What went wrong against Austin FC?

RSL lost 2-1, losing only their second home opener in club history.

Apologies for this newsletter not going out first thing in the morning to greet you in your inbox with its shining face, but two things: 1) I wanted to rewatch the game and talk about it, and 2) there was never any chance this newsletter would have a shining face today.

See, losing your home opener? That’s not great. It’s not technically unprecedented for Real Salt Lake, but it’s sure close. It’s happened once in the team’s history, and that one was considerably worse: a 5-1 loss in 2018 to Los Angeles FC. That game also featured the MLS debut of Alfredo Ortuño.

And it’s not like teams don’t lose their openers sometimes — Austin, Charlotte, FC Dallas and Vancouver each lost theirs (Vancouver at our hands! — er, feet?) But Real Salt Lake has historically been a team that has held itself to a high standard, and if we’d like to reduce that standard, I suppose we could do that.

If it feels like this might be an overreaction to a single game, I think it’s important to note that the team simply hasn’t been good since the midway point of last year. In RSL’s last 21 competitive matches, the team has a total of five wins, three of which have come at home. A 25 percent winning percentage is cause to be frustrated, no matter the circumstance.

Lucas Muller | Wasatch Soccer Sentinel

“Goals change games”

After the match, Real Salt Lake coach Pablo Mastroeni dropped the timeless quote: “Goals change games,” then talked about how the game would have been different if the team had scored another goal. And obviously enough, that’s true. Nobody can honestly dispute that.

But you know what? Austin scored through Jon Gallagher in the 9th minute. That’s an awfully early time to concede a goal. Sure, if RSL had scored a second goal, that would have helped, but the team was on the back foot for just 20 minutes throughout. Goals change games, but not conceding goals probably changes them more. Let’s talk about how RSL conceded both of those first-half goals.

Big gaps in the midfield

Mastroeni’s high-verticality approach requires that players start pushing forward early in possession rather than building slowly, and a necessary outcome of that is that big gaps can start to appear. Combine that with a setup that presses high up the field — or at least feigns at high pressure, and I’ll get to that — and large gaps can start to appear.

This is immediately before RSL concedes the first goal. Jon Gallagher gets the ball in a wide position and immediately cuts inside. Bryan Oviedo doesn’t have help inside, so he has to try to make a defensive run, of which he does a reasonably poor job, having anticipated the player moving outside. And that’s probably the right individual decision from Oviedo, but only if there’s help in some way, be it a winger, a midfielder, or another defender.

Gallagher continues the run, and Oviedo doesn’t do particularly much to put him off it. Braian Ojeda is too high up the field to make a meaningful defensive effort here, and Jasper Löffelsend is tasked with Sebastián Druissi — leaving him wide open in this situation would be a mistake. We should immediately ask ourselves here what Ojeda’s done to put himself in a disadvantageous position, because these things all have causes. I’m not going to sit here and blame any individual player for their positioning, because I think there are reasons for each of those. Let’s rewind five seconds, because that gives us an even better sense of what’s going on.

See those two figures on the right side of your screen? Those are Damir Kreilach and Rubio Rubin. Both are high up the pitch and not contributing defensively in the slightest, unless they somehow think Austin’s going to be making a weird, unwise backpass. We’re defending — at best — in a 4-4-2, and the ‘2’ simply isn’t present defensively in the slightest in this situation.

As a result, Braian Ojeda is here trying to put pressure on Owen Wolff, Jefferson Savarino is filling the channel, and there is no support for Oviedo. Ojeda starts making that run back immediately, but he’s left in a disadvantageous position.

This confirms two things to me: First, either Mastroeni sees Damir Kreilach as a striker, given this positioning, or Kreilach is wildly out of position. Austin has found an easy path through RSL’s midfield because the midfield has a player completely missing. Kreilach may have been pressing a defender here, but to what end? Austin has the ball further up the field, and it doesn’t particularly matter if Kreilach is near a center back, hoping to press them into a turnover. Second, RSL is playing a 4-4-2 these days, and Kreilach is not an attacking midfielder in this setup. We’re an empty bucket of a midfield, and Austin poked a hole in the bucket.

Of course, Gallagher’s goal was wonderful, hitting the top corner from well outside the box. It’s an extremely low-xG goal, but if you give players a run inside and a free shot, xG matters considerably less. The thing that gives me some consternation from his shooting position is that he realistically has three good non-shooting options: Ethan Finlay on his left with Andrew Brody on the wrong side, Gyasi Zardes centrally with Justen Glad well off his mark, and Emiliano Rigoni on his right with a good free crossing opportunity. The center backs can’t push much forter forward given those conditions. The midfield is just chasing play, but not because of individual errors.

To me, this feels like Austin FC coach Josh Wolff knowing where the team can find a gap, and he’s given them instructions to capitalize. Perhaps it’s instead more about individual players seeing the gap and taking advantage of the situation, though, if we want to give Josh Wolff less credit.

One last torturous screen grab here before we move on to the second goal. This is an excellent frame in the replay, showing us exactly how free Gallagher is, and how potent at least one option was. You get the picture.

Let’s move to the second goal.

This is where Owen Wolff receives the ball. I could talk in depth about this one again, but you know what? This is just sloppy tactical play. Kreilach is on an island, Rubin is on an island. Löffelsend is tasked with marking Druissi, which seems, by now, to be an intentional approach. Druissi has smartly removed Löffelsend from contention here by drifting backward, and I’m just so unhappy about all this. But unlike the first goal, things get really ugly at the point of the shot, and there are multiple players who could have dealt with this.

Marcelo Silva is free, and Wolff just hammers home a shot. There are players completely free on either flank, and there’s another good midfield option should Wolff opt for that. He opts for a ridiculous shot, and it works wonders, because, as before, xG doesn’t matter if players are given free opportunities. We see Braian Ojeda trying to get involved here, but he’s late — in part because he’s had to leave his mark, Rigoni, to pursue the shot.

That both of these goals came from simple plays near the midfield stripe should be a huge red flag for Real Salt Lake. This tactical approach is ridiculous, and while it’s tempting to say we lost to two low-probability shots struck well, I think it’s more accurate to say that we lost the game due to midfield inadequacies exposed by a tactical setup that, to put it lightly, needs some work.

What did Pablo Mastroeni say about it?

First, Pablo Mastroeni — in a question about Diego Luna, so we have to extrapolate slightly — talks about RSL playing a double-pivot midfield. That’s something I’ll have to do a little more thinking about and reading about, because while it’s not a new idea, I’m struggling to grasp how it’s working in Real Salt Lake’s case.

Anyway, here’s a series of quotes from Mastroeni’s post-game press conference.

Goals change games. If we find the second one there, then it’s a completely different game. Obviously, we weren’t able to capitalize on that. The frustrating part was the amount of space we left them in midfield. We worked on a couple different schemes, so I’ve got to go back and look at the way we set up.

We don’t currently have a 6 — a destroyer — but what we do, is we’ve got a lot of graft in the midfield. … It’s a position that we’ve definitely talked about. Last year, when Everton (Luiz) left, whether it was Pablo and Jasper, Scottie and Jasper or Pablo, we felt like we could do the work and it was more ‘industry.’ But none of these players are natural-born killers in there, like a destroyer 6, but they can do the work. It’s something we’ve talked about, and something we all feel is important to make sure we have that. At that point, you can change your setup a certain way tactically. To ask any one of those guys to be the one guy that allows the other two guys to get forward would be a tough ask. We feel like the partnerships have been good, and I think tonight, Jasper and Braian played well, did a lot of great work defensively, covered some good spots. We get Pablo (Ruiz) back for the next game finally, so we’ll have some different options.

I think both those goals were from 25 yards out. The first goal, I think Gallagher hits it with his left foot, and he’s right-footed, and he hits it upper 90. It’s football. The fact that Druissi or somebody else didn’t score, and Wolff and Gallagher score — hats off to them for being brave enough to take those shots. We’ll go back and look at video to see what we need to do better to correct those moments. The only way I can explain it is, “it’s just football.”