Data Dump (Ft Lauderdale Away)

Hey-oooooooooo! We won! Not only did we beat FtLCF but we beat the ref. I still can’t get over how bad the missed call was on their first goal.

They scored off of this beautifully handled build up. pic.twitter.com/DaI3qVSO4z

— Ben Turner (@Union_Omaha_Ben) October 1, 2020

My favorite part is that all three FtLCF players start walking away since they saw the handball as well. Ok, #refrant completed let’s dive in!

1) Toby in midfield

Gotta love it when Jay calls his shots. On the post game pod after the Richmond game he said that Toby would “feature” on Wednesday. Certain pundits thought this might be 15 to 30 minutes. Instead, ten days after leaving Kenya, Toby made his debut, started for us and went the full 90′ with a yellow card. He picked that card up in the 1st half and Jay made all five subs anyway. I can only imagine how impressive this young man has been in his time with the team. His stats were really impressive too.

Those are eye popping, to be honest. I didn’t include offensive stats since they were all zeros, but in terms of defensive effort, wow. Let’s compare Toby to our three fantastic midfielders.

Another effort like that and Toby could lead the team in tackles won and interceptions. I’m sold. For fun, check out this heatmap.

Maybe the most impressive heat map I’ve seen from a midfielder all year.

2) Devin in Elma’s role

Count me among those who thought adding Toby to the team was adding strength to an area we don’t need strength, our midfield. But the MOST interesting thing that came out of the addition of Toby was putting Devin up top.

I talked to Devin for 70 minutes about his career and he never mentioned if he had ever played forward. But watching him play all, he is honestly the player most similar in style to Elma. Indefatigable, all energy, all action, relentless on the press, the Elma of our midfield. With a legit midfield star on our hands in Toby (see point #1) and a slide that felt endless, Wednesday night was the perfect time to try something crazy.

Except it wasn’t that crazy, in fact, it made so much sense I was mad I didn’t think of it. Not a great sign to be starting two midfielders as your forwards, but hard to argue with the results, amiright? Evan Conway had a goal and an assist and EVD came on to score the game winner (duh, EVD4MVP). Let’s see if Devin looked on paper like Elma.

The fact that I had to triple check to see which person was which was all you need to know. I’d like to see this formation for another game to continue to evaluate whether this is the right thing for us. We could have scored 4 or 5 goals in that game and won 5-1. It is even more impressive because of some crazy…

3) Passing stats

Oh man, I do love a game where we have 30% possession, but it feels like we dominated and only didn’t win in a blowout because of bad refereeing. Look at these numbers.

An all around great performance for us. It’s a lot easy to see our refusal to quit when we score goals and win, but this time has ice in their veins. Can’t wait for Saturday!