Game Context
St. Louis City surprised everyone last season, winning the Western Conference in their expansion year. They started off really hot and then cooled off, so going into this season they were expected to be decent but not as high achieving. Matt Doyle put them in his third tier of teams and the MLS preseason power rankings had them at #11. They haven’t lost yet this season, but came into the game with only one win, at home to NYCFC, with draws at home to Real Salt Lake and then on the road at Austin and LA Galaxy. Perhaps most importantly, all their starters and nearly all their subs from the previous game were available despite the international break.
DC wasn’t so fortunate. It was bad enough that they were coming off a demoralizing 3-1 home loss where they fought hard but were out-classed by MLS villains Inter Miami despite Messi being out hurt and Suárez and Alba being rested. Adding insult to that injury, DC arrived in St. Louis missing a bunch of starters and likely substitutes: Matti Peltola and Aaron Herrera were on national team duty for Finland and Guatemala respectively, Kristian Fletcher and Matai Akinmnboni were with the US U-19s for friendlies against England and Morocco, and Pedro Santos was suspended after his DOGSO red card against Inter Miami. Steve Birnbaum and Russell Canouse are still hurt and sadly don’t sound like they are even close to being healthy.
On the DC United subreddit, I jokingly said that an injury could result in a goalkeeper playing in the field. But was it even a joke? DC had only three field players for the bench and did in fact bring two goalkeepers. They were forced to recall Hayden Sargis from his loan to Las Vegas to drastically reduce the odds of Luis Zamudio or Nathan Crockford making their MLS debut playing out of position.
Formation
Lesesne opted to play three at the back, with Christopher McVey on the left, Lucas Bartlett in the center, and Conner Antley on the right. The wingbacks were Cristian Dájome on the left and Lucas Stroud on the right. It’s hard to see formation details on the broadcast, but my best guess is that Jackson Hopkins and Mateusz Klich played in front of the defense and then Gabriel Pirani and Ted Ku-Dipietro played in front of them but behind Christian Benteke. It’s hard to tell in part because Stroud was much more successful at getting forward than Dájome was.
The other reason it was hard to tell is that St. Louis also plays high intensity, Red Bull-adjacent soccer, so the whole game was chaotic. Like DC United, St. Louis City doesn’t have a lot of creative players, so they make up for it in intensity. DC’s backline was put under a lot of pressure for most of the game and struggled to play through it.
Jacob Murrell was the only sub before the very end, coming on for a cramping Jared Stroud after 71 minutes and I guess theoretically played the same position. Martin Rodriguez and Mohanad Jeahze came on in stoppage time for Ku-Dipietro and Pirani for short cameos.
Scoreline
St. Louis struck first with their centerback Joshua Yaro scoring on a disappointingly easy header on a corner kick. See below for details on how this happened, but I’ll just say here that our centerbacks continue to be relatively weak in the air and that leaves us much more vulnerable on set pieces than we were with Donovan Pines and especially Steve Birnbaum playing.
DC United answered only a minute later using what is already a classic—really the classic—2024 Lesesne DC United attacking pattern. St. Louis must have drilled on it, but what was special here was the speed with which it came together. Bartlett stood on the ball inside the center circle, had a rare opportunity to survey the field without being pressured by St. Louis, and then rifled a pass out to Stroud on the right wing. Typically this kind of pass is lofted, giving the defense time to adjust, but this was a line drive between defenders. Stroud took a single touch before hitting an early cross to the far post. Just like the corner kick, Yaro was in much better position than Benteke, but he misjudged the flight of the ball to the point that he got no contact when he jumped. Benteke for his part flew in and made lots of contact, smashing a shot that was pretty close to Roman Bürki but still required an impressive reaction save to deny. Then Ted Ku-Dipietro got to the rebound for a tap-in before anyone else. As I watched the game, I thought the St. Louis defender Joakim Nilsson inexplicably turned off and let Ku-Dipietro run past him, but after watching carefully I think he and KDP react at the same time. It’s just that Ku-Dipietro had two advantages: he was already facing the goal and, as a 22-year-old attacker, he’s much quicker than a 30 year old centerback. So in summary: Bartlett and Stroud were key contributors to DC’s first goal against their former club, Benteke had a great header, Ku-DiPietro made a great hustle play, Nilsson shouldn’t feel too bad, and Joshua Yaro should definitely feel bad about this one.
DC’s second goal had a similar shape to the first. This time Conner Antley fired the pass forward along the right. Klich flicked it on to Stroud, who took an awkward touch but did well to recover and sprint into the box. Then he played a perfect ball across, too far from goal for Bürki to reach but enough ahead of Yaro to reach a wide-open Benteke for an easy goal. Yaro and the right back who was a good five yards behind Benteke, Totland, look at each other accusingly afterward. Totland could have run harder, but he was never getting there in time, I don’t think. Yaro could have positioned himself better to block the pass, but the real issue is that Nilsson had run up toward Klich previously and been completely eliminated by Klich’s flick, causing Stroud and Benteke to essentially have a two on one against Yaro. In that situation, Yaro needs to prevent the pass and didn’t, but it was Nilsson getting burned that got him into that mess. At any rate, another great team goal from DC.
DC took that lead into the half, but it didn’t hold up. Célio Pompeu worked a nice give and go with Ostrak to get to the edge of the box. Conner Antley stepped up but Pompeu played the ball a hair faster and got clipped by Antley. It was at the very edge of the box and it took VAR to even call the foul, but it looked like a penalty to me even watching the broadcast in real time. To his credit, Pompeu jumped up instead of rolling around and put in a dangerous ball, but if there hadn’t been contact, it would have been an even more dangerous situation. Klaus scored the penalty with a particularly obnoxious set of stop-starts. I hate that stuff. It’s not like penalty takers need even more advantages, but FIFA won’t ban it, so fair enough I guess.
DC edged St. Louis in the xG battle, 1.9 to 1.8, though without the penalty it would have been 1.9 to 1.0. St. Louis had 14 shots to DC’s 10 and I’d say by the eye test, if anyone was going to win it felt like St. Louis deserved it given the way they poured on the pressure late in the game. Surprisingly, Nökkvi Þórisson’s stoppage-time shot that required a kick save from Bono only earned his team 0.06 xG, so maybe stats aren’t everything (it scored 0.66 post-shot xG, though). But for all that pressure, they didn’t create the tap-ins that DC did.
Also, in an amusing statistical artifact, Benteke’s header was 0.13 xG and then Ted’s tap-in was 0.93, so the same two-second sequence was worth 1.06 expected goals!
Player Ratings
Alex Bono - 7 - Not to blame for either goal and made a great kick save at the very end. Two goals allowed on 2.48 post-shot xG faced. So: a solid game as a shot-stopper. Unfortunately he made his worst mistake yet this season with the ball at his feet, giving it away while on the ground at the edge of the box. He was fortunate that Klaus mishit a chip to end the danger. Each game he has one of these calamities. His shot-stopping has been strong but you wonder if he’s leaving the door cracked for Tyler Miller.
Lucas Bartlett - 6 - Like the whole team, he fought hard, and it was his pass that set up the first goal. But like the whole defense, he struggled some under pressure, most notably in the first half when he misplayed the ball to set up a very good St. Louis chance.
Christopher McVey - 5 - He was beaten badly in the second half by, I think, Klaus on a header near the end line that was played back for a dangerous chance. Probably he was fouled there, but the ref didn’t care. According to the stats, he lost six out of eight aerial duels. Ouch.
Conner Antley - 4 - Conceded the penalty, obviously, and as you’ll see below I allot him the largest share of the blame for the first DC goal. As I’ll also discuss in detail below, he completed only 15 of 36 passes. That’s 41.7%, the lowest on the team, lower even then Benteke and Ku-Dipietro who are supposed to be trying low-percentage passes close to the other team’s goal. He did his best, but this game was just too fast for him.
Jackson Hopkins - 4 - Had some defensive actions but he just feels mostly invisible out there. Huge contrast to Klich and, in previous games, Peltola. I assume that means too often his positioning is such that the ball is just zooming past him on defense, a problem that a lot of our young players have. Had a really poor day passing as well. On the positive side, I don’t think that ball he cleared near the very end of the game was going in, but I do appreciate that he was there to clear it regardless!
Mateusz Klich - 7 - Great flick to put Stroud in behind on the second goal. Otherwise, the typical sort of game we’ve come to expect. Very active, wins some and loses some in the duels and take-ons, but makes himself felt on defense and provides a (relative) level of calm and quality in possession. I thought he did better staying active in the second half this game compared to our previous games.
Jared Stroud - 8 - I’d say he was fired up to play his former team, but the great thing about Jared is he’s always fired up. It’s too bad Martin Rodriguez has number 14 because Stroud reminds me of Ben Olsen in his playing days, fighting hard and leaving everything on the field to the point you almost forget he’s got some quality as well. He wasn’t in space much this game, but when he was, he made St. Louis pay. He’ll only go down as having one assist, but in practice he had two. It’s disappointing that he carefully didn’t celebrate the goals against this former team and then was rewarded by having his old fans boo him when he’s down injured and having to be subbed off. To hell with them, Jared! At least we appreciate you!
Christian Dájome - 6 - He made some key defensive interventions early on and passed pretty accurately. Lost tons of duels, but he was playing out of position. And despite his passing, he couldn’t get much going on offense. Maybe that’s Pirani’s fault, though my pet theory continues to be that players on the left side (in this game that’s him and Pirani) look worse than players on the right side because Klich shades to the right and isn’t as involved on the left.
Gabriel Pirani - 5 - Let’s start with the good. He worked hard for ninety minutes, longer than he usually plays. Despite the pressure and pace of the game, he led the team in passing accuracy with 78.9%. and we’ll talk more about that later. This game was devoid of creative passes, unfortunately, like the one he made to put Benteke in on goal against Miami. And while he definitely plays a lot of defense for an attacker, what I noticed in this game is that he shrinks back from hard challenges and usually doesn’t even attempt to jump for balls in the air. I recognize that style of play very well because it’s how I personally played rec league soccer, but he’s being paid good money to be out there and he has teammates like Jared Stroud who are giving everything.
Ted Ku-Dipietro - 7 - Great hustle to be in position to score the goal, but that chance was mostly created by Stroud and Benteke. Otherwise, he had a game typical of his 2024 season so far: lots of aggression, which is exciting, but not a lot to show for it. That’s a little disappointing, but I’m hoping he’ll get better if he can stay on the field for a longer stretch of consistent minutes.
Christian Benteke - 8 - Another strong game from Benteke in the ways that Benteke has strong games: powerful in the air, aggressive toward goal, not perfect but underrated as a finisher. I wish we had a better roster so he could have even more success.
Substitutes
Jacob Murrell - 5 - Played about thirty minutes when you include stoppage time. Made no impression on me. Martin Rodriguez made more of an impression in 12 minutes against Inter Miami, and that’s a pretty low bar. Fotmob says he had 4 touches in those ~30 minutes. So, not great. For now I’ll keep giving him the “playing out of position” excuse I suppose.
Martin Rodriguez - N/A - Really hard to imagine why Lesesne thinks he could possibly be worse than Jacob Murrell in the midfield. Maybe his defense is especially terrible, that’s my standard explanation for why Fletcher doesn’t start over Pirani. Okay, but Murrell’s defense is also terrible! Maybe he’s not fully healthy? Wish someone would ask Lesesne about this at the press conferences.
Mohanad Jeahze - N/A - He lives! He even touched the ball and…looked hugely rusty. It’s got to be hard to have your first professional minutes in a year coming into such a fast game with St. Louis City really pushing for a win, but it looked like Lesesne made the right call not bringing him on until we were in time-wasting mode. Still, I’ll consider it a win that he’s back on the field. Maybe he can recover some form and contribute. Unlike Rodriguez, he’s not competing with up-and-coming young players.
Manager - 8 - Don’t need to belabor this. Troy Lesesne got a point out of a tough game with very limited personnel. Good work. Also, none of the subs have succeeded in making it seem like he’s starting the wrong people, so good job there too. As things stand, I’m really looking forward to see what he can do next year when he and McKay will have had a lot more ability to shape the roster.
Referees - 3 - The referees were bad. Before the season it was like, “haha will anyone notice it’s not the usual refs?” Well, the experiment has been tried. We noticed. Really hope PRO and PRSA get a deal in place before the next game.
It’s a league-wide, or maybe sport-wide, thing so not really praise for these particular refs, but I do appreciate that stoppage time is more accurately reflecting time wasting now. Lots of whining from St. Louis City over what I felt were pretty mild time-wasting tactics from DC (mild compared to CONCACAF World Cup Qualifying and CCL/CCC play anyway), but they added over ten minutes to compensate. Good job.
Blame Game: The Corner Kick
So let’s talk about whose fault is it that Joshua Yaro has such an easy header for St. Louis’ first goal. Kyndra de St. Aubin, the color commentator, supplied one theory: “It looks like he’s marked by Benteke. How often do you see Benteke get beat on a header?” Really not often, which is a clue that maybe he wasn’t beaten here either.
As Yaro jumps, Benteke is still approaching him and has absolutely no shot to win the ball. Is that because he’s been “beaten”? The shots used by the broadcast make it hard to see what happens, but I think we can piece it together.
Here’s the state of affairs just before the kick is taken. Benteke is right behind Yaro here, but don’t be fooled: he’s behind Yaro and not making any attempt to get between him and the ball. Like many modern teams, DC defends corner kicks with a partial zone. Benteke and the centerbacks—the people who are good at heading the ball—stand at intervals no matter where the attackers are. That’s why Bartlett and McVey are standing off to the right even though no St. Louis players are around them. Players like Hopkins and Ku-Dipietro who aren’t good in the air are the ones who are jockeying with the attackers and trying to throw them off.
It’s a little hard to see in that shot but DC’s zone defenders are, from left to right, Conner Antley, Christian Benteke, Lucas Barlett, and Christopher McVey. When all things are equal and two players go up for a header, the closest one to where the ball is coming from will get it, so the goal is for a zone defender to either jump from where they are or take a couple steps backward and jump. Stepping forward, like Benteke ends up having to do, is a recipe for getting beaten to the ball.
If you look up at that shot of Benteke trying to step toward Yaro, it’s obvious we all wish he was on the other side and backpedaling. Well, that’s what Antley should be doing. Yet he’s nowhere to be seen! Neither are all the St. Louis players who, just before the kick is taken, are all clumped up just in front of Benteke. So what happened?
You can just glimpse it on the broadcast. Sorry for the fuzziness, but you can look for yourself on the highlights; it’s easier to see in motion. The leftmost DC defender is Conner Antley, getting shoved well out of the way by St. Louis midfielder Tomas Ostrak. Hopkins and Ku-Dipietro seem to have been man-marking Kluas and Ostrak. Or maybe they were double-teaming Klaus, who you’d expect to be the danger man here. Regardless, they react to the flight of the ball much too late, so Yaro is unmarked.
During the celebration, Yaro points. Maybe he’s pointing to a friend or family member, but my guess is he’s acknowledging whoever came up with the set piece play that got him so open.
So who’s to blame here? I think Conner Antley gets the lion’s share. Sure, that push is technically a foul, but everyone is shoving on corners (Klich is doing his fair share on this same corner to stop another player who otherwise would have been a late-arriving secondary possibility had Yaro not made the play). At 6’1” Antley is small for a centerback, but Steve Birnbaum is listed at the same height and is nearly invincible in these situations, so height isn’t everything. And if it had been Klaus muscling him away, well, we see Benteke using his size and strength to create unfair matchups for defenders all the time. But Tomas Ostrak is a 5’9” midfielder. His interference was going to make it tough for Antley to make the play here, and I suspect if Antley had gotten free of him then Klaus would have stepped in, but all Klaus ends up doing is watching as Antley lets himself get knocked into a different zip code by a smaller midfielder.
That said, Ku-Dipietro and Hopkins are unmolested and could have easily stepped to Yaro. Yaro jumps pretty high, so I don’t know that Ku-Dipietro could have gotten to the ball, but he could have at least pressured Yaro. And Hopkins is plenty tall enough. But they don’t end up close to making any kind of play. I think their eyes were on Klaus and Ostrak when the ball is kicked. So they might share a little bit of the blame. Or perhaps whoever is coaching DC on set pieces told them to focus on the attackers and not the ball? We can’t say for sure.
But: fool me once, shame on you. The important thing is for the coaching staff to make sure DC doesn’t get beaten this way again. And as worried as we might be about his recovery speed, Steven Birnbaum getting healthy so he could play over Antley in this situation sure wouldn’t hurt either.
Spring Break Update
DC United painfully missed five important players against St. Louis. One of them, Pedro Santos, was presumably watching DC play from the comfort of his couch (and, in fairness, probably desperately wishing he was there playing with his teammates). But what were the other four up to?
Matti Peltola had the most important fixture as he and the Finland national team played on the road against Wales in essentially a semi-final of a Euro 2024 qualifying tournament. The details of the complicated qualifying situation over there need not detain us because, alas, Wales crushed Finland 4-1 and eliminated them. On the plus side, this is definitely the most I have ever heard “DC United” said during the highlights of a Euro qualifier.
Peltola played the whole game at left back. I didn’t watch the game, but from the highlights, he was maybe partially to blame for the first goal as he reacts a little too slowly to a loose ball in the box. The other goals weren’t his fault, so he’s doing better than one of the other defenders, who had one of the most egregious open field centerback mistakes I’ve ever seen to give up the fourth goal.
Finland isn’t finished; they play a friendly against Estonia later today (Tuesday). Selfishly, I hope Peltola gets the night off and comes back rested.
Aaron Herrera was playing for the Guatemala national team in a friendlies against Ecuador and Venezuela. The good news is these were in the United States (New Jersey and Houston respectively) so at least he didn’t have to travel too far. Herrera went 90 minutes in both matches at right back as they lost 2-0 to Ecuador and tied Venezuela 0-0. You can see Herrera doing some Herrera things in the highlights and he wasn’t at fault on either of Ecuador’s goals.
Last but already most successful, Kristian Fletcher and Matai Akimnboni are with the US U-19 national team playing friendlies against England and Morocco as part of preparations for this summer’s CONCACAF U-20 Championship, which will qualify four countries for the 2025 FIFA U-20 World Cup in Chile. The Morocco game is tonight (Tuesday), but Fletcher and Akinmboni both started the game against England, a slightly surprising 3-2 victory for the United States.
There’s very little coverage of these games, but a Twitter user named Marcus Chairez watched the first half and had good things to say about both Akinmboni and Fletcher. It was a line-breaking pass from Akinmboni that began the passage of play leading to the US’s first goal, for example.
Also, in alumni news, Kevin Paredes and Griffin Yow have been playing with the US U-23 Olympic team this window. Paredes has being doing just okay from the sounds of it, whereas the star of their two games (a 3-0 win against Guinea and a very impressive 2-2 draw against Thierry Henry-managed France) has been, by all accounts, Griffin Yow. He was involved in all three goals against Guinea (two actual assists) and scored against France. After a tough first season, Griffin Yow seems to have locked in a starting role for K.V.C Westerlo, a bottom-half team in the Belgian Pro League. DC still has skin in the game since his sale reportedly included a 35% sell-on clause. Yow is still only 20. If he can get himself a nice transfer, DC will reap some much-needed salary cap help.
Why Did Passing Accuracy Plunge?
One of the great things about Troy Lesesne’s tactics is that, unlike Losada’s DC or doctrinaire Red Bull, he wants his players to maintain possession and try to make cool soccer plays instead of just charging forward. The high energy is just for defense, where it should be. As a result, so far this season DC has tended to have respectable amounts of possession and decent passing accuracy.
This past game against St. Louis City was a big outlier. Here are DC’s passing accuracy percentages from each game of the season in order: 76, 76, 70, 77, 56. One of these things is not like the other! I know all soccer stats are suspicious, but I think most will agree that this is in line with the eye test. DC was struggling to hold on to the ball and do useful things with it for large stretches of the game.
So what went wrong? My first idea was that St. Louis City wanted to play murderball and just dragged us down to their level. This is what good Red Bull teams have often done. They don’t care about playing beautiful soccer and they don’t let you play it either, they just pull you down into the mud, the mud they’re used to playing in. When this happens, it’s annoying but at least you can tell yourself that the problem is those other jerks are playing anti-soccer and ruining the sport for fans! They should stop being cowards and play the beautiful game like Pele intended! But here’s where stats are a useful corrective to the eye test. Here are DC’s opponent passing percentages this season in order: 70, 70, 79, 78, 71. St. Louis is that 71%, smack in the middle of our opponents. They were passing about as successfully as usual. It was DC United that was failing.
What about their other games this season? Their opponent passing accuracies going into this game: 78, 75, 62, 84. That’s a little ambiguous. No one was as low as DC’s 56%, but 62% isn’t far off. But they certainly don’t just do this to everyone.
So again: what went wrong? I came up with two new theories:
1) St. Louis City came in with a great gameplan and worked really hard to execute it for 90 minutes. Perhaps their preferred style of play was just unusually effective, or maybe they found something that other teams might copy if Lesesne and his team don’t make adjustments going forward.
2) There’s a composition effect at work here. DC United as whole passed much worse this game than in previous games, but this DC United was made up of different players. Some of those different players were bad at passing the ball. To prevent this from happening again, Lesesne should simply use better players in the future. Simple! I joke, but to some extent it really is simple. The international break will end and suddenly we’ll have a lot more players.
So how do we know which theory is right? I decided to compare how accurately DC players passed in this game versus how they did against FC Cincinnati. Why that game? If we were farther into the season, I’d just use the season averages, but it’s still early and there are some weird games in there. New England was playing a man down, Portland deliberately lets teams possess the ball so they can counter, and Inter Miami was a totally different team at the end of the game from what they were when we kicked off. Meanwhile, FC Cincinnati was also a road game and while they aren’t Red Bull or anything, they play pretty aggressively on defense. So they seem the most comparable to St. Louis City, but DC’s passing accuracy against them was 70% instead of 56%.
So what do we find? Let’s look at how players did by rough position.
Alex Bono (25% → 53%)
Right away, we see…a big improvement?! Alex Bono must have really been hitting those FIFA Career Mode passing drills because his passing percentage more than doubled! He completed 10 of 40 against Cincinnati but then 25 of 47 against St. Louis! Amazing! If he keeps improving at this rate, he’ll be completing 200% of his passes soon!
Okay, okay, Benteke didn’t play against FC Cincinnati but did play against St. Louis City. Since we don’t always play out of the back, that’s enough to double the completion percentage of any goalkeeper. Let’s keep moving.
Lucas Bartlett (85% → 54%)
Christopher McVey (77% → 55%)
Conner Antley (44% → 43%)
Here we have both theories at work. Bartlett and McVey have been completing over 70% of their passes each game this season and both saw their accuracy nosedive. I think St. Louis City specifically came to this game intending to pressure them, did so effectively, and it worked out great for them. Except in a few moments where they slacked off: both DC United goals came from movements started by an accurate long pass from a DC centerback without much pressure (first Bartlett, then Antley).
As for Conner Antley, he’s emblematic of theory two. He played 23 minutes against FC Cincinnati after Bartlett was injured and passed poorly, whereas he played the entire game against St. Louis City and passed about as poorly again. He’s trying hard and doing as well as we could have expected, but the MLS game is faster than USL and it’s been tough for him so far. He did have the pass that led to the second goal, but even there, when you look at it again, it comes in high and hard (maybe it was intended for Stroud?) and without a moment of genius from Klich, we’d probably have lost possession.
Jared Stroud (56% → 58%)
Cristian Dájome (71% → 72%)
A tale of two wingbacks. Stroud is all effort out there and we love him for it. He also hit two beautiful crosses in to Benteke for the goals. It’s possible his valuable ability to get forward and fire off crosses is actually making him look bad here since of course crosses are much lower percentage chances than most passes. I think Dájome spent a lot more of the game pinned back defending. But he was playing center forward against FC Cincinnati and still completed a good share of his passes!
Klich (64% → 65%)
Jackson Hopkins (87% → 50%)
Before he came to DC, Mateusz Klich was playing in the Premier League. Compared to those opponents, FC Cincinnati and St. Louis City are the same to him. We might prefer a bit more accuracy here, but Klich is the closest thing we have to a creative player so we want him taking risks. Then we have poor Jackson Hopkins. Before you ask, this is no sample size artifact. He was 20 for 23 in 76 minutes against FC Cincinnati, whereas against St. Louis City he played the whole game and went 14 for 28. Ouch. Something to learn from.
Gabriel Pirani (71% → 75%)
The much-maligned Pirani led the team in passing accuracy. If you’ve read other things I’ve written about him, you know I’ve been saying his short passing is the best part of his game, but also he’s probably playing too conservatively for an attacker. Still, he’s been a consistently accurate passer since he arrived at DC United and it’s definitely to his credit he was able to maintain this under more pressure than usual.
Ted Ku-Dipietro (56%* → 54%)
Christian Benteke (65%* → 42%)
Neither of these guys played against FC Cincinnati, so I used Ku-Dipietro’s accuracy from Portland and Benteke’s against Inter Miami as the first number to compare. Ku-Dipietro stayed about the same, but that hasn’t been good. As much as we all like him better than Pirani because he’s aggressive and successfully dribbles people, his expected assists per 90 this season is the same as Pirani so far despite his passes going astray far, far more often.
Meanwhile, Benteke’s numbers were sharply down and tied with Antley for team-worst on the night, but in his case, that might be because St. Louis City was much better about recovering his headers on long balls than Miami was. I did notice he wasn’t as effective holding the ball up this game, though.
Jacob Murrell (0% → 75%)
Martin Rodriguez (100%* → 0%)
This is the entertainment-only small sample size zone. Jacob Murrell went 0-3 against Cincinnati but was 3 of 4 against St. Louis City. Good job, I guess. Rodriguez, on the other hand, came in during stoppage time and went 0 for 2 against St. Louis, but in his ~15 minutes against Inter Miami he was 11 for 11 passing, believe it or not. Just wanted to give him props for that since it’s otherwise been a tough season for him so far.
That’s everyone who played against St. Louis City, but what about the absent players? How did they do against FC Cincinnati?
Matai Akinmboni: 100%
Matti Peltola: 79%
Aaron Herrera: 77%
Pedro Santos: 74%
Kristian Fletcher: 64%
So here’s the scorching hot take we’ve been building to: we really could have used these guys. Akinmboni was 5 for 5 in 23 minutes, so that’s a small sample. Fletcher was also a sub, but played longer and went 7 for 11, not great and you wonder if Akinmboni and Fletcher would have struggled had they played similar to Hopkins, McVey, and Bartlett.
The other three played the whole game against FC Cincinnati. Santos and Herrera were #2 and #3 in DC passes attempted (Santos with 49 was just three passes behind the leader, Klich), so they are really high utilization players in Lesesne’s system.
They aren’t perfect. Santos in particular often annoys me by misplacing fairly short passes in our own half. But Peltola, Herrera, and Santos would have really helped us possess the ball better (for what it’s worth, Peltola completed 55 of 66 passes for Finland just now in their losing effort against Wales).
So the final conclusion is a boring answer: both theories are partly right. St. Louis City’s gameplan definitely seems to have knocked Lucas Bartlett, Christopher McVey, and Jackson Hopkins off their game. But it also really hurt to lose quality fullbacks—fullbacks are so important in Lesesne’s current system—as well as someone like Peltola who helps Klich stabilize the midfield.
Hopefully you enjoyed wading through all these stats just to learn what you already knew! Hey, now you know it with more precision.
Standings
DC United dropped to #10 in the Eastern Conference, below the playoff line but tied with three other teams. They’ve also slipped to #18 in the Supporter’s Shield standings.
Christian Benteke at 4 goals is one behind the current leaders, LA Galaxy’s Dejan Joveljic and Lewis Morgan of the hated Red Bulls, who just scored a hat trick against Inter Miami (hard to know how to feel about that one!).
Coming Up
This weekend CF Montreal is coming to Audi Field. They are on 7 points, one more than DC despite having a game in hand. That’s even more impressive when you consider they are playing their first six matches on the road. They tied Orlando 0-0 in Orlando, beat FC Dallas 2-1 in Dallas, beat Inter Miami 3-2 in Miami, and lost 4-3 in Chicago…but only because of the most unlikely goal that will be scored this year (the wind catching a lofted ball Kellyn Acosta kicked from his own half). They’re going to be a tough opponent, but as DC found on its long road trip in 2018, the longer it goes on the more it grinds down the team, so hopefully DC can get a result at Audi Field.
The match after that is as hard as it gets: on the road against Columbus, the MLS Cup winners and consensus pick for best in the East, though they are a point behind FC Cincinnati in the standings. Then there’s at last a little let-up in schedule difficulty with a home match against a struggling Orlando City.