Is the answer to glaring defensive mistakes by your central defenders, that cost your team points, to just play more central defenders?
That seems to be the strategy that Fire coach Raphael Wicky landed on after witnessing his team give away easy goals in multiple games early this season.
In the opening day match against New England the Fire came out red hot. They were pushing Jonathan Bornstein and Boris Sekulić high up the field to give them width in attack. Chinoso Offor, Przemyslaw Frankowski, and Robert Berić were exchanging positions and causing overloads on both flanks, and Álvaro Medrán and Luka Stojanović were basically playing as two attacking midfielders pushing up to support the front three. This approach allowed the Fire to get off 20 shots, the most chances they have in any game this season, and also to score two goals in the opening 15 minutes.
But of course it left Francisco Calvo, Johan Kappelhof, and Gastòn Gimenez exposed to New England counter attacks, and they reminded everyone that the defensive issues from last season remain. Both center backs were guilty of diving in to make tackles, getting turned and giving up two cheap goals to New England.
Take a look at the average position map for the game and notice the advanced positions of Medrán (10) and Stojanovic (8). Playing both players allowed the Fire to keep possession of the ball in advanced areas of the field and pinned New England into their own half, forcing them to rely on counter attacks. Unfortunately they were pretty successful on those counters.
There were lots of positives to take from this game, but unfortunately, it seems like Wicky walked away focusing on defensive issues. The next game against Atlanta only seemed to confirm for Wicky that the focus had to be on defense first, as they gifted Atlanta their second goal before running out of gas late in the game, with Wicky unwilling to use his young attacking players from the bench.
So two games in and two poor defensive performances created pressure for Wicky to change something. His response…more center backs!
He decided to bring Maurico Pineda into the team, but instead of replacing Kappelhof with Pineda at center back, he opted to play Pineda as a center midfielder to provide more defensive cover. Pineda has played center midfield at times in his career so it’s not completely shocking to see him deployed in that position, as I wrote after that game it’s not that Pineda was necessarily bad, more a case of it made the team more defensive, and stopped them from playing to their strengths. Medrán was reduced to a spectator out wide, and the Red Bulls pinned the Fire back into their own third for long stretches of the game.
Wicky seemed to agree that Medrán playing as a wide attacker didn’t work, because in the next game Medrán found himself watching from the bench, where he was joined by Pineda. Instead Kappelhof was tasked with playing as an out-of-position center back at center mid against last season’s Supporters’ Shield winners. Kappelhof struggled, often resorting to sending the ball aimlessly up the field to avoid getting caught in possession. The result was that the Fire created a season low 9 shots, only 3 in the first half, and as shown in the heat map below they barely even entered the Union’s penalty box.
Kappelhof was taken off at halftime because he was already on a yellow card but even without that it was clear that the Kappelhof experiment in midfield wasn’t working for anyone.
Finally, in the most recent game Wicky persisted with playing a more defensive lineup, again fielding Pineda and Gimenez in the middle of the park, only this time they were joined by Medrán playing in an attacking midfield role and 17 year-old Brian Gutiérrez joined Berić and Frankowski up front. This line up gave the Fire more balance and they were able to possess the ball higher up the field and actually create quite a few scoring chances, but how much of that is due to playing a depleted DC United squad and how much is because the Fire finally found some offensive and defensive balance remains to be seen.
So what happens when you attempt to solve a team’s defensive issues by simply playing more center backs?
Actually, the answer was pretty predictable. Their offense got worse and the defense stayed about the same. The Fire scored 0 goals in all three of those games, and conceded 5. Compare that to the first two games when they scored 3 goals and conceded 5 and it seems pretty clear that more center backs probably isn’t the answer to the Fire’s early season struggles
