Marked is in the eye of the beholder: Assessing a baffling assessment about the latest defeat
What does a literary device used by Edgar Allan Poe have to do with Saturday night's match? We go nerdy so as not to go scorched earth.
The plot of Saturday night's match between Austin FC and FC Cincinnati – a 2-1 defeat for visiting Verde — is fairly simple. Evander, the protagonist or antagonist (depending on your narrative perspective) was given time and space in two key moments of the match to make remarkable plays.
The first was his 12th-minute goal to give the hosts the early lead, and the second — following the adversity of giving away the equalizing penalty kick off the foot of former FCC player Brandon Vázquez — was a visionary 76-minute assist to a streaking Gerardo Valenzuela, evading Guilherme Biro to score emphatically and retake the lead.
But in the post-match press conference, Austin FC head coach Nico Estévez took on a literary device, known as the unreliable narrator, that Edgar Allan Poe employed to great effect — you, the reader, know that the narrator's version of the story diverts from reality, because of what else the author has revealed to you, but the narration adds another layer of depth and complexity to the work as you evaluate the characters and their actions.
I got the first question out of the gate and asked about the game plan to neutralize Evander — an early MVP candidate and the principal reason Cincinnati retook the Eastern Conference lead last night. Estévez first praised Evander as (to paraphrase fancifully here) a talented player capable of thwarting a defensive strategy, which is a completely legitimate observation. Getting beat by great plays from one of the best players on the league on the road is a Normal MLS Occurrence.
But then, he made observations about the plays that arguably asked fans, to quote George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, to "reject the evidence of your eyes and ears."
"In he first goal, he was unmarked because it was a very quick play," Estévez said. "It was that a play that we were winning the ball, [Besard] Šabović was winning the ball, but the ball connected to the opponent, and the ball went to them, and then they just played quick and they we didn't have time to react to that situation. This is why he was unmarked."
And then, on the second goal, "He's marked, he's with on the player. What he does is amazing. I mean, the way he does that is amazing. The guy that that scored the goal, he wasn't mark, but with one player in front of [Evander], what he did with he outside of the foot ... I don't think how many players you know that they can do that. And I think you can say this game was a win for a player, and that player made the difference in this game."
Let me present some ocular evidence.
Breaking down the second goal
MLS's official goal highlight video clip shows the progression of the play. I went ahead and captured a still from it that highlights a key moment in the sequence, which starts with loosely-marked wingback Lukas Engel passing to an open Evander at the top of the 18-yard box, from close to the same part of the field where Evander scored his goal.
Notice something?
The caption notes, "Evander with some space," and indeed, he's got some. At this point in the play, Evander's got two passing options inside the box, and he could get either of those passes off before Oleksandr Svatok (in front of him) or Owen Wolff (to his right) could get to him. Here's the stunning part, though: Valenzuela, who scores the goal, isn't even in the frame. He'll enter from the right as Evander, having to choose once Wolff starts running toward him, chooses to chip the ball to the far post. Valenzuela makes a late run to get on the end of it and volley it home.
What's further confounding about Estévez's version of the story — that Evander is marked and Valenzuela is not — is that Biro actually has a better chance to impact the play than Wolff did. Biro, however, tried to play the incoming ball rather than posting up on Valenzuela, whiffing on his attempting header, which allowed Valenzuela to receive the ball with the placement and the weight to enable the scoring. It was a great goal, but an even greater assist.
"I guess marked is in the eye of the beholder," I told Estévez before asking my second question, with all of this freshly before me. He certainly knows more about soccer than I do, but I also know what I saw.
Jon Gallagher assessed the performance after a longer-than-usual wait for a player to get him into the Zoom call, meeting Moisés Chiullán's question about having an impressive showing in keeping the margin to 2-1 and keeping themselves in the match for longer than some might have expected — given how one goal turned into much more than that when Austin faced a similarly talented Vancouver team on the road last month.
"That's good to hear, because you obviously have your own opinion and feelings of the game, but you don't really know until you've probably come off the field and you get an idea of what the media thinks," he said. "You watch the game back, you get a little bit of a better understanding of how it actually went, but my initial reaction was that there was a lot of positives and really disappointed to not get a result.
'I thought we had really good moments," he said, before noting, "probably two preventable goals; they just happened to be in the right places at the right time. I think we deserved a point; I think that probably would have been fair."
And yet, it's another loss
The 2-1 loss to FCC, taken in isolation, is not so bad. But a 2-1 loss to FCC being a fourth loss in Verde's last five matches, and those four losses being by a 12-2 aggregate – with only one of those two goals scored from open play – is quite concerning. Verde's only scored two goals in one match out of 12 league matches this season, getting one goal in half those matches and failing to score in five others.
If Verde were gutting out results on the strength of a single goal plus sturdy defense, as they were in the first part of the season, it would at least signal a burgeoning identity and lead to some level of success. For stretches of the second half, the defense looked like the defense that bottled up LAFC, St. Louis, and the Galaxy en route to 1-0 shutouts.
And speaking of the Galaxy, my recent Emergency Podcast exhortation that, "It could be worse; you could be a Galaxy fan" got even more traction, given that this most recent loss came on the day that the Galaxy lost 7-0 to the Red Bulls in an MLS Cup rematch that makes me wonder about the future of Greg Vanney in Carson.
But with only a Vancouver-LAFC match on deck today that won't change Austin's position in the table, Nico Estévez's team has dropped to 8th place, and its five wins and -7 goal differential could impact tiebreakers in future weeks with Colorado and Dallas, currently tied with Austin on 16 points and on either side of the playoff line.
"I think if you analyze a little bit the game, I think we had a really strong start," Estévez assessed. "We had a really good couple [of] dangerous chances against them, and we concede that goal, I think we immediately responded."
Responses measured in chance creation is one thing, and responses measured in goals is quite another. Here's a pair of player stats, courtesy of FotMob, that allow you to see how Austin's two most expensive scorers fared, including a mostly-invisible Myrto Uzuni:
Vázquez, 35 touches, seven touches in the opposition box, two big chances missed
Uzuni, 25 touches, one touch in the opposition box, two passes into the final third (playing, remember, on the wing)
Austin hosts Atlanta on Wednesday, and given both teams' similar struggles this season — a new coach and new players underperforming expectations — the matchup appears on paper to favor Verde. Estévez indicated, to summarize the tenor of his post-match comments, that he sees progress in the team as it continues to evolve.
But, given all that transpired in his session with the media on Saturday night, can we believe him?
Verde All Day is a reader-supported online publication covering Austin FC. Additional support is provided by Austin Telco Federal Credit Union. You can comment here if you’re a subscriber, or reach out via Bluesky.
Thanks to a comeback involving three goals in seven minutes, Verde will play its rivals in Orange with a chance to advance to the U.S. Open quarterfinals.
The plot of Saturday night's match between Austin FC and FC Cincinnati – a 2-1 defeat for visiting Verde — is fairly simple. Evander, the protagonist or antagonist (depending on your narrative perspective) was given time and space in two key moments of the match to make remarkable plays.
The first was his 12th-minute goal to give the hosts the early lead, and the second — following the adversity of giving away the equalizing penalty kick off the foot of former FCC player Brandon Vázquez — was a visionary 76-minute assist to a streaking Gerardo Valenzuela, evading Guilherme Biro to score emphatically and retake the lead.
But in the post-match press conference, Austin FC head coach Nico Estévez took on a literary device, known as the unreliable narrator, that Edgar Allan Poe employed to great effect — you, the reader, know that the narrator's version of the story diverts from reality, because of what else the author has revealed to you, but the narration adds another layer of depth and complexity to the work as you evaluate the characters and their actions.
I got the first question out of the gate and asked about the game plan to neutralize Evander — an early MVP candidate and the principal reason Cincinnati retook the Eastern Conference lead last night. Estévez first praised Evander as (to paraphrase fancifully here) a talented player capable of thwarting a defensive strategy, which is a completely legitimate observation. Getting beat by great plays from one of the best players on the league on the road is a Normal MLS Occurrence.
But then, he made observations about the plays that arguably asked fans, to quote George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, to "reject the evidence of your eyes and ears."
"In he first goal, he was unmarked because it was a very quick play," Estévez said. "It was that a play that we were winning the ball, [Besard] Šabović was winning the ball, but the ball connected to the opponent, and the ball went to them, and then they just played quick and they we didn't have time to react to that situation. This is why he was unmarked."
And then, on the second goal, "He's marked, he's with on the player. What he does is amazing. I mean, the way he does that is amazing. The guy that that scored the goal, he wasn't mark, but with one player in front of [Evander], what he did with he outside of the foot ... I don't think how many players you know that they can do that. And I think you can say this game was a win for a player, and that player made the difference in this game."
Let me present some ocular evidence.
Breaking down the second goal
MLS's official goal highlight video clip shows the progression of the play. I went ahead and captured a still from it that highlights a key moment in the sequence, which starts with loosely-marked wingback Lukas Engel passing to an open Evander at the top of the 18-yard box, from close to the same part of the field where Evander scored his goal.
Notice something?
The caption notes, "Evander with some space," and indeed, he's got some. At this point in the play, Evander's got two passing options inside the box, and he could get either of those passes off before Oleksandr Svatok (in front of him) or Owen Wolff (to his right) could get to him. Here's the stunning part, though: Valenzuela, who scores the goal, isn't even in the frame. He'll enter from the right as Evander, having to choose once Wolff starts running toward him, chooses to chip the ball to the far post. Valenzuela makes a late run to get on the end of it and volley it home.
What's further confounding about Estévez's version of the story — that Evander is marked and Valenzuela is not — is that Biro actually has a better chance to impact the play than Wolff did. Biro, however, tried to play the incoming ball rather than posting up on Valenzuela, whiffing on his attempting header, which allowed Valenzuela to receive the ball with the placement and the weight to enable the scoring. It was a great goal, but an even greater assist.
"I guess marked is in the eye of the beholder," I told Estévez before asking my second question, with all of this freshly before me. He certainly knows more about soccer than I do, but I also know what I saw.
Jon Gallagher assessed the performance after a longer-than-usual wait for a player to get him into the Zoom call, meeting Moisés Chiullán's question about having an impressive showing in keeping the margin to 2-1 and keeping themselves in the match for longer than some might have expected — given how one goal turned into much more than that when Austin faced a similarly talented Vancouver team on the road last month.
"That's good to hear, because you obviously have your own opinion and feelings of the game, but you don't really know until you've probably come off the field and you get an idea of what the media thinks," he said. "You watch the game back, you get a little bit of a better understanding of how it actually went, but my initial reaction was that there was a lot of positives and really disappointed to not get a result.
'I thought we had really good moments," he said, before noting, "probably two preventable goals; they just happened to be in the right places at the right time. I think we deserved a point; I think that probably would have been fair."
And yet, it's another loss
The 2-1 loss to FCC, taken in isolation, is not so bad. But a 2-1 loss to FCC being a fourth loss in Verde's last five matches, and those four losses being by a 12-2 aggregate – with only one of those two goals scored from open play – is quite concerning. Verde's only scored two goals in one match out of 12 league matches this season, getting one goal in half those matches and failing to score in five others.
If Verde were gutting out results on the strength of a single goal plus sturdy defense, as they were in the first part of the season, it would at least signal a burgeoning identity and lead to some level of success. For stretches of the second half, the defense looked like the defense that bottled up LAFC, St. Louis, and the Galaxy en route to 1-0 shutouts.
And speaking of the Galaxy, my recent Emergency Podcast exhortation that, "It could be worse; you could be a Galaxy fan" got even more traction, given that this most recent loss came on the day that the Galaxy lost 7-0 to the Red Bulls in an MLS Cup rematch that makes me wonder about the future of Greg Vanney in Carson.
But with only a Vancouver-LAFC match on deck today that won't change Austin's position in the table, Nico Estévez's team has dropped to 8th place, and its five wins and -7 goal differential could impact tiebreakers in future weeks with Colorado and Dallas, currently tied with Austin on 16 points and on either side of the playoff line.
"I think if you analyze a little bit the game, I think we had a really strong start," Estévez assessed. "We had a really good couple [of] dangerous chances against them, and we concede that goal, I think we immediately responded."
Responses measured in chance creation is one thing, and responses measured in goals is quite another. Here's a pair of player stats, courtesy of FotMob, that allow you to see how Austin's two most expensive scorers fared, including a mostly-invisible Myrto Uzuni:
Austin hosts Atlanta on Wednesday, and given both teams' similar struggles this season — a new coach and new players underperforming expectations — the matchup appears on paper to favor Verde. Estévez indicated, to summarize the tenor of his post-match comments, that he sees progress in the team as it continues to evolve.
But, given all that transpired in his session with the media on Saturday night, can we believe him?
Verde All Day is a reader-supported online publication covering Austin FC. Additional support is provided by Austin Telco Federal Credit Union. You can comment here if you’re a subscriber, or reach out via Bluesky.
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