I’ll be honest, this game was 9 days ago but it feels like A LOT longer ago than that. This was match 6 of our season, but the result we got from match 7 made our draw in the desert feel a lot better. We have a few things to unpack from this match so let’s dive in.
1) DAMIA VIADER
I’ve been posting Dami’s stats on Twitter when I write this column because it seems like it is lazy to use space in this column to talk over and over again about Dami’s brilliance and importance to our team. BUT, when a player pops off a 8.9 rating on FotMob and makes team of the week, I’ll make an exception.
Let’s quickly remember this preposterous goal line clearance in the 38′
Dami leads the league in crosses by a preposterous margin. If you added the crosses attempted by the 3rd (32) and 4th (30) ranked players, you would still have less crosses than Dami has (63). The player 2nd on the list plays for Fort Lauderdale who has played 3 more games than Union Omaha. Dami is 2nd in the league in chances created with 22. He is one chance behind a player who also plays for Fort Lauderdale. (All stats current through 6/10).
Okay, now that you understand just how preposterous the stats Dami is putting up are, let’s look at the Toronto game. Dami had 13 of Union Omaha’s 29 crosses and 4 of the 11 chances the team created.
7 of those 29 crosses were successful for the team, and Dami had FIVE of those crosses.
Also this was the first game that Dami had an assist but did not score a goal. I think more assists are on their way.
2) First corner kick goal?
If you were at Rathskeller late night last Wednesday you might have heard a few massive UO fans talking about how Union Omaha hadn’t scored off a corner. Those fans (*cough* me *cough*) are wrong. Last year, JP scored directly off of a corner at North Texas, Elma scored at Tormenta following a corner, and Evan scored at Fort Lauderdale following a corner. Daltyn’s goal fits into that second category, a goal following a corner.
What was a first for the club was a central defender scoring a goal. Congrats Daltyn!
3) Impact Subs
Lots of chatter about the difference the subs made, Boyce won the corner that led to our goal and, as always, Tobi looks like he is on another level. However, our constant drip, drip of chances didn’t seem to change much after the subs came on.
You can see that we continued to create small chances at about the same rate after the 67′ as we did before. I need to keep learning more so I can have some better xG analysis than that, but hey, 11 points from 6 straight road games is good enough for me.
Who Gives A Hoot? 