A week ago, Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, SOUR, was released. It seems as if I’m not the only person in my age bracket to reallly like the album. If you have not listened, I’d encourage you to at minimum read that review and consider listening. As a Union Omaha fan, the songs will hit just a little bit harder after what happened on Wednesday at the historic home of the Madison Blues, a semi-professional baseball team, Breese Stevens Field. Time to relieve this horror show, so but put on SOUR and let’s dive in.
1) What went wrong?
So it definitely FELT like this was the worst game we’ve played in a long time. Personally, I drew the line back to game away to Tormenta FC on Sept 11, 2020 for the last time we had such a disjointed game. Visually, it seemed like we were incredibly wasteful in possession of the ball. I thought this would be easy to confirm by looking at a few metrics that might show we did not value the ball as much as our opponent: interceptions by Forward, low passing accuracy by Union Omaha, throw-ins by Forward, and recoveries by Forward. Let’s look at them in order.
Interceptions: defined by Opta as “where a player reads an opponent’s pass and intercepts the ball by moving into the line of the intended pass.”
Forward had 11 to our 16.
Passing Accuracy: our passing accuracy was 83.1%. That is 5% better than our season average which is 78% and the best single game mark we’ve achieved all season.
Throw-ins: According to FotMob, we had 18 throw-ins won to Forwards 13.
Recoveries: defined by Opta as “where a player recovers the ball in a situation where neither team has possession or where the ball has been played directly to him by an opponent, thus securing possession for their team.” The league (nor FotMob) does not provide Recovery totals, but this Chalkboard looks like we had more recoveries than Madison, maybe even dominating the category.
One other thing I considered was the possibility we piled up those stats in the final 30 minutes of the game, when we had to chase a result. But as you can see from the chart above, the rate of recoveries dropped slightly, but not dramatically after the 60′.
So, I’m a bit stumped honestly. If you have an answer, hit me up on Twitter!
2) Can data confirm the “slow start” narrative?
So I wasn’t able to find anything to indicate we were particularly wasteful in possession, so maybe we just had a “slow start,” which is definitely not a data-driven term. However, there is good data-based evidence that we dominated the game after they scored. Let’s start with the GameFlow data from American Soccer Analysis.
What a great representation of the flow of the game. We basically created no chances, nothing even above 0.05 xG, in the 1st half. Madison had one spell of pressure in the 2nd half when they got their goal, and then we dominated chances for the rest of the game with extreme pressure at the end. Madison was still the better team by the overall xG metric, but if that isn’t a slow start, I don’t know what is! Possession heatmaps back this up as well.
Union Omaha (before 60′)
Union Omaha (after 60′)
Forward Madison (before 60′)
Forward Madison (after 60′)
Looking through those four charts two things stand out to me: Just how much we had Madison on the back foot during the final 30′ of the game and how little we played down the left in the final 30′ of the game. (Speaking of things happening on the Union Omaha left, we’re getting closer to the “Is Dami Viader the best player in League One?” column, but not quite there yet.)
To put some qualitative analysis to these charts, it is clear that we had too little too late. And what we offered late didn’t play to our strengths. However, after these first two items, I’m not sure we played as badly as I thought we did.
3) How much did this game matter?
There are two aspects of this loss to be dealt with. The first is emotional. I started this column talking about the best breakup album to come out in years. You can tell my emotional state. The good news, emotionally, is we will return to the home of the Madison Radicals, Breese Stevens Field, next Sunday and have a chance to immediately, and brutally, turn the page. The bad news is, of course, that we could play that badly again which would hurt even more. We are after all a streaky team, in 21 matches we’ve gone undefeated for 8 matches (plus preseason), 3 losses in a row, undefeated for 9 matches (plus preseason), 1 loss.
The second is the affect it has on our goals of becoming Champions and the good news in that regard is this game had very little effect on our season long goal. According to SportsClubStats, we are now 2.6% less likely to make the playoffs. Not ideal, but pretty darn good for an emotional gut punch of a game.
That’s all I’ve got, grieve the loss, take a cleansing breath, remember to listen to SOUR, and have a great holiday weekend!
Who Gives A Hoot? 