Let me start off by saying if I never watch Forward Madison play at Hart Park again, that might be too soon. It is the perfect combination for a headache, a team that chokes the life out of the beautiful game and a field that is the sports field equivalent of a participation trophy. To quote some data I heard during the broadcast: there have been five 0-0 draws in League One this season and THREE of them have been at Hart Park. Watching a Madison team be “completely unable to create chances while being very good at defending” at Hart Park once this season was more than enough for me. I can’t imagine having to drive an hour to watch that dreck in person.
Before we dive in, I do want to praise this Union Omaha team though. We’ve played 14 games, earned 23 points and are 6-5-3. A normal season will have 28 games. Last year, Lansing finished 2nd on 46 points with a record of 12-10-6. So right now, we are on the same pace as the 2nd team in the league last season.
Not to transition to the Greenville game yet, but they are on pace for 64 points in a 28 game season. That is 8 points more than North Texas last year. If you take their points per game and translate it to Bundesliga or Premier League, that’s good enough for 2nd place in both leagues last year. They are a very, very, very good team.
I know other voices in this media empire have argued we are a team that hasn’t risen to the challenge when needed. I love you guys, but I disagree. The rules are the rules and this year only two teams make it to the final. But one team has run away with the league, in a league outside of the States, we’re fighting for almost nothing. In our league we are one of several teams competing for the second spot. No one, including us, have run away with second place because it is a relatively competitive league, and we are not head and shoulders above any other team. The pressure other teams have put us on is incredible, we’ve been playing must win games for weeks and we’ve bent, but not broken. It’s perfectly fair to expect results, but a bit unreasonable to expect us to be a Bayern or Liverpool or even a Greenville. (Greenville wasn’t even Greenville last year, we’re on track to do better than they did). Think about what a mitzvah it is that we’ve had literally weeks of games that matter a ton for the post-season and while we haven’t grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, we’ve shown up and shone out each and every week. I’d challenge anyone to point to a time where our team hung its head, quit trying, or sulked their way through a game or even a sequence.
If we end up on the outside looking in at the end of the season, and do a post-mortem, this game is not going to even make a “top three games we should regret” article. We kept a clean sheet and were shut out on the road by the second best defense in the league. Besides, the same thing happened to Greenville, so we are in good company. NOW, let’s dive in.
1) Madison is unbearable to watch, but very good defensively.
I think I made my feelings clear in the intro to the column, but I’m not sure my grudging respect for their defensive abilities came through. Probably because I was heavy on the grudge and light on the respect. I do think that Madison is a pretty solid defensive team. Let’s see what we can see about that.
Look at all those touches in our box. Hahaha just kidding, that huge spot of red on the right side of the chart is their goalkeeper. That’s not really evidence of anything other than their dour style of play and spoiler alert for #2: we’re good defensively.
But last week I talked about how we perform when we have more than 50% of the possession. Surprise, surprise we had 53.6% of the possession. A reasonable strategy on their part to have us take the game to them.
That is a lot of defensive action going their way. FotMob also has Forward winning the following defensive categories: duels won, tackles attempted, tackles succeeded, aerials won, interceptions, and accurate long balls because they play boring soccer. But…
2) We aren’t too bad at defending either!
My single favorite stat from this game is that we held them to one successful cross out of the nineteen they attempted. Let’s look at the Opta map for that:
So, this is the actual chart and reflects my original notes that they had zero successful crosses, but somewhere between Monday AM and now the stats changed to have one successful cross. Hard to say if a vigilant observer noticed the discrepancy and reported it or if there is a formal review process but, I’m certainly not going to rewatch that game just to find out when the cross took place. Let’s look at the unsuccessful actions:
You just love to see it from our guys. I’ve tried to show their actions in stopping these crosses.
I think I did better than Madison did at successfully crossing the ball, but that’s a low bar and that chart is only OK.
3) Who said we should try Dami as left mid?
In the last 3 Questions I pointed out that Jay had a huge decision to make where to start Dami. I think he made the right call trying him out at left mid and made an even better decision to put Sebas on for the 2nd half at left mid. I think we just functioned better as a team in the second half.
Here is Dami’s first half chart:
This is your “Data Dump Wince Chart of the Week” (trademark pending). Less than a third of his passes were on the left side, he is left footed after all. So many of those passes are backwards or unsuccessful. Let’s look at the second half:
Ahhhhh doesn’t that feel better. That’s what Dami’s chart’s should look like! This column has gone on long enough and I’d like to end on a positive note, so we’re done! On to Greenville!
Who Gives A Hoot? 