Meh, that was pretty lame game if I’m being honest. Probably because I woke up at 5am in Cancun, MX just to make it to that game (hashtag humblebrag). Kudos to Greenville to showing up and playing ugly enough soccer to steal a win and then celebrating like they actually care about the Big Green Belt. Shame on the referee for awarding a corner off someone’s hand in the box in the 89th minute. Instead of focusing too much on the game, I’m going to see if I can find some trends in the four losses we’ve had this season, so let’s dive in.
1) Time of Possession
We have talked a ton over the lifetime of the column about time of possession. It is commonly known, at least I think, that we seek to lose the possession battle in any given game. In the 2021 season, our losses have been the 1st (Greenville), 2nd (Tucson #2), 3rd (at Madison #1), and 13th (at Chattanooga) ranked games in Union Omaha time of possession. We have lost all 4 of those games 1-0. (Kind of impressive in its own right).
| Result | Average Possession |
| Win: | 44.0% |
| Draw: | 45.0% |
| Loss: | 55.7% |
On average, we have 11 minutes and 14 seconds more of possession over a 96 minute game in our losses compared to our wins. Now let’s peek at results when winning or losing the possession battle:
| Percent of Possession: | Points | Points per game |
| Under 50%: | 41 | 2.05 |
| Over 50%: | 3 | 0.75 |
Ope, we’re still the same old Union Omaha.
2) Time of first goal.
Does the time of our opponent’s first goal affect our possession numbers?
| Home | Away | Possession Percentage | Minute of Opponent’s Goal |
| Forward Madison | Union Omaha | 51.1 | 58 |
| Chattanooga | Union Omaha | 45.6 | 79 |
| Union Omaha | FC Tuscon | 58.5 | 7 |
| Union Omaha | Greenville | 67.6 | 12 |
Not perfectly, but certainly recently, an early goal for our opponents has led to losses where we have a ton of possession.
3) Players being rotated?
With the decision to start a couple of converted midfielders at striker in this game the other thing I wanted to check was whether we were performing badly in games that had a big rotation. There were a lot of ways I could do this, but I chose a relatively simple way because of time constraints.
I believe our best XI, aka what I think Jay would roll out for a playoff game with everybody healthy, looks like this: Nuhu, Sousa, Illal, Knutson, Dami, Boyce, Scearce, Otenio, Doyle, Hurst, Conway. To measure our deviation from our best, I assessed each games starting lineup to see how many of those players were not starting (or playing in their ideal osition).
| Home | Away | Missing Best XI | Missing Players |
| Forward Madison | Union Omaha | 2 | Conway, Otenio |
| Chattanooga | Union Omaha | 5 | Conway, Sousa, Osumanu, Knutson, Otenio (RB not MF) |
| Union Omaha | FC Tuscon | 2 | Knutson, Otenio |
| Union Omaha | Greenville | 2 | Conway, Hurst |
In reviewing the chart, I learned nothing meaningful. Evan and Tobias appear a fair amount on the missing list, but we picked up plenty of points without those guys even seeing the bench this season. And I think including any of the rotated center backs is massively unfair because Jake and Blake have proven themselves to be MORE than capable of holding down the back line this season. And I would be equally confident with any of them (Knutson, Crull, Malone) playing next to Illal on the biggest stage.
I think it is hard to lump our losses in together which makes me both more and less confident going into the playoffs. On one hand, we’ve never lost starting our best XI. On the other hand, the last two losses have shown a blueprint to beat us: score early, park the bus, get lucky on a penalty (aka we miss or the misses an incredibly blatant handball in the box).
Instead of ending on a totally bleak note, let me end with a bonus data dump tidbit researched by based meme lord: Ranting Blue Penguin, aka Tim.
Bonus) New High Score Alert
I was stunned when I saw that we had 507 passes in our game against Greenville, those are “Congrats your team just held Barca to only X number of passes in your narrow Champions League defeat” numbers. Tim answered my call for assistance and did some game by game research on the league website to determine our previous season highs for passes were:
2020: 495 passes, vs Madison 8/19, Draw
2021: 478 passes, at Madison 5/26, Loss
I hope this record stands for a long time! Thanks again to Tim!
Who Gives A Hoot? 