Orlando City vs. Toronto FC: Three Keys to Victory

Following Wednesday’s 3-2 road victory against Atlanta United, Orlando City has quietly put together a run of four games unbeaten and has won three of those four games. Up next is a Toronto team that hasn’t tasted defeat in its last seven matches, and with fixture congestion once again an issue during September, OCSC will need to be at its best if it wants to come away with three points against a direct rival for the Eastern Conference playoff places. What follows are my three keys to victory against the Reds.

Ring the Rotations

Not only will the Lions be coming off short rest following a midweek match, but there’s another extremely important midweek contest looming on the horizon in the form of Wednesday’s U.S. Open Cup semifinal in Columbus. Playing an unrotated XI against both Atlanta and Toronto would be tantamount to suicide, even without the extra game thrown in, but with the semifinal to consider, rotation is going to be key. We saw around this time last year and again in August how difficult it can be to win games when the team either can’t or simply doesn’t rotate, and this stretch of games is too important to keep asking the same 11 guys to play a highly physically demanding style every single match.

A number of OCSC players have begun to look leggy in recent weeks, and I don’t think it was an accident that Griffin Dorsey and David Brekalo didn’t play the full 90 minutes against Atlanta. They’ve barely come off the field this year and absolutely needed a little extra recovery time, but they aren’t the only ones. In an ideal world, we see guys on Saturday who haven’t been starting much lately, like Marco Pasalic, Tiago, Tyrese Spicer, Luis Otavio, Wilder Cartagena, Zakaria Taifi, and Iago; while guys who are coming back from injury or have lots of minutes on their legs like Dorsey, Robin Jansson, Antoine Griezmann, Joran Gerbet, and Martin Ojeda get some rest to start the game even if they’re subbed on in the second half. No such luck for Ivan Angulo, who will play the full 90 in every game until the end of time.

Be Better on the Back Post

Lately I’ve felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day when watching Orlando City play, because I’m watching the Lions’ defense get repeatedly exposed in the same way: a ball is played in from a wide area, across the defense to the back post, and there’s at least one free man to get on the end of it. That’s how Orlando gave up a goal against Real Salt Lake and how it conceded both goals against Atlanta. If not for some wayward finishing by the Five Stripes, OCSC likely would have given up more goals in a similar fashion during Wednesday’s contest. The word is very much out on how to score against this team: put in either a cross or a diagonal switch that bypasses the nearest part of the defense and requires the team to pick up runners on the back side. That’s it. In theory, it shouldn’t be a difficult thing to fix, but if it isn’t cleaned up — and soon — then teams are going to continue making Orlando pay for that particular flaw and it’s going to cost the Lions points. Toronto is unbeaten in its last seven games and just put a couple goals past the best defense in the league. No need to make the Reds’ job any easier for them.

Clinical Finishing

Assuming that Martin Perelman makes significant changes to his starting XI with an eye on the Open Cup semifinal, we’ll probably be in for a rather disjointed offensive performance on Saturday. That means that quality chances will likely be hard to come by, which puts a huge emphasis on finishing the ones that the Lions create. Even if the offense is creating tons of good chances the way it did against Atlanta, the guys on the field need to do a much better job of finishing those chances. On Wednesday, the Lions created a whopping eight chances with an expected goals (xG) value of .25 or higher, meaning that a player taking that shot would be expected to score roughly 25% of the time. Orlando managed to finish just three of those chances, and a game that never should have been in doubt ended up having a nervy finish once Atlanta pulled a goal back in stoppage time. That sort of profligacy simply can’t happen on Saturday, especially in a contest where chances will probably be at a premium.

There you have it folks. Bring on the fresh legs, clean up the back-side defending, and be lethal finishing in front of goal, and the Lions should have a good chance of taking all three points at home on Saturday. Vamos Orlando!