'Maybe we needed to wake up': Assessing a surprising loss in Canada

After Austin's 3-2 loss on Saturday against a CF Montréal team teetering on the edge of playoff elimination in August, Myrto Uzuni had a message about the importance of team unity.

"Now we have to be more together to continue to achieve our goals," he said, and that seems a perfectly fine statement on the surface.

But context is important.

That answer came after a long delay even getting an Austin FC player to appear at the press conference — more than 20 minutes passed between farewell salutations from Austin FC head coach Nico Estévez and Uzuni popping up on Zoom, looking not entirely thrilled to be before the media.

In my fifth year of covering Austin FC post-match press conferences, I can't remember a longer gap between coach and player appearing, even in COVID-19 days when we stayed masked up in the press box to conduct Zoom interviews with players five floors below us in the same building.

If the team was indeed committed to being together on Saturday night, it was perhaps starting that newfound togetherness in what one might cynically interpret — given the length of the wait and no explanation for why — as a collective reticence to face questions about its performance.

(Though, after a biting loss such as this one, missing out on a chance to eliminate a playoff team — again, in August, by merely drawing that team, which came into the contest with just four wins in 27 matches — I understand the unwillingness to talk about it.)

Estévez was more effusive, to his credit, especially in addressing my initial question about the defensive lapses that contributed to the loss.

"No good, as you said," Estévez said. "It's very difficult to win a game when you concede three goals in the way that we conceded. All of them, we could have avoided them. It seems like it didn't go our way today in some of these situations, some because of the mistakes that we make, and some of it is from luck. But we weren't good enough in that side and we can do better, and we have to do better."

The game did hold some positives on the offensive end — Uzuni and Wolff both scored their fourth goals of the season, with Wolff now getting goals in back-to-back contests, and Uzuni netting goals in three of the last five matches.

"Our production on the offensive side, it was enough to win the game," said Estévez, pointing out that Osman Bukari had a good one-on-one opportunity to add to the tally, and Uzuni had another chance that went wanting. "There were a couple crosses that they went right there, and then no one touches."

He noted that Montréal made it difficult in the first half – reflected in the hosts getting the match's first six shots and going up 1-0 early – by man-marking, an issue compounded by Verde players' positions, especially the fullbacks, being "too high" — something he addressed after halftime by dropping them deeper to create more space for wingers and midfielders.

And yet Estévez, even when pondering the offense, said, "But you know, in order to win these games away, you have to do it really well defensively."

Parsing numbers

There's a likely reason Estévez didn't bring up xG as he now customarily does; Verde actually overperformed a meager xG, getting outpaced by a Montréal side that got to add a hefty PK value to its total xG.

By FotMob's numbers, CFM won the xG battle 2.17 to 1.35, though expected goals on target (xGOT) was nearly even at 1.96 to 1.85 — emphasizing that the penalty really did ultimately make the difference in the match. (Well, that, and Verde's inability to produce an equalizer after Owen Wolff answered Prince Owusu's gift goal with a 77th-minute strike, bringing Verde to just a single-goal deficit.)

Here's how it looked from the ASA numbers via Catalina Bush.

Montréal has more than double Austin's xG per that count, but what really jumps out to me here is how aligned the goals are with the momentum chart in the center of the graphic, and how pronounced Montréal's momentum is from just before halftime — when they retook the lead – to a few minutes after the PK, when Wolff's goal sparked a burst of Verde activity.

You can also see in that graphic, looking at the players' average positions, how high up the fullbacks were, even with the second-half adjustment figured in. You can also see how Austin played more centrally, whereas Montréal's fullbacks and wingers were positioned much wider.

But the teams had about the same average line for defensive actions — which was fairly far forward — and field tilt only favored Austin 58-42.

Austin's two goals came on their best-positioned chances; they weren't able to do anything with their poor or average shots. (CFM got its opening goal off Hennadii Synchuk's "average" shot, which comes from distance from goal — he still managed to get an open shot between defenders who failed that particular transition defense test.)

And, finally, the goals added ratings confirmed what you saw with your eyes; Uzuni, Wolff, and Bukari all excelled, while Mikkel Desler — dinged in large part for his handball resulting in a penalty kick — was down with Oleksandr Svatok (who the G+ metric consistently does not like at all) at the bottom of the ratings.

Uzuni, asked about his performance, downplayed any individual accolades that Saturday's match might have given him.

"This is coming by hard work, the people on the club know very well," he said. "The people outside the club, they don't know nothing about that. I'm working a lot to be more consistent, to score a lot, to help the team. But as I told you before, we are [all] sad. I'm not happy about my goal or my performance, because this game is not individual, this is collective. And I think we are going sad in[to] Austin, and we have to prepare so strong, because San Jose is a good team, and we have to make good performance. We have to give to our fans, because I think they deserve, after two draw at home, they deserve to be happy and together, [with] three points."

About that San Jose game

Next Saturday's home match against the Quakes is critical in the race for the play-in places, now that Verde has dropped seven of their last nine possible points, going winless in the three August matches following their most convincing offensive output of the year against D.C. United.

The worst-case scenario I laid out in Friday's article happened last night – Austin lost while San Jose beat Houston, allowing the Quakes to clamber into 8th place. While Austin's now dropped to 9th, it was helped in somewhat solidifying that position by Minnesota beating Real Salt Lake and LAFC drawing Dallas. That leaves Austin four points ahead of RSL and five points ahead of FCD, and Austin's got one more match to play than both of those teams.

Still, a Verde win next Saturday would allow them to regain at least 8th and possibly edge past 7th-place Colorado, as well as chipping away at a 10-goal gap in goal differential — though realistically, if hosting the play-in game comes down to the goal differential tiebreaker, it's likely that San Jose will prevail, given that goals are coming much easier for the Quakes right now. (Its 52 goals are double Austin's 26, though the Quakes' defense has let in 48 goals to Austin's 32.)

"You never want to lose a game," Estévez said. "But maybe we needed to wake up, because I think our performance against Houston and Dallas were okay ... Against Houston, probably we did a really good job there, and it was like probably the last minutes where we didn't do a good job.

"Sometimes you need to lose a game in order to give a step back to realize that if you don't do well, you can get punished," he continued. "And then everything that you work for and you gain during this time, you can lose it. And then now we're in that situation, we have to step up. And it's not about effort, it's not about willingness, because I saw a group in the second half going after the game, trying to tie the game and win it the game. But we got short, and in any match game it's very difficult to score multiple goals. Now that we are scoring multiple goals, we are lacking on closing [off] those goals on the defensive side."

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