Four positives from the Charlotte FC Open Cup match

Some thoughts after a wild night of tournament soccer at Audi Field

It was far from a perfect performance, but after a game like that, I want to dwell on the positives, so here’s four in-depth takes from DC United’s Open Cup game against Charlotte FC.

Troy Lesesne

I’ve liked a lot of what we’ve seen from Troy Lesesne since he arrived and have given him many benefits of the doubt due to the difficult roster situation in 2024. In previous weeks, though, I’ve been increasingly critical of his role in the team’s struggles. Yes, the roster could be more talented, but is it really true that the only options are either (A) an okay offense and completely porous defense or else (B) an okay defense and a completely stagnant offense? I was skeptical.

I’m happy to say I saw some real positive signs in this game. DC United dominated the first half, and though they only scored one goal, I thought they looked better than they have in ages, good enough that if Benteke had been out there they could have had two or three, all without giving up much on the other end. In particular, the movement and interchange between the forward line and the players behind them looked much more dynamic and healthy. Peglow, Kijima, and even Murrell were cycling back and making themselves available, and the midfielders and defenders were actively looking for them and often finding them.

The caveat here has to be that Charlotte FC rested many of their important starters, and that their midfield has been a weakness for them this season even at full strength. And despite the rotated lineup, they didn’t bunker the way Charleston did. It remains to be seen if DC can do this in normal MLS play. But this performance at least shows me that the coaching staff is accurately diagnosing problems and implementing fixes.

Despite their talent deficit, I assume Charlotte made some tactical adjustments at halftime, or at least got the old fiery halftime speech, because they did a lot better in the second half and scored two goals to get the lead. Lesesne ended up having to make a formation change to chase the game.

As I expected, DC United had came out in a 5-2-3 shape. Three at the back, but more aggressive than the 5-4-1 look from the last few games. There’s no xG available for this game, but my sense was that in the first 75 minutes or so, Charlotte had a couple half-chances but nothing serious. Yes, they scored two goals, but those weren’t down to the formation. Patrick Agyemang got the first by displaying the skills that have elevated him to the US National Team and the second came from a header on a corner kick.

Now, all that said, at about 76 minutes Charlotte FC defender Adilson Malanda hit the crossbar on an open look from inside the top of the box. If the score becomes 3-1 there, boy, there would be a different vibe coming out of this game.

But the score stayed 2-1. At 80 minutes, needing a goal and also with Agyemang coming out of the game, DC switched to a 4-3-3. Matti Peltola had come on almost twenty minutes earlier for Lucas Bartlett and had been playing right centerback. Now he moved up to play the double pivot with Servania, allowing Jackson Hopkins to play a #10 role in front of them. I hesitate to draw many conclusions from the game at this point given how tired most of other players were, but it’s not shocking that Charlotte cut DC apart for an easy third goal. That’s been happening with four at the back all year. But Lesesne’s gamble on variance paid off, because DC “won” the 40 minutes after the formation switch 2-1 and got to the penalty shootout.

I feel like in this game Lesesne really made the most out of a tricky situation. For once he had some players on the bench who could make an impact (Leal, Hopkins, and Fletcher) but they weren’t really match fit. Even Leal, who has been healthy long enough you’d think he’d be 90 minutes fit, faded in extra time, though he also picked up an injury at some point so that might have also contributed. Lesesne found a way for them to make an impact that still ensured there’d be enough left in the tank to get a needed goal during extra time.

DC’s Roster Depth

For much of the last decade, DC United has struggled with depth issues. With the front office seemingly unable or unwilling to fill enough roster slots, the team would be only a few injuries away from a crisis. Last season, the roster numbers looked a little better, but there were a number of long-term injuries to players like Russell Canouse and Steven Birnbaum, plus holdover players like Jeremy Garay and Hayden Sargis that Troy Lesesne was unwilling to play no matter how bad things got.

This season, Ally Mackay has built a roster that is numerically on par with the rest of the league. The question has still been the talent. Earlier this season, with the team on a losing streak but in uncharacteristically good health, I felt frustrated that, for once, there were no strong players I could point to and say, well, when that guy’s back, the team will be better. The starters were healthy, they were losing, and the backups seemed worse.

As the season has developed, matters have changed for the better and also for the worse. The injuries have at last piled up: forwards Christian Benteke and Dominique Badji, attacker Gabriel Pirani, and centerback Lukas MacNaughton are all out with long-term injuries. Meanwhile, opinions will vary on this point, but I’d say there have been at least two underperforming starters in Boris Enow and Jared Stroud.

So it was very encouraging to see that on Wednesday night nearly every substitute brought with them some reasons for optimism. Jared Stroud entered first, at halftime due to a minutes restriction for Peglow, and…well, he was energetic, I guess. He still hasn’t recaptured his form from early 2024. I said “nearly every substitute”.

Matti Peltola was “supposed” to be a starter and I came into this game wanting to see him start over Boris Enow, so maybe he shouldn’t count as depth, but right now he’s a player who comes off the bench and can actually improve the midfield. He may have been on the team longer than Enow and Servania but he’s younger and there’s more reason to hope he’ll improve as he gets more experience. In the last few games, he’s shown real flashes of becoming the player DC needs him to be: an aggressive defender, a midfielder who can turn under pressure and make a quick progressive pass, and an orchestrator who can hit the sort of long, accurate diagonal passes that unbalance a defense. He’s not nearly as consistent as he needs to be yet and I continue to worry about his speed, but I’m starting to think he’s genuinely improved since last year and that’s a good sign.

Jackson Hopkins came in with the team needing a goal and played his best game in a DC shirt. He actually started the sequence leading to his goal with a strong turn and aggressive run in toward the box, then a good pass. That combination of “aggressive run and then good pass” was something he did again and again in this game. His goal—his first professional goal I believe—was a very nice finish. Defense is still a question mark with him, but he’s still not old enough to drink for another month.

Randall Leal came in after 68 minutes and while I’d still like to see him look really good for an entire shift, he delivers real quality in spurts that is a big benefit to the team’s shaky offense. A lot of fans are puzzled he’s not starting every game, and he might get to that point with better fitness, but for now he’s at the very least a good spark off the bench.

Kristian Fletcher definitely has some work to get in synch with his teammates and develop his defensive positioning, but coming on for Murrell he provided something DC hasn’t had in years: a changeup at forward. Badji and Murrell each have different strengths but they are both variations on the same “very poor man’s Christian Benteke” theme. On the evidence of this one appearance, Fletcher brings more speed, more ability to dribble, and much more interest in running in behind a defense. I’m not convinced yet he’s going to be more productive than Jacob Murrell, but at least he’s got a different skillset.

I think DC still needs Christian Benteke back from injury to have much of a chance at climbing into the playoffs, but I’m feeling a little more optimism about the supporting cast.

Jordan Farr

During extra time at the Charleston game, I was staring at the DC player warming up behind the goal. Was that…Jordan Farr? Why would he be warming up? I speculated at the time, and in my writeup, that maybe he was preparing in case he was needed for emergency duty as a field player. Except he stopped warming up as soon as DC scored. “Maybe he’s good at saving penalties and they were going to put him in for the shootout,” I admitted in my writeup, but it was just too much fun to imagine him coming in to play some other position.

So when DC tied the Charlotte game in extra time and Farr started warming up even though Derek Dodson was still available on the bench, I immediately knew that Lesesne wanted him in for penalties. This is certainly A Thing That Is Done in world soccer but I think it’s usually viewed as coaches overthinking things. Why put in a guy completely cold when you’ve got a perfectly good keeper already? In this situation, you have to add in the clearly negative impact on Kim Joon Hong, a very young player and a guy DC has made a big investment in (at least in comparison to what MLS teams normally invest on keepers). This is a mistake unless Jordan Farr is absolutely incredible at stopping penalties, I said to the person next to me.

You know what happened. Jordan Farr is absolutely incredible at stopping penalties.

Four saves out of five is insane. I’m sure it’s happened sometime before, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Apparently it’s never been done in the Open Cup before, which is kind of shocking when you think about how old the tournament is.

Surely we can enjoy his incredible performance without being dour analytical killjoys, right? But…I’m a dour analytical killjoy at heart and I couldn’t help wondering if this could just be random chance. One piece of evidence in Farr’s favor is that Lesesne really did sub him in despite the Kim situation. Surely he had to see a pretty big difference in practice. I guess it’s also worth noting that shotstopping in general hasn’t exactly been a strength for Kim so far this season.

In the post-game press conference, Lesesne claimed they knew Farr was amazing at penalties before they even signed him: “We also knew [when we recruited him] that if we got in this type of situation that he’s excellent, and he has a track record of that…in the USL final with San Antonio he had a similar performance a few years back.” Normally I’d just nod along to a comment like this, but I just got done writing that this was a truly incredible moment. Has Farr actually done this before?

I went back through FBref to find out. One caveat is that FBref probably doesn’t have every match he’s ever played (if he played in Open Cup games for his USL teams they don’t seem be in FBref, for example) but it has records of his USL regular season and playoff performances going back to 2019. He started 120 games in that time for three different teams, so the first question is: how did he do against penalties during games?

It turns out he faced only 8 penalties in those games and opponents made 6 of them. He saved one. The other one was missed. Now probably he’s gotten better at saving penalties with experience, but the save was back in 2022. Since then he faced three penalties. Last year, only one, and that was the one that missed. In 2023, two faced and two were made. That’s not a criticism, it’s a pretty normal ratio for a goalkeeper, but it hurts the “Farr is amazing at stopping penalties” theory.

What about shootouts? Troy mentioned he did particularly well in the USL Final, after all.

Well, in 2021, Farr and San Antonio FC played Orange County in the USL Conference Finals. Essentially, the semifinals of the USL playoffs. After drawing 1-1, San Antonio went to a penalty shootout and…lost 3-5. Orange County made every single PK.

In 2022, San Antonio—still with Farr in goal—reached the USL Final and defeated Louisville 3-1 to win the championship. No PKs awarded during the game and no shootout needed.

In 2023, Farr played in goal for San Antonio most of the year but didn’t play in the playoffs. It looks like he missed a game late in the season due to a red card and then was benched. As a side note, that San Antonio team had both a 19-year-old Rida Zouhir (eight goals and four assists, not bad) as well as 22-year-old Tani Oluwaseyi (now a good MLS forward for Minnesota United, he had 16 goals and 7 assists that season for San Antonio).

Anyway, in 2024, Farr played for the Tampa Bay Rowdies. In the USL “Conference Quarterfinals” (so the round of 16, I guess) they drew Detroit City 1-1 and went to a penalty shootout. Farr and Tampa Bay prevailed 3-1. Look familiar? Yep, Detroit City only scored a single penalty. So was history repeating itself against Charlotte? Not quite, he “only” saved two of Detroit’s penalties. Another player missed, and they didn’t get to take a fifth because they were too far behind. Tampa Bay gave Farr’s performance a glowing writeup on their web site and I think it’s safe to say Lesesne’s memory conflated two Jordan Farr high points: him winning the championship with San Antonio and his good shootout performance last season for Tampa Bay (who went on to lose to Charleston in the next game).

So what’s the takeaway here? I think two things can be true: Jordan Farr has become good at stopping penalties and showed that both in DC practice and last season for Tampa Bay in that shootout. But also: penalties are a bit of a crapshoot and there’s some real luck involved.

One final point about the shootout: I took a quick look at Charlotte FC fan reaction and while I saw one or two people grudgingly praise Farr, the typical reaction was more to the effect of, “I can’t believe how bad we are at taking penalties.” Some even blamed the Audi Field surface.

One thing we can be absolutely sure of. If these guys think that Audi Field surface was bad, boy, they haven’t seen anything yet. Lucky for them, their MLS regular season game at Audi Field is in October, so they may not learn the error of their ways like they would if they were coming in July.

But I also think they shouldn’t be too hard on their players, just like I don’t feel too bad about Jared Stroud, Kristian Fletcher, and Matti Peltola failing to convert. Everyone was exhausted by that point in the game, even the subs. No one on either team missed the target and that fact alone is both pretty amazing and also helped both goalkeepers look good.

The only DC United team in the last decade that had a real chance of winning MLS Cup was the LuchaRoo team of 2018. Some still complain about Nick DeLeon missing the final penalty to lose the playoff game against Columbus even though he’d scored heroically to force the shootout a few minutes before the end. But what I remember is the crushing disappointment that Wayne Rooney and Lucho Acosta, both completely exhausted, missed their penalties. Lucho is still at it, in fact, bouncing a paneka off the crossbar Wednesday as FC Dallas lost to the New York Red Bulls on penalties.

If those guys couldn’t do it with the season on the line, I can forgive anyone for struggling and focus celebrating Jordan Farr as the hero of the night. Yes, there was some luck involved, but sometimes you have to be lucky and good.

The US Open Cup

After the Charleston game, I kind of glumly noted that even though DC won in extra time with two exciting goals, the game was a pretty poor experience. Not very many fans, poor atmosphere, dire soccer was played during regulation, and then the game didn’t even end on time.

On Wednesday, the weather was worse, there might have been even fewer fans, and again the game ground into extra time. Except…the game was great! Maybe not as much for Charlotte fans. But for those of us supporting DC, the first half had lively play, there were some tough moments in the second half, but that just increased the excitement as DC came roaring back to tie the game. The players celebrated the goals like they were scoring in the World Cup, and the few fans were really into it.

Then, when extra time ended, fans from all around the stadium surged to the supporter’s section for the shootout. It felt like we were all joining together to will Jordan Farr and DC United to victory. It’s probably my favorite Audi Field experience since 2018.

All it took was DC United playing a bit better on offense, the opponent not bunkering, and the stakes of tournament soccer. After the Charleston game, I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of going to another Wednesday night Open Cup game beforehand, but now I’m disappointed to see DC will travel to Nashville for their next game (it also bodes poorly for winning the tournament seeing as home teams went 6-2 in this round).

I haven’t gone back to check if I’m forgetting anything, but I think this was the greatest home game of the Troy Lesesne era. Last season’s Nashville match where Pirani scored twice in stoppage time to (briefly) save the season was incredible, but it was on the road. Going back to Rooney and 2023, the season opener against Toronto where Ku-Dipietro scored the game-winner is at least a contender, but I remember most of that game as being frustrating. I wasn’t able to attend the Losada era’s 7-1 win over Toronto, so that’s probably a candidate. For me, I have to go back to Rooney-to-Acosta in 2018 or maybe the 5-1 demolition of Montreal that season.