Connect with us

Orlando City

Orlando City vs. LA Galaxy: Final Score 2-0 as Designated Players Help Lions Stop Home Skid

Ercan Kara scored one goal and helped set up the second as Orlando City put in a complete home performance vs. LA.

Published

2 years ago

on

Image courtesy of Orlando City SC / Mark Thor

Ercan Kara, Facundo Torres, and Martin Ojeda helped elevate Orlando City to a 2-0 win and an end to a four-match home winless skid in front of 22,519 fans at Exploria Stadium. The trio of Designated Players were a threat to the LA goal all night and two of them scored to lead Orlando City (4-3-2, 14 points) to a complete performance against the Galaxy (1-5-3, 6 points).

Kara scored the first goal and helped set up the second, leading the Lions in shots on goal (3) and finishing second only to Ojeda in shot attempts, with four. The win snapped Orlando City’s 0-3-1 home winless streak and a three-match losing spell in front of the home fans.

“I thought we played a very good half in the first half,” Orlando City Head Coach Oscar Pareja said after the match. “We played very well against a team who changed the model in the second half and then occupied different spaces. But in the end, our players had the energy to decide the results, (and) create a couple more chances.”

Pareja shuffled his lineup a little due to injuries. Mauricio Pereyra (thigh) and Duncan McGuire (lower leg) were not on the team sheet. Pedro Gallese started in goal behind a back line of Kyle Smith, Robin Jansson, Antonio Carlos, and Michael Halliday — with the Homegrown fullback returning from an injury of his own. Cesar Araujo and Wilder Cartagena played in the central midfield behind an attacking line of Ivan Angulo, Ojeda, and Torres, with Kara up top. The club’s three Designated Players started together for the first time since opening night against the New York Red Bulls.

The first half was a back-and-forth affair but touches and passes were sometimes ruined by the wet conditions as players struggled with their first touch or to get onto longer or faster passes. Orlando had the better attacking movements but they often couldn’t pull off enough clean touches to free up a shot and a few times just a slight hesitation allowed Galaxy defenders to recover and cut off passing lanes. As a result, there weren’t many shot attempts in the opening half.

The first opportunity of the match fell to the visitors after a free kick from distance was given by referee Jon Freemon. The Galaxy played the ball short to Dejan Joveljic just inside the top of the 18-yard box but his shot attempt was blocked by Araujo.

The Lions should have had a great scoring opportunity six minutes in when a good switch by Smith found Halliday up the right side. Instead of crossing in to a wide-open Kara for a chance on goal, the Homegrown defender took an extra touch and it was a heavy one. He recovered at the end line and won a corner but nothing came of that.

Jansson broke up a good transition attack by LA in the 17th minute, getting in front of a Joveljic shot.

In the 25th minute, Tyler Boyd cut in from the left and fired with his right foot, but it was right at Gallese, who held fast to the wet ball.

Araujo put the ball in the net in the 33rd minute but it was quickly reviewed and overturned by Freemon for a handball in the buildup on Torres, who was run into from behind while in the air.

But five minutes later, the Lions had a goal that counted. Carlos sent a nice ball over the top down the right flank for Halliday. The fullback fizzed a cross into the 6-yard box that Kara flicked in for his first goal of the MLS regular season, putting Orlando City up 1-0 in the 38th minute.

“It’s a great feeling to score,” Kara said. “Big congrats to Mikey. He crossed it really well and I told him before the game that he can find me at the first post and, yeah, he found me.”

“The goal that Ercan did for us and Michael (Halliday) assisted as well, I think that’s the highlight from us and it’s very, very good for them,” Pareja said.

Orlando came within inches of doubling its lead in the 44th minute. A takeaway in the attacking half led to the Lions having numbers in the attack. The ball found Ojeda near the right corner of the box. He fired a shot in for the back corner but LA goalkeeper Jonathan Klinsmann got a fingertip to it and it fell just inches wide of the back post.

That was the last good chance of the opening half. Orlando held the advantage in possession (61.8%-38.2%), shots on target (2-1), corners (3-1), and passing accuracy (85.5%-78.9%), while the visitors led in shot attempts (4-3).

LA made two substitutions at halftime, chaning shape to five at the back after putting Eriq Zavaleta and Daniel Aguirre on for Boyd and Douglas Costa. It took Orlando a while to figure things out as LA quickly won a corner and looked more threatening to start the second half. Julian Aude cut in from the left and fired over the bar in the 48th minute.

But the Lions figured out how to deal with the Galaxy pushing wingbacks higher in an effort to keep Orlando from exploiting the flanks as it had in the first half.

“We understood the game,” Pareja said. “What was difficult for us to control was the volume in the middle. We knew that they will add another player there, but also that (if) they’re going to give the ball to us, we’re going to hurt them on the counter and that’s exactly what happened.”

Ojeda nearly doubled the lead in the 50th minute. Kara nodded the ball down into his path off another great pass from Carlos and the Argentine’s curling shot fizzed just inches wide of the far post.

In the 56th minute, Torres picked out Kara with a cross but it was behind the big Austrian and his scissor-kick attempt went over the bar. However, Orlando doubled the lead a minute later.

Kara knocked a ball to Ojeda in the middle with a filthy backheel touch and Ojeda sent Torres in with a good diagonal ball to beat Martin Caceres. Torres tried to hit a chip shot over Klinsmann, but the goalkeeper got a piece of it. The ball dribbled into the corner of the net anyway to make it 2-0 in the 57th minute.

Ojeda tried an audacious chip from midfield in the 63rd minute but his shot curled wide to the right side of the goal. He beat Klinsmann but the spin on the ball took it offline.

Klinsmann kept his team in the match with a good double save in the 66th minute, denying both Ojeda and Kara from good positions. On the ensuing the ball skipped to Kara, who fired on the bounce but his shot was right at Klinsmann.

The Galaxy poured numbers forward to try to get back into it but Joveljic curled a shot well wide in the 71st minute and Chicharito had two efforts denied by Gallese in the 76th and 83rd minutes. The latter of those was a great stop on a header off a scoop pass from Mark Delgado.

Pareja subbed liberally late in the match to help see it out. Among his changes was sending Homegrown Player Alex Freeman on for Halliday to make his MLS debut.

The Lions finished with more possession (55.1%-44.9%), passing accuracy (85.5%-81.7%), and shots on target (6-3). LA fired more total shots (15-14) and won more corners (6-4).

“I’m very happy that the team brought the performance to get the clean sheet,” Jansson said. “I think we looked solid all over the field.”

“The first thing, obviously, was to win at home,” Pareja said. “Just getting this result for us was crucial —just getting back our confidence.”

“I think that’s how we used to play normally,” Kara said of the performance. ” And that’s what everybody wants — the fans and we too, because that’s how we like to play. Keep the ball, and having chances, and I think we did today a great job, and we have to continue it, and we are all happy.”

The Lions will head on the road for their next few games, starting next Saturday at Montreal.

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Orlando City

How Orlando City’s Offense Stacks Up Against What Atlanta Does Defensively

How Orlando City has performed against teams playing with three or four defenders, and how that may influence the playoff game against Atlanta United.

Published

6 hours ago

on

November 21, 2024

By

Image courtesy of Orlando City SC / Mark Thor

The most famous quote about real estate is that “there are three things that matter in property: location, location, location.” Soccer coaches also like to think in threes, especially when it comes to points, but for a soccer coach, the three things that matter might be the rhyming triplet “formation, formation, formation,” as that is where they will have the biggest influence on every game that their team plays.

Throughout his tenure as head coach, Óscar Pareja has preferred to use a 4-2-3-1 as his formation (fbref.com’s lineup data shows that the Lions primarily played a 4-2-3-1 in 65% of their MLS matches this season, and 79% of their MLS matches during the last three seasons). The Lions have lined up in a 4-2-3-1 during each of their last 14 games, and my confidence level is strong to quite strong (can you believe Meet the Parents came out 24 years ago?) that they will do so once again on Sunday when they host Atlanta United.

Atlanta United also prefers to deploy a 4-2-3-1, but was less consistent than Orlando City this season during MLS play, as evidenced by the chart below that shows how Atlanta lined up this season:

The purpose of this image is a table to show how Atlanta United lined up in 2024 (mostly in a 4-2-3-1 but also in one of six other formations).

I am relying on the coders at Opta for their evaluation of the formation, as I do not watch a lot of Atlanta United matches (sounds terrible), but though Atlanta primarily played with four defenders in more than two-thirds of its matches, during the last two matches it played a 3-5-2, the only two matches all season in which interim coach Rob Valentino rolled out that formation. I suspect that the formation change was related partially to playing Inter Miami and trying to defend the Herons’ dynamic offense and partially due to an injury suffered by defender Brooks Lennon in the first game of that series. So, while Atlanta primarily played four in the back for most of the season, there is a good chance it will roll with what worked against Florida’s second-best MLS team when it plays Florida’s best MLS team this weekend.

Now, if you want to read more about Atlanta, then you can read our match preview, which will drop Sunday morning, but I want to look at how Orlando did against teams that play similar styles. Looking only at MLS games, the table below shows how Orlando City performed against different back line structures this season (the left side is how the Lions’ opponents lined up, the right side is how Orlando City performed against opponents in those formations):

Table embedded as an image showing Orlando City doing best in goal differential in 12 games against three-man back lines, second best against four-man back lines, and having played once against a five-man back line (a 1-1 draw).

Orlando City earned slightly more points per game — the stat that matters most — against teams that played four in the back, but the Lions had a better average goal differential when teams played three in the back. Atlanta will likely deploy one of those two formations. In both games against Orlando City this season, Sunday’s visitors went with a 4-2-3-1, but as mentioned earlier, they used three in the back in each of their last two matches, so it really could be either.

Soccer is not like baseball, where players primarily stay in the same spot throughout the game, so some of these stats have to be taken with a grain of salt, as players are not always rigidly in the same position throughout a match. A team may also primarily play with four in the back but switch to three when chasing a game, or five when trying to protect against a late goal.

That said, using the data around Orlando City’s opponents’ general formations, here are the attacking groups who played the most frequently against four defenders during the 24 MLS games where Opta coded the opponents as using a defensive group of four:

Table embedded as an image showing the most frequently used lineups against teams who deploy four defenders. The most frequently used attacking group has a plus eight goal differential for the season.

It is a little ominous that the main starting group, shown in row one, has played 666 MLS minutes against back lines of four this season, but do I like that green goal differential of +8 in those minutes, which is a strong +1.08 per 90 minutes. I like that goal differential more than I like all the things that Cardi B, Bad Bunny, and J Balvin like on their song that is creatively named “I Like It.” Coincidentally, when people ask me what I think about that song, I say, “I like it.” I am very creative.

If we look at the lineups that Orlando City has used against back lines of three defenders then there are some pretty major differences in personnel groupings, but it must be noted that more than half of the games against teams playing three in the back came early in the season, when Ramiro Enrique was unavailable to play. Enrique, my presumed starter at striker, has played fewer than three games’ worth of minutes (265 total) against back lines of three this season, and only 28 minutes with the main starting group, which ranks 13th among all the attacking lineups for minutes played against three defenders. That group scored one goal in their 28 minutes together though, for a robust 3.21 goals-scored-per-90-minutes average.

While the team as a whole has been successful against three-man back lines, I do not expect any of the lineups shown in the table below to play more than a few minutes together this weekend, though the first row and the last row are strong groups and had a lot of success.

Table embedded as an image showing the most frequently used lineups against teams who deploy three defenders. The most frequently used attacking group has a plus three goal differential for the season.

I am sure that all week long the Orlando City coaching staff has been going back and forth on whether it is more likely that Atlanta reverts to its most commonly used four in the back, or if the Five Stripes try for three wins in a row with three in the back. I would prefer that Atlanta plays with zero defenders and goalkeeper Brad Guzan wears a blindfold, but I think that is unlikely to be the case.

Even though Atlanta defeated Orlando City both times while in a 4-2-3-1, based on available personnel and recent results, I believe that the team will come out in a 3-5-2 in Inter&Co Stadium in the conference semifinal. Good things come in threes, and Orlando City’s best offensive production this season has been against three defenders, so I am going to be hoping that this continues, and in the third game against Atlanta the Lions grab the three points. Three’s company!

Well, it is a playoff game, so there are no actual points at stake, but you know what I meant.

Vamos Orlando!

Continue Reading

Orlando City

Orlando City vs. Atlanta United: Three Keys to Victory

What do the Lions need to do to get a victory to advance to the Eastern Conference final?

Published

8 hours ago

on

November 21, 2024

By

Image courtesy of Orlando City SC / Mark Thor

Orlando City continues its playoff journey against Atlanta United Sunday at Inter&Co Stadium. The Lions are coming off an emotional penalty shootout win over Charlotte FC in their best-of-three, first-round series. Likewise, Atlanta United stunned everyone by taking out Inter Miami to advance in its own best-of-three matchup. Now, the rivals meet in the Eastern Conference semifinals.

What does Orlando City need to do to get past Atlanta United to advance to the Easter Conference final?

Beat Guzan

Brad Guzan made 16 saves over Atlanta’s three matches against Inter Miami, including seven in the 3-2 win on the road in Game 3. The 40-year-old former USMNT keeper is in excellent form and is a big reason why the Five Stripes are facing Orlando City. Converting chances against Guzan will be crucial to earning a result. There have been times this season when the Lions have struggled to convert their chances. Despite that, the team has done enough offensively to get to this point. Facundo Torres, Martin Ojeda, Duncan McGuire, Ramiro Enrique, and others have contributed and will need to do so this weekend.

Cartagena is Essential

Orlando City lost twice to Atlanta United during the regular season. What is interesting, and perhaps relevant, is that Wilder Cartagena was out for both of those matches. Cartagena was shown a straight red in the match against Minnesota United prior to the first match against Atlanta way back in March. He was shown a yellow card in the match against FC Cincinnati and then served a yellow card accumulation suspension for the final match of the season against Atlanta. Fortunately for Orlando City, Cartagena will be available for the match this weekend. I’ve mentioned before the importance of Cartagena to Orlando City’s success. When he and Cesar Araujo are on the field together, the defense is simply better. Cartagena is frankly one of the better defensive midfielders in MLS. Atlanta scored five goals in the series against Miami, and Orlando will need to keep the visitors from having that kind of offensive success.

Overcome the Past

That darn international break in the middle of the playoffs is something I don’t love. More precisely, I don’t like it because Orlando City often struggles after a break. It would have been nice if Orlando City could have ridden the momentum from the penalty kick victory into the Atlanta match, but that’s not to be. Now is the time for Orlando City to break some bad habits, including turning around its historical lack of success against Atlanta, and tendency to struggle in the first match after a break. Oscar Pareja needs to have the players in the right frame of mind, and the players need to execute the plan. A full house of supporters can also make a difference. Given it’s a Sunday afternoon match, there’s no reason not to pack the house.

That is what I will be looking for Sunday afternoon. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Vamos Orlando!

Continue Reading

Lion Links

Lion Links: 11/21/24

Marta’s chance to shine in NWSL Championship, NWSL and MLS award winners announced, 2025 SheBelieves Cup details, and more.

Published

11 hours ago

on

November 21, 2024

By

Image courtesy of Orlando Pride

How’s it going, Mane Landers? I’ve been spending most of this week plotting out some holiday shopping to make things a little less stressful for myself over the next few weeks. A big weekend filled with Orlando soccer awaits us, so make sure to get any errands or obligations out of the way sooner rather than later. Let’s dive into today’s links!

Spotlight Falls On Marta in NWSL Championship

There are plenty of storylines heading into Saturday’s NWSL Championship between the Orlando Pride and Washington Spirit, including Marta’s opportunity to put an exclamation point on what has been an excellent season for the Pride. Orlando has been enjoying the fruits of its labor this season after a rebuild over the past few years that’s included plenty of change in the City Beautiful. Marta has been a constant, however, enduring some difficult seasons since joining the Pride and adapting her game She’s scored in both of the Pride’s playoff games so far and has a chance to author a storybook ending on Saturday.

Ann-Katrin Berger Named NWSL Goalkeeper of the Year

NJ/NY Gotham FC goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger was named 2024 NWSL Goalkeeper of the Year, beating out the Pride’s Anna Moorhouse and Utah Royals FC’s Mandy Haught for the honor. It was Berger’s first year in the NWSL and she’s the first European player to win the award. She only conceded 16 goals across her 22 matches for Gotham this season and was a key reason behind her team’s success. I’m not too surprised that Moorhouse did not win, considering how solid the Pride’s defense was as a whole, but this won’t take anything away from a record-breaking season for her.

Wilfried Nancy Named MLS Coach of the Year

Columbus Crew Head Coach Wilfried Nancy was voted 2024 MLS Coach of the Year after a historic season in which the Crew set club records in both points and goals. The Crew also won the Leagues Cup this summer and their 2024 Concacaf Champions Cup campaign included advancing past Tigres and Monterrey en route to the final. This is Nancy’s first time being named Coach of the Year and he has been a finalist for the award every year since 2021. The Frenchman received 40.02% of the vote, winning the award over Inter Miami’s Gerardo Martino and Colorado Rapids Head Coach Chris Armas.

2025 SheBelieves Cup Details Unveiled

The 10th annual SheBelieves Cup will take place next year and the tournament will return to its usual format where each of the four teams plays each other once. The United States Women’s National Team will host Japan, Colombia, and Australia in February in what should be an exciting tournament. The U.S. will take on Colombia on Feb. 20 in Houston before facing Australia in Arizona on Feb. 23 and finishing the tournament on Feb. 26 against Japan at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego. These games will also be the first domestic games of 2025 for the USWNT as it prepares to qualify for the 2027 World Cup in Brazil.

Eric Quill Named FC Dallas Head Coach

FC Dallas announced that Eric Quill will become the team’s next head coach. Quill joins Dallas after a great year with New Mexico United that included trips to the U.S. Open Cup quarterfinals and USL Championship Western Conference semifinals. It’s also a reunion of sorts for Quill, as he previously coached North Texas SC and was named USL League One Coach of the Year with the club in 2019. Dallas missed out on the playoffs this season, with Peter Luccin coaching the team on an interim basis after the firing of Nico Estevez in June.

Free Kicks

  • District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser challenged Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer to a bet involving this weekend’s NWSL Championship, with embarrassing lightshows on the line.

That’s all I have for you this time around. I hope you all have a wonderful Thursday and rest of your week!

Continue Reading

Trending