Nashville SC @ DC United 7/13/24
DC tries to break its winless streak on a hot night at Audi Field
Game Context
DC United entered having played 11 games since their victory of Atlanta United on May 11th with only three draws and eight losses to show for them. The team expected this to be a rebuilding year, some promising early results notwithstanding, so Troy Lesesne’s job wasn’t really in jeopardy, but for a playoff push to be a realistic prospect, the team needed to start getting some wins.
Nashville SC had lost three straight games, but they were generally tough games: Inter Miami, at Columbus, at Portland. Still, any bounce they got from their interim manager was gone and their new hire, the US National Team’s BJ Callaghan, won’t actually join the club until July 22nd.
According to the MLS power rankings, this was the #20 team (Nashville) against #28 (DC United).
Formation
With Lucas Bartlett the latest player missing due to red card suspensions, Troy Lesesne started Christopher McVey in the center of the backline, flanked by Matti Peltola and Aaron Herrera. That left Pedro Santos and Cristian Dájome once again deputizing as wingbacks with Martín Rodríguez and Mateusz Klich in central midfield. Ted Ku-Dipietro and Jared Stroud were in the winger positions with Christian Benteke up top. The numbers are debatable but I call it a 3-4-2-1. For a while, the team defended in a 3-4-3 alignment, but after taking the lead sat back in a 5-4-1.
Goal Breakdowns
0-1 Boyd 19’
It’s a seemingly routine throw-in for Nashville. It’s a long throw, but not that long, to Teal Bunbury in the near side of the box. The first problem is that Teal Bunbury’s header isn’t really contested. McVey is right behind him and Herrera is ahead of him, but with the ball in the air Herrera doesn’t move decisively and ultimately doesn’t even jump for it. Bunbury does a great job flicking the ball across the face of goal, far enough behind DC’s line that Peltola can’t get to it but not in reach of Bono, Then Tyler Boyd comes charging in behind Peltola, unmarked, for a tap-in.
Peltola’s back was turned and he wasn’t aware of the run; maybe he should have been. Santos is standing wider, where he really ought to be able to see it, but he reacts very late, way too late to contest it. At this point most DC players turn away in disappointment, but McVey gesticulates to Santos and Santos gives a “what could I do?” gesture. I agree with McVey: I think Santos gets the majority of the blame here. Someone’s got to spot and pick up that run, but it’s a tough one: they are watching the ball and to some extent they have to since the header could just as easily have ended up coming straight to one of them.
1-1 Dájome 50’
DC wins a corner on a well-worked free kick where Klich rolls it across to Herrera for a long but dangerous shot that is just barely pushed wide by Willis. Klich sends the corner to the far side of the box where Benteke beats everyone to the best spot and heads it toward the six yard box. Ted Ku-Dipietro was lurking, but was probably offside, so in a really smart play he moves away from goal without playing the ball. That leaves it for Dájome, who has drifted close by as the play developed and is still (barely) onside.
It’s not an easy shot since the ball is approaching such that his back is to goal. He awkwardly spins and swings at the ball. He doesn’t make good contact on the ball—it’s hard to tell but I think he was trying to roof it at the near post—but it trickles into the goal just inside the other post. They all count the same, though! It involved genuinely good plays from Benteke and Ku-Dipietro to set it up and Dájome did a good job getting to a dangerous spot.
2-1 Dajome 55’
From central defense, McVey hits a good driven diagonal ball along the ground to Santos. He’s got three Nashville players converging on him and does really well to play a give and go with Rodríguez that gets him to the center of the field with just enough time to play the ball out wide before yet another player reaches him. The simplest available pass was a quick one to Klich who has acres of space in front of him, but Santos hits a diagonal instead to Dájome who is out near the sideline with no one around him. Dájome drives the ball forward while Stroud makes a run across his path.
There are two Nashville defenders and one of them should surely have stepped up to challenge Dájome, but I think there was a miscommunication and both of them hang back to keep an eye on Stroud. To his credit, Dájome aggressively capitalizes on their mistake by charging to the edge of the box and firing it into the goal. It sounds easy, but only a very strong and well-placed shot would beat the keeper from that distance and his shot is both, hammered into the near corner. It’s a beautiful goal that’s far more technically impressive than his first.
Player Ratings
Alex Bono - 7 - He didn’t have a lot to do, but he made two important saves on close range shots. His distribution was as accurate as it had been previously, which is to say massively improved over Tyler Miller in the past few games.
Matti Peltola - 5 - Solid. I’m always worried he’s too slow, and he looked slow chasing balls over the top yet still got there before the Nashville player, so maybe I should just calm down about that. He had a couple good moments with his long passing as well.
Christopher McVey - 6 - As usual, he was fairly solid and the goal was the result of midfielders letting him down. His quality on the ball continues to be an asset. His aerial game is a weakness, though, especially when Bartlett isn’t out there, for example late in the game where he barely contested Muktar’s point-blank header that thankfully went straight to Bono.
Aaron Herrera - 6 - Strong as usual battling and in the occasional moments where he could go forward.
Pedro Santos - 7 - He must have forgotten to bring all his years with him because he had a very strong game, winning a bunch of tackles and actually looking dangerous on the dribble despite the heat and having to a play the full ninety minutes. Still, his rating is reduced because he was ball-watching on the goal.
Cristian Dájome - 8 - Nashville wasn’t worried about him, leaving him alone in acres of space for the first two thirds of the game, and eventually he made them pay. It’s hard to make amends for a very early red card against DC’s biggest rival, but these two goals sure helped. He also had a pretty solid defensive performance except for one shaky moment where Surridge outmuscled him for a point-blank header.
Martín Rodríguez - 5 - He continues to look good as a shuttler. He plays calmly out of pressure, keeps things moving, and occasionally puts in a nice tackle. He still doesn’t add much danger going forward, but you can’t have everything. Despite his general calmness on the ball, he did lose the ball twice in dangerous positions.
Mateusz Klich - 5 - Typical Klich game: some inventive passes, some decent work in the press, and a few bizarrely misplaced passes mixed in.
Ted Ku-Dipietro - 5 - He’s usually good for one or two dangerous-looking shots that go right at the keeper or narrowly miss the frame. He had two this game, so a good outing, at least by his current standard. His dummy to Benteke near halftime was nice and deserved a better outcome and he continues to run hard all the way up to the moment he’s substituted.
Jared Stroud - 5 - More shots than usual, which is a positive, but he wasn’t able to make any of them count.
Christian Benteke - 5 - A fairly quiet game, but he got the assist on Dajome’s first goal with his usual aerial prowess.
Substitutes
Gabriel Pirani - 6 - I consider this a strong outing: with DC trying to hold on to the lead, he ran around playing defense and when he did get a moment with the ball in space, he did really well to carry it through Nashville’s desperation defending and get a relatively good shot off.
Jacob Murrell - 6 - Not a lot of time on the field, but I appreciated that in several moments he was able to hold the ball and maintain possession instead of what he’s done in similar spots in previous games, charging into defenders or hitting a low percentage attacking pass.
Garrison Tubbs - NA - Just a short cameo deep in stoppage time.
Manager - 7 - Despite the string of bad results, Lesesne has kept the team motivated and willing to fight hard on a hot day. Not something to take for granted, as we’ve seen with Rooney and Ashton.
Where are they now? 2023 edition
Watching Copa America games, it was shocking how many former DC United players showed up. José Farado, Edison Flores, Éric Davis, and even Bruno Miranda all featured for their national teams. I’ve been thinking about going back and checking up on people who left, and really it would be better to do that at the end of the season, but what the heck. Let’s see how people from DC United who left last year are doing.
Goalkeepers
Tyler Miller, Alex Bono, and Luis Zamudio are all still with the team, though Luis Zamudio did go out on loan to the Colorado Springs Switchbacks at the beginning of 2024. A few days after arriving, he started in a 1-0 loss in the Open Cup and never made it on the field after that. It’s not clear yet whether DC recalled him because he has no prospect of playing time or because they expect to trade either Bono or Miller during the transfer window.
Defenders
Ruan
DC traded him to FC Montreal along with $500K GAM for Aaron Herrera. Ruan has played in every match for FC Montreal, starting all but one of them, and is actually doing better than Herrera on the scoresheet with two goals and three assists (Herrera just has three assists). Herrera certainly looks a lot better than Ruan did last year based on the eye test, however, and deputizing as centerback will naturally hurt his counting stats. Someone must agree with me since Herrera was voted into the MLS All-Star game. Anyway, this might be the rare trade where both teams feel like winners even in retrospect.
Derrick Williams
Atlanta United claimed him in the re-entry draft. He’s played 16 games for Atlanta United this season, starting 15 of those and (I think) only missing time due to injury. Atlanta fans seem to like him a lot and though Atlanta’s not having a very good season (their coach got fired a few weeks ago) their defense has been decent. A lot better than DC’s, in fact, though I think DC’s defensive problems are more attributable to its midfield.
Brendan Hines-Ike
Hines-Ike moved to Austin FC in free agency and he’s played in 20 games for them, starting 18 of them. He played reasonable well for DC but struggled with injuries. Happily this season he’s been able to stay on the field and with lots of games left he’s just thirty minutes from exceeding his best season minutes total with DC. Austin fans seem pretty happy with him.
Andy Najar
Andy went to Honduras to join C.D. Olimpia, a club longtime fans will remember as an old opponent in the Champions Cup as well as Luciano Emilio’s previous club before joining DC. Unfortunately I can’t find actual stats for the Honduran league so I don’t know how much Andy was able to play before their season ended, but he definitely got into some games and is one of three players displayed prominently on their website.
Donovan Pines
After DC didn’t pick up his contract, Pines signed with Barnsley in League One (despite the name, England’s third division and—though these comparisons are complicated—a lower level of play than MLS). Pines played in four games, starting three, and scored two goals. Unfortunately he then needed season-ending surgery due to a thigh injury, but Barnsley is hopeful he’ll be ready for preseason.
Éric Davis
After the 2023 season, Davis signed for FC Košice. Košice is the second largest city in Slovakia but KC Košice plays in a 9,000 seat stadium and finished fairly low down in the first division. Wikipedia says he’s made 13 appearances there, but more importantly, he’s still getting called up for the Panama national team. He started every one of their matches in Copa America, including their 1-0 defeat of the United States that was the decisive moment leading to the US getting eliminated in the group stage and Gregg Berhalter getting fired.
Jacob Greene
After DC didn’t renew his contract, Greene signed with Columbus Crew 2 in MLS Next Pro (again it’s complicated but at least two levels below MLS in the pyramid). He’s been in and out of the starting lineup and started at right center back in their most recent game.
Gaoussou Samaké
After DC didn’t renew his contract, Samaké signed with the Last Vegas Lights in the USL Championship. He had three goals and three assists in 721 minutes before tearing his ACL and MCL on May 25th against the Tampa Bay Rowdies and requiring season-ending surgery.
Still with the team: Steve Birnbaum, Matai Akinmboni, Hayden Sargis
Midfielders
Viktor Pálsson
Palsson left mid-season to join Eupen in the Belgian first division. He went on to play all 2,700 minutes of Eupen’s thirty-game 23/24 season, no small feat for a 33 year old. He even scored two goals. Alas, Eupen finished at the bottom of the table and was relegated. He continues to feature for the Iceland national team, starting at right back in their Euro 2024 qualification playoff against Ukraine as they lost 2-1 in a game that, had they won, would have seen them qualify for the tournament.
Lewis O’Brien
O’Brien left his short-term loan for DC United vowing to fight for his place on Nottingham Forest’s first team, but he never played in the Premier League. Instead he was loaned to Middlesborough in the Championship where he played 23 games, starting 18. That’s only about half the massive Championship season, but he had an injury halfway through the year that saw him miss a great deal of time. O’Brien hoped to be bought by Middlesborough, but they elected not to do so. Forest have, as usual, said he’s not in their plans for the forthcoming Premier League season, and that they’d rather sell him than loan him. There’s been rumors of interest from Championship sides but no takers thus far.
Yamil Asad
Asad signed for FC Cincinnati for the 2024 season after first playing in preseason as a trialist. Some people said this was Cincinnati signing a locker room buddy for Lucho Acosta and certainly he was limited to some last minute cameo subs until the summer. Since June, however, he’s started playing meaningful minutes and even gotten a start or two. In only 416 minutes, he has two goals and five assists. That’s more goal contributions than he’s had in any season since his first season with DC in 2018. Maybe anyone can rack up goals and assists when they play on arguably the best team in the league, but against DC (where he had an assist) I thought he looked better than…well, than he has since 2018. Maybe Pat Noonan (or Lucho?) has found the secret to motivating him to get in shape.
Chris Durkin
DC traded Durkin to St. Louis City in exchange for Lucas Bartlett, Jared Stroud, and $300K GAM. Durkin has played in 22 games, starting 20. He’s scored a goal and has assisted twice. St. Louis fans seem to really like him and be pleased with the trade, but St. Louis is having a disappointing season, sitting next to last in the West after unexpectedly winning it last year, and fired their coach two weeks ago.
Ravel Morrison
Although he remained contracted with the club in 2023 (and counting against the salary cap), Morrison never played for DC that season. Despite alleged interest from some Championship clubs, Morrison has yet to sign with a new club. He hasn’t played in a match since his last appearance for DC in late 2022, so his career may well be over, though so far the British press hasn’t stopped comparing him to Messi.
Still with the team: Russell Canouse, Pedro Santos, Gabriel Pirani, Ted Ku-Dipietro, Jackson Hopkins, Mateusz Klich, Martín Rodríguez, Jeremy Garay
Forwards
Taxiarchis Fountas
After DC United and Fountas agreed to mutually terminate his contract, he joined Trabzonspor in the Turkish top division. Trabzonspor had a good season, finishing third behind perennial Turkish powers Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe, but Fountas was never more than a role player. He played in 29 matches but only started 12 and had just two goals and one assist. I can’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of Turkish soccer fans but it seems like Trabzonspor fans don’t think he’s very good.
Nigel Robertha
In April he signed with Ittihad Kalba FC, a bottom half team in the top division of the United Arab Emirates. I can’t find any trustworthy statistics for the UAE league but one site didn’t list him on the list of their scorers. It’s a summer break league, however, so by the time he joined the season might well have been over.
Jose Fajardo
After leaving DC United, Fajardo joined CAI in Panama, but before playing for them, he was loaned to C.D. Universidad Católica, a contending team in the top division of Ecuador. Longtime DC fans may remember DC playing Católica in the Copa Sudamericana back in 2005, but that was a different Católica, one from Chile, not Ecuador. At any rate, Fajardo has appeared in 14 games, starting 6 of them. Despite this limited amount of time (just 787 minutes) he’s scored 6 goals and assisted 4 times. This torrid form carried over to the Panama national team, where he started three of Panama’s four Copa America games and came on as a sub in the other one, against the United States. He scored two goals in the tournament, both devastating to US chances. He got the second goal against the US that put Panama ahead 2-1 and he scored Panama’s first goal against Bolivia in the group-deciding match.
Erik Hurtado
After half the season, he’s yet to resurface with another club. His instagram account mentions he’s a “NASM Certified Personal Trainer” so it’s possible he’s effectively retired.
Still with the team: Cristian Dajome, Christian Benteke, Kristian Fletcher
Coaches and Technical Staff
Wayne Rooney
Just three days after DC’s season ended with ownership deciding not to retain him, Rooney was appointed manager at Birmingham City in the English Championship. This was an unusual move since it was October 11th, quite early in the British soccer season, and Birmingham was unexpectedly sitting in 6th. In the next fifteen games, they would earn just two wins to go with four draws and nine losses, leaving them last in the league. Rooney was fired by the beginning of January with DC not even having hired its next coach yet. This time Rooney would wait a bit longer for his next job, but at the end of May—as Birmingham was relegated to League One—he signed a three year contract with another Championship club, Plymouth Argyle, which had finished the season just one point clear of relegation. They just played their first preseason game with Rooney in charge, drawing 2-2 with South African side Orlando Pirates. It seems even Rooney’s Orlando mojo is dwindling.
Frederic Brilliant
There were rumors he hoped to stay on the coaching staff and he did hang around after Rooney’s departure to act as manager for last year’s October friendly against the Ghanian team Medeama SC (one of the most meaningless friendlies in club history seeing as the season had ended disastrously a few days earlier), but he wasn’t retained by Troy Lesesne and in March got a job as an assistant coach for the Utah Royals, an NWSL expansion team. Only two months later, however, in May, he was given the head coaching job at DC Power FC, a new women’s team that shares some minority owners with DC United and Loudoun United. It will be playing in the inaugural season of the USL Super League, a new top division women’s league competing with the NWSL. Their first game is August 17th.
Carl Robinson
Carl Robinson was added to Rooney’s staff to give him an assistant with MLS experience and fans at the time, still worried Rooney would go back to England and leave DC in the lurch, assumed he was the designated successor. In fact, when Rooney went off to Birmingham, he brought Robinson with him. That spell at Birmingham didn’t last long, of course. In May, Robinson was hired by Atlanta United as an assistant for interim manager Rob Valentino, replacing some of Gonzalo Pineda’s assistants who had left along with their boss when he was fired. Atlanta continues to struggle and is just one point ahead of DC in the standings.
Pete Shuttleworth
After following Rooney from Derby County to DC, he followed Rooney to Birmingham City FC and continues to work on Rooney’s staff at Plymouth Argyle.
Diego Restrepo
He was the only holdover from the Losada era, becoming goalkeepers coach at the beginning of the 2022 season and continuing during Rooney’s tenure. Dismissed along with the rest of the staff, Restrepo only needed a little longer than Rooney to find his next gig as he was hired in December to serve as Bay FC’s goalkeeping coach. But in June he appears to have been quietly replaced by Hideki Nakada, perhaps at the same time that the club parted ways with general manager Lucy Rushton.
Stewart Mairs
Mairs joined DC in 2016 and became technical director in 2019. After Lucy Rushton was fired, he said he hoped to be considered for the general manager position. That might seem ridiculous, but when I heard him speak at a team event I was impressed with how sharp he was and one suspects Rooney was actually making the personnel decisions. In any case, the team hired Ally McKay instead and Mairs was not retained. On LinkedIn he lists “Mairs Consulting” as his current employer.
Sean Howe
DC’s director of scouting for almost three years, he left in the post-2023 shakeup and is now Head Scout for San Diego FC, the new MLS expansion side that will begin play in 2025. Mexican star Hirving Lozano, currently at PSV, is their first announced DP signing.
Standings
The win jumps DC up to 12th in the East, a position that flatters them slightly since they’ve played more games than most of the other teams at the bottom. But they’re still tied with Chicago on points per game and ahead of Philadelphia, so they’re definitely not in last. Maybe more importantly, they’re now nine points clear of San Jose in the race to not win the Wooden Spoon.
What’s that? Playoffs? Okay, fine, they’re only three points out of playoff position but they have three teams to pass: Nashville, Montreal, and Atlanta. And that’s not even considering New England is a point DC with three fewer games played. It’s going to take a lot more wins to make the playoffs.
Coming Up
There’s one more regular season game this month, Wednesday at the slumping Minnesota United. Minnesota started brightly but have two draws and six losses in their last eight games, so it’s not impossible to get a result there.
After that, on Saturday there’s a meaningless friendly against Scotland’s Celtic FC which might have just a bit of meaning since it will probably serve as a debut for DC’s incoming summer transfers.
Then it’s off to Atlanta the following Friday to begin Leagues Cup, followed by Santos Laguna.