A few stray thoughts from Sunday's 3-2 defeat at the hands of TFC:
Did the diamond in the midfield help? In a way, yes. In a way, no.
You’ll probably have noticed Paul Mariner gushing about the new system that Brad Friedel has instituted — or at least instituted for Sunday’s match at TFC — and Teal Bunbury, on Revolution Postgame Live, spoke about it highly.
“Everyone’s putting the work in, and I think that’s what it took to play this new kind of formation, a 4-4-2 with a diamond in the midfield,” Bunbury said, crediting the work load of Scott Caldwell and Luis Caicedo.
But let’s ask this question: did the Revolution have the right personnel out there to pull it off?
When you look at the starting XI — Brad Knighton, the four defenders, plus all three available defensive midfielders — it provided, in theory, plenty of cover for when the Reds had the ball and put it in dangerous areas.
That only left three spots for attacking-minded players: Carles Gil, Diego Fagundez, and Bunbury.
I think playing the third defensive midfielder was the kicker in all of this. Regardless of who shouldn’t have started, the Revs have proven they play well with four or even more attacking options. And while New England did some good things with the three options for most of the match, they didn’t do enough to crack the code of Toronto’s defense.
And what about the options Friedel brought on: Juan Agudelo replaced Fagundez in the 70th; he tried to make things occur, but didn’t have the last pass down. Cristian Penilla and Juan Fernando Caicedo came on for Caldwell and Luis Caicedo, but outside of a couple of Penilla touches, nothing happened. Those were late subs, granted.
And what was Wilfried Zahibo doing on a few of those late forays into the box? Sometimes you need to know your limitations, and despite being tall, he’s taking opportunities away from offensive-minded players.
What goes around, comes around
We mentioned it in the Match Report, and we’ll mention it again here: the touch by Toni Delamea just before the half was incredibly ill-advised, and it led to a go-ahead goal for TFC. With Jay Chapman pretty much standing in the middle of Lake Ontario, Delamea should have just let the ball go by him, and the assistant referee’s flag would have gone up like it did in this case. The AR couldn’t see Delamea’s touch.
But a rather similar occurrence went New England’s way about 11 months ago, at home, to Sporting Kansas City: with Bunbury practically in Downtown Wrentham, Roger Espinoza had toe-poked the ball forward away from Fagundez, and Bunbury calmly scored the lone goal of the night. VAR confirmed it, and that’s that.
Here's how @TealBunb's goal went down. #NERevs pic.twitter.com/noaajOOIV8
— New England Revolution (@NERevolution) April 29, 2018