Revs forced into high press, gave up too much space, says Delamea

FOXBOROUGH — Not shy about being critical about his own squad mates or taking ownership of his own mistakes in a match, Revolution center back Antonio Delamea is always honest in his assessments.

And following the 2-0 loss to Columbus in the home opener Saturday, the Slovenian didn’t mince words when asked for his take; after all, he had a good view on the left side of the alignment, and thanks to his hard work found himself poised to make several Crew attacks fizzle out.

Delamea recorded six takeaways — three in each half — to keep the Black and Yellow at bay, including in the second half when Columbus wanted a second goal.

“I feel like now when I’m thinking about the game, we didn’t do a good job being on the ball and (were) defending all the time,” Delamea said. “We tried to high press in the second half because we were forced to, but unfortunately, Diego (Fagundez) missed the penalty; if he had scored, the game would have gone in different ways. Because we were chasing the result, we had to high press; we lost a lot of energy, and we made mistakes, especially on the easy passes, and I think that cost us.”

Delamea, who is starting his third season in New England following a successful stint at then-Slovenian champions Olimpija Ljubljana, noted that the defending was not the problem Saturday.

The problem was not getting on the scoreboard first.

“We look at goals and you see the score; they had three chances and scored twice,” he said. “And I don’t really think we did an overall bad job in our defensive line but when they score from the first chance, and then we were forced to chase them, it totally changed the game and yeah, we need to do better. We need to score first, and then everything’s easier.”

The Revs were not industrial in attack against the Crew, with 16 of 23 passes into the penalty area without meeting a navy blue jersey. They did not create, and found the intensity dropping after the first 10 minutes of the match, which saw Delamea helping to keep the ball on the Columbus side of the midfield line.

Yet as Columbus penetrated through and gained a foothold in the match — “I think one of the reasons as I’m thinking back is that they create 5-v-3 in the midfield and we didn’t do a good job there by pressing, so we weren’t aggressive enough. We just let them play, and we were defending for much of the first half,” he said — Delamea had to step things up.

That continued into the second half.

“(Columbus penetrated) because there was a lot of space. They out-ran us and out-numbered us in the midfield, so I was pretty much, especially in the second half, 1-v-1 against (Gyasi) Zardes. That’s one of the reasons why we had so much work to do.”