Preview: Columbus Crew at DC United
DC comes home trying to shake off a poor performance
I said in last week’s preview that the Orlando game would test MLS parity. Sure, Orlando on paper was a lot better than DC’s previous opponents, but would that be visible on the field? Answer: yes.
Still, there are a couple ways to interpret DC’s 4-1 loss in Orlando that are mostly mutually exclusive and which suggest different things about this next home game against Columbus. Possibilities include:
Orlando is just comprehensively better. Their best players are better than DC’s best players. Their supporting cast are better than DC’s supporting cast. The guys coming off the bench are better than the guys coming off DC’s bench. Their worst players are better than DC’s worst players. If this is true, the loss is the fault of some combination of DC’s ownership and front office for not fielding a competitive team, not Troy Lesesne or the individual players.
The rest of the roster might be more even, but Orlandos’s three designated players are collectively much better than DC’s single DP. They had 3 goals and 3 assists in the game, after all. A lot of MLS teams have one pretty good DP and a disappointing one, and in those matchups DC with its one very good DP in Benteke can have the advantage. Through a combination of luck and front office skill, Orlando currently has three really good DPs. My preseason survey of the league overall showed me this is really rare. Probably only the LA Galaxy could say this last season.
The game would have been competitive, but Troy Lesesne made some mistakes and as a result DC got blown off the field. I tend to think the impact of coaching and tactics is overrated even though it’s fun to think about (it’s overrated because it’s fun to think about). So I wouldn’t have even thought to list this as a possibility, but it’s the explanation Lesesne has offered in press conferences and in his interview with Greg Roche on the Pitch Pass podcast. I appreciate Lesesne’s “buck stops here” approach to life, but I don’t really buy this. Still, the theory here is that the players were confused about what to do and as a result played slower and more tentatively, giving Orlando an edge all over the field.
There’s just a lot of variation from game to game in MLS. Over the course of the season, team X might usually be a lot better than team Y, but on a particular night, you never quite know how well the two teams will play and how motivated they’ll be. And because of the parity of MLS, playing with anything less than 100% motivation and pretty good form will be punished. On days where one team is playing particularly well and another is playing particularly poorly, especially on the road, a blowout happens. But the losing team won’t be as bad as they looked next week and the winning team won’t be as good. I’ve watched MLS for two decades so I know this is a real phenomenon, but just because it’s true of many blowouts doesn’t mean it’s true of this one.
I wanted to lay these options out even though this is supposed to be a preview of the Columbus game, not a review of the Orlando game, because of the varying implications.
If the first theory, that DC’s roster just isn’t good enough, is closest to being accurate, that’s bad news for Saturday because Columbus has been a very good team for several years and has a very good roster.
The other three, in different ways, give a lot more reason for optimism. We’ll get to Columbus, but for now they just have one attacking DP who is decent but not a dominant player. And if the problem was Lesesne giving bad instructions, well, he’s admitted the problem and hopefully won’t repeat that mistake. Or maybe it’s all kind of random and we’ll just roll the dice again and see what numbers come up.
Anyway, on to the lineup—what? You want to know what I think the answer is? I don’t really know. While watching the Orlando game and feeling frustrated, I thought it was the first answer, that the roster was outclassed. Now that some time has passed, my optimistic side has reasserted itself and I’m leaning towards the second explanation. Orlando’s DP situation is really good this season. Each year, teams become preseason darlings by loading up on expensive attackers and each year it usually doesn’t work (cough, Atlanta, cough). But…occasionally it does work. Not always when you expect, though. Orlando weren’t even darlings this year because Luis Muriel was pretty bad last year and everyone wrote him off, but for some reason he’s suddenly playing lights-out this season.
Projected Lineup
After you get blown out 1-4 you have to make some changes, right? Seems like it, but…what to change?
Kye Rowles is the usual starter and Matti Peltola could come in, but they both traveled for international duty. Rowles played 87 minutes last Thursday in Australia’s 5-1 win over Indonesia, but was on the bench for Australia’s second game, so in theory he ought to be ready to play. The problem is he was on the bench for a game in China, so he had to fly 15 hours to get back to DC.
Peltola played the first half of Finland’s first match, a 1-0 win over Malta, and then 17 minutes in Finland’s 2-2 draw in Lithuania on Monday. That’s about a nine and a half hour plane flight.
Is this a good matchup for Peltola? I expect Columbus to dominate the ball and for DC to struggle in the midfield against Nagbe, so I tend to think Enow and Kijima will be preferred since they are quicker and cover more ground. But Enow had a terrible game in Orlando and Peltola is probably the best passer and most ball-secure of the three of them, so maybe he’ll start to try to help avoid the Crew’s press?
The other shakeup option would be for Randall Leal to start over Gabriel Pirani, but from Lesesne’s press conference it sure sounded like he wouldn’t be available. Leal has been training, but Lesesne said they were trying to take things slow and make sure he’s really getting healthy. So I don’t think we’ll see more than a sub appearance and he may not even make this roster. Conner Antley and Hakim Karamoko are in full training, which is great, but they are still working on fitness and I don’t think they’re candidates to start even at full fitness. Jackson Hopkins has made progress but still has a ways to go.
Some fans have called for a return to three in the back. Last season that was more stable defensively than the four man backline. But with DC’s offense sputtering and an opponent with a tough midfield but not a lot of creativity on offense, I don’t think Lesesne wants to take an attacking player off (Pirani, presumably) just to get Lukas MacNaughton on the field.
So I’ll be boring and guess Rowles comes back and that’s the only change:
Backup Goalkeeper: Luis Barraza
Attacking Subs: Jacob Murrell, Dominique Badji, Fidel Barajas, Rida Zouhir
Defensive Subs: Matti Peltola, Brandon Servania, Derek Dodson, Lukas MacNaughton
Not Selected: Garrison Tubbs, Gavin Turner
Lesesne went out of his way to praise Gavin Turner in his pregame press conference and emphasize he’s close to making the field. If that’s really true, maybe he makes the gameday roster, but I think that’ll wait for more injuries.
The Opposition: Columbus Crew
I’ve updated my MLS previews to show players from each team that, as of week 5, made the leaguewide top 90 in npxG/90 and SCA/90. I wrote an article about this that you can read for more about why and how to interpret it, but something I’ll mention here is that across all of 2024, DC United had three players in each category: Benteke (#11), Ted Ku-Dipietro (#61), and Pirani (#64) for npxG and then Mateusz Klich (#13), Pirani (#53), and Aaron Herrera (#59) for SCA. Klich and KDP are gone, obviously, but due to injuries neither is on these lists yet at their new teams. More importantly, this bears out statistically what we’ve all seen, that so far this season both Pirani and Herrera have regressed (in terms of contributions to the offense, in Herrera’s case).
Columbus won MLS Cup in 2023 and Leagues Cup in 2024, though they were upset by the Red Bulls in the 2024 playoffs. Then they sold their star player, Cucho, and didn’t replace him. They probably will replace him at some point this year, but they haven’t yet, so for now Columbus is running the experiment of what an MLS team is like without its star DP.
They are still a good team. They’re undefeated and sitting in sixth place with 9 points. Their defense has been very good in terms of actual goals scored and not much worse in expected goals. The offense, however, has been struggling. It’s masked a bit in the overall statistics in the grid above because they got off to a big start against Chicago, aided by some terrible miscues by Chicago defenders. Since that game, however, they’ve scored two goals in four games on about 3.5 total xG.
They still have two DPs. Even at 34, Darlington Nagbe remains a force in the midfield, but he’s not a creative player in attack. Without a brighter star occupying defender attention, Diego Rossi is still decent but is arguably having his worst season.
Against NYCFC last week, the Crew completely dominated possession, attempting 200 more passes than their opponents. They also outshot NYCFC 24-5. Yet the game ended 0-0. Only 5 of the Crew’s 24 shots were on target. Their xG for the game was 1.5, so it was perhaps a bit unlucky, but their highest xG shot was a 0.21 xG header (that was off target) from a centerback.
They’ve also got a problem familiar to DC United fans: for some reason, the Crew simply don’t have enough players on the roster. This has led to short benches in several of their games and situations where players are on the bench even though the coach will under no circumstances play them. Against NYCFC, for example, Nancy only used two subs. I expect this to hurt them later in the season, as the temperature rises and as fatigue and injuries build up, but for now, with their international call-ups back, I don’t think it’s a big factor.
What I’ll Be Watching For
If ever there was a game that seems to call for a “Bennyball” approach, this is it. DC should sit back, try to scrape out a victory through fullback crosses to Benteke and set pieces, and dare the Crew to come up with some creativity if they want to get dangerous chances.
I don’t think Lesesne’s interested in playing that way, though. And maybe he’s right not to try. Last season, even with Cucho playing for them, DC actually got draws in both games against the Crew, 1-1 and 2-2. In each game, they had a whole expected goal of xG more than the Crew. Benteke scored all three of DC’s goals whereas Cucho had a goal and an assist in the 2-2 game. Cucho’s gone now and Benteke’s still here, so…? Maybe that was luck, but maybe Lesesne’s style matches up well with them?
No matter what, we should expect the Crew to have more of the ball. The question on defense is whether DC can keep Jacen Russell-Rowe and Diego Rossi from getting good chances. And on offense, DC has been tinkering with the midfield, trying to find a way to move the ball from Enow/Kijima to Peglow and Pirani. Moving Pirani back farther into midfield sure didn’t work against Orlando, so maybe this is a back to basics game: let Pirani stay high as a second forward and just lean on Schnegg and Herrera for ball progression?
We’ll see! I’ll be back with a game review if DC wins or draws.