Galaxy went to Portland on Saturday and got themselves a 1-1 draw. This was a great result (those mark the first home points the Timbers have dropped in 2018) even if LA continue to look very much like a work in progress.
LA have now mostly beaten the teams they should beat, lost to the teams they should lose to, and picked up a couple of useful road draws (at Vancouver back in March, and now this one).
They have been a punchline because their defense has been so bad and because their attacking pieces are an ill-fitting mishmash. But I don't think this team is just going to evaporate.
8. I don't think Houston's going to just evaporate, either, but this wasn't a great week for them. They had a result at their feet in Sandy before failing to properly defend a late corner, and then they went to Montreal and found a way to lose 1-0 to an Impact team that had been death spiraling.
I type the same thing every week about Houston: Their defense keeps costing them results, and the points they drop now can and maybe will be killer come October.
As for Montreal, Saturday represented easily their best defensive performance of the season:
"Not a lot going on here" is actually a massive improvement at Stade Saputo. Perhaps Remi Garde's scorched earth motivational tactics worked this time.
7. I think it's fair to say that Philly had the weirdest week of anybody. They played a great first 45 minutes against Chicago on Wednesday, and then a bad second 45 minutes, and still pretty convincingly won 3-1. Then on Saturday they went to Atlanta and all hell broke loose in a 3-1 loss that saw both Alejandro Bedoya and Haris Medunjanin sent off in the aftermath of a penalty awarded after Josef Martinez had been taken down on the break.
The Union are a much better team than they were in March, and a lot of that had to do with the veteran central midfield doing yeoman's work taking care of the ball. It'll be telling to see how they cope next week against a TFC team that's 1) below them in the standings, and 2) showing signs of life.
6. The problem for TFC is that they lived only for 65 minutes against Crew SC on Saturday. The Reds became the 13th team in MLS history to take a 3-0 lead and somehow not win, eventually having to settle for a 3-3 draw against a Columbus side that did murder on set pieces.
Full thoughts here:
5. Chicago's also in the mix out East, hunting for that sixth spot. They recovered well enough from their midweek loss at Philly to come home and drop a 2-1 result on the Quakes.
The Fire did not play particularly well, and I think it's fair to say that San Jose let them off the hook at least a little bit as this one could've ended 2-2. But it didn't, and Chicago are still hanging around, and if they can keep hanging around maybe they catch some sort of "Nicolas Lodeiro, 2016"-style lightning in a bottle during the summer transfer window.
4. NYCFC did what they should've on Saturday, beating visiting Orlando City 3-0 to remain the only perfect home team in the league. It was an unsettled performance, though, as once again Patrick Vieira messed with both the formation (3-5-2 in the first half, 4-3-3 in the second) and lineup (David Villa didn't start!).
"I know that David is a top player, I know what I can get from him so just for this game I wanted to try some things," Vieira said afterward. "There was some good and some bad but at the end I think when you have the quality players that we have up front, it allows me to play and make some tough decisions. This is part of my job and it’s not easy. It’s not easy to leave David out today."
I mostly understand what Vieira's doing here (a lack of depth and squad rotation has cost this team in recent years), and I don't think there's been anything particularly wrong with their recent form. Yes, they've taken a couple of losses, but they've also faced by far the toughest schedule in the league this far.
Orlando City came off a six-game winning streak and entered a tough, 13-game stretch four games ago. They've lost all four.
3. Our Pass of the Week comes from Roger Espinoza in Sporting KC's 4-1 win over Minnesota United. Espinoza spotted Alexi Gomez jogging behind the ball, which left the lane open for him to slip Cristian Lobato through:
Gomez appears to be the latest in a long line of questionable signings by the Loons, and was replaced at halftime by another new arrival, Maximiano. Maximiano picked up two yellows in 18 minutes and MNUFC played the rest of the game with 10 men.
2. The Whitecaps broke their winless skid on Friday night, going down to Commerce City and beating the Rapids 2-1. It played out as expected: Colorado made silly mistakes when pushing numbers forward and got roasted in transition, while their defenders constantly struggled to contain both Yordy Reyna and Alphonso Davies in 1v1 situations.
Vancouver haven't won much – this was only their second win in their last 10 outings – but they're hanging around down in sixth place in the West, and their attack is fun literally every single week.
Not so for the Rapids, who became the first team since 2014 to bank seven straight losses. They do not look like a team that spent significant blood and treasure this offseason on a host of imports who were supposed to fix a miserable 2017. Eight points through 12 games is officially the worst start in club history.
1. And finally, there could be only one Face of the Week:
This kid gets it.
