Data Dump: Greenville (Away)

Well, we did it. We beat the previously undefeated-at-home regular season champions, at their place. Not at the start of the season but 13 days before the Triumph will host the USL League One Championship game. In winning the game we ended the season of our bitterest League One rivals (Chattanooga, New England, Wauwautosa). And while we won’t be headed into the last game of the season controlling our own destiny, this isn’t 3 Questions, so that isn’t really relevant to this column. Let’s dive in.

1) Who keeps the shots out? Nu, Nu, Nuhu!

One of the greatest pleasures that I have experienced from Union Omaha is getting to know a ton of new awesome people and share my passions with them. I’d like to introduce one of them now: Data Dump’s Anonymous Goalkeeping Consultant. (DDAGC for short). DDAGC and I text about games pretty regularly and I always enjoy the goalkeeping report. DDAGC points out is times when Rashid isn’t living up to his potential mixed in between healthy doses of praise and routine admiration of his clinical distribution skills. I thought this was by far Rashid’s best game of the season, and since making a season-saving-save eight minutes into stoppage time can distort one’s feelings, I wanted a take from DDAGC and this is what I got.

“Nuhu proved why he is one of the best in league one last night for sure. My thoughts on Nuhu: His two clutch saves to keep Omaha on top (one in the first and the last minutes of the second). Nuhu’s ability to manage his box and manage the game in general is always a key attribute Nuhu adds to the defense of UO. The difference today was that he made two big saves keeping his team on top. Putting this all together saw UO’s ability to defend be unbreakable. The score easily could have been 5-3 GVT but Nuhu made every save he could possibly make only allowing Pilato’s banger that was not possible to save.”

First of all, Rashid made four saves on the night, now if I was a more reputable or competent journalist, I would be able to figure out if that was the most saves he had all season. But I do know he was averaging less than two saves per game, going into this match. So let’s figure this was at or near the top of his saves per game this season.

Second, FotMob said Greenville had FIVE Big Chances in the match. Opta defines a Big Chance as: “A situation where a player should reasonably be expected to score, usually in a one on one scenario or from very close range when the ball has a clear path to goal and there is low to moderate pressure on the shooter.” So Rashid needs some credit for the fact Greenville only got a single goal on Sunday.

2) Who is Union Omaha’s Mr. Clutch?

Obviously, this is the home of #EVD4MVP, and next week expect the full case as a special edition Data Dump. But, after I got done screaming at my television as Evan Conway’s shot beautifully curled into the back of the net and got over the 20-30 minutes of anxiety that followed, I started to wonder who had the most game winners for Omaha.

Fun fact: we’ve won seven games, SIX of them were by a one goal margin. I went through all seven games and figured out the goal scorer and the person who assisted. Here is that chart:

Home	Away	Game Winning Goal	Game Winning Assist
Union Omaha	North Texas	Conway	EVD
FC Tucson	Union Omaha	EVD	unassisted
Union Omaha	FC Tucson	Molina	EVD
Union Omaha	Orlando City B	Conway	Boyce
Lauderdale	Union Omaha	EVD	Molina
Union Omaha	Tormenta	Conway	Otieno
Greenville	Union Omaha	Conway	EVD

Three names appear on that list more than once. We’ll honorable mention Christian Molina and remind you to vote Christian for goal of the week. That leaves us with two players: Evan Conway and Ethan Vanacore-Decker.

Evan’s case: Four of his team leading five goals have been game winners. He has no game winning assists, although his two assists both came in games he scored in.

Ethan’s case: two of his three goals were game winners. One of those was unassisted. He has three game winning assists and they were on the game winners for arguably the three most memorable wins of the season.

I’m glad they are both Owls. Who do you think is Mr. Clutch for us?

3) Possession and shots.

Real talk, that was probably the most enjoyable game to watch all year. It was a couple of great defensive teams throwing offensive haymakers at each other. And it cemented (at least in my mind) our skill as a counter attacking team. So let’s just check in on a couple of Data Dump favorites before we wrap up here.

Did we lose the possession battle handily? Oh yeah we did.

Did we take a ton of shots? Yeah we did. And they were on target at a rate right in line with our season average? Yes! (37.5 in this game to 38.6% on the season). Did we win?

Heck yeah we did. Hope you’re still savoring it as much as I am.