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We're into Week 5. No excuses for early-season rust or jitters anymore.
Let's take a look at a few things:
City's Full
Orlando City SC are the league's last remaining perfect team, with two wins from two outings. On Saturday they'll take their first trip away from central Florida, making a stop in Columbus to face Crew SC (4 pm ET | UniMás; facebook.com/univisiondeportes).
The Purple Lions have been very simple and straightforward this season. They play a flat-ish 4-4-2 with inverted wide midfielders, hit a ton of long-balls (24.4 percent of their passes are 35+ meters, which is more than anybody in the league), and build off the forward pairing of Cyle Larin and Carlos Rivas.
Those two guys are pretty good:
Take this halftime break to enjoy Cyle Larin & Carlos Rivas working together. This is fun. pic.twitter.com/z3gNzcJNFg
— Matthew Doyle (@MLSAnalyst) March 20, 2017
That's something close to the Platonic ideal of an OCSC goal this year, but the reality is they're usually even more direct and no-frills than that. Which makes sense, since they're still figuring out their starting central midfield, and starting backline, and they're playing without Kaká, and it kind of just makes sense to get it up front and hope Larin and Rivas can make some magic.
It's not how I expect them to play all year, mind you. But they're doing what must be done at the moment, and they have six points from two games because of it.
I'll also be watching: I wrote about the Kekuta Manneh trade on Thursday, and what that could mean for the future of the Crew SC midfield. I'm also curious about what will happen on the Columbus backline, as their hoped-for improvement has been somewhat off the mark thus far.
Waiting For a Sign
New England started the season in a 4-4-2 diamond, with Juan Agudelo as the No. 10 and Lee Nguyen as the second forward. After two games and one goal it was pretty clearly not working, so Jay Heaps swapped their roles.
Agudelo responded with two goals last weekend, and Nguyen grabbed a goal and an assist in a 5-2 win over Minnesota United. It was encouraging.
But playing the Loons at home is a vastly different sort of challenge from traveling across the continent to play at Portland, which is Sunday's task (9 pm ET | ESPN2; MLS Live in Canada). New England will probably play a tight diamond again:
That's a network passing graph made from Opta data. The circles represent the location of each player's aggregate touch, while the thickness of the lines represent the volume of passes traded back and forth.
You can see they had a lot of the ball, and particularly on that left side with left back Chris Tierney pushed way up. This makes the Revs more dangerous, but it also makes them more susceptible to long-balls over the top (the diamond ALWAYS invites that), specifically targeted at the left side of the defense. This is exactly how FC Dallas got both their goals in Week 3's 2-1 victory over New England.
Is that reason enough to play a little more conservatively, given Portland's high-powered attack? Probably. But at the same time, the Revs aren't exactly great at sitting deep and playing for a point. They pretty much have to attack, which should mean an open-ish game.
I'll also be watching:David Guzman. Nguyen isn't much of a defender, which is probably why Heaps was a little hesitant to play him underneath two forwards. He'll have to do real work on Sunday, though, because if the Revs let Guzman dictate the geometry of the game then Diego Valeri will be free to roam around and just be a pure attacker.
That's bad. If you want to beat the Timbers you've got to make Valeri a cog in the midfield and just pull him out of the attacking third. If you don't... good luck.
One more thing to ponder:
Happy weekending, everybody.
