The long ball game, a lack of intensity, no Plan B and that MVO mistake

My Birmingham Legion FC talking points following their 1-0 loss at Hartford Athletic in Saturday's USL Championship matchup

Matt van Oekel warms up ahead of Legion’s home game against El Paso Locomotive (TIMOTHY BELIN)

The good vibes didn’t last long in Birmingham.

Not even a full week after Birmingham Legion’s first win of the season, one meant to kickstart a tough campaign, the Three Sparks made sure to bring their fans back to reality.

Traveling to Connecticut to face the only team in the USL Championship without so much as a point so far this season, one also deprived of several key players through both injury and suspension, the Black and Gold registered just one shot on target in a match lacking any real intensity. To make matters worse, they then handed Hartford Athletic a gift goal, just the second of Hartford’s league season to date, to ensure the hosts got their first win of the season.

The defeat showed that the previous win might have been more of a false dawn than a fresh start, and that the team has a long way to go to turn its fortunes around.

Legion’s long ball conundrum

Last week, I praised interim head coach Eric Avila on one of the key changes he made to the team: his limited use of long balls.

Birmingham Legion focused on short passes around the El Paso midfield, meant to draw the opponent out and create spaces for players to run into. Only when such an opportunity presented itself did the Three Sparks launch balls in behind for their speedy forwards to run onto.

In stark contrast, this week saw an increase in long ball attempts, and not the smart kind.

Long balls have three main purposes other than simply clearing one’s lines:

1. Like Legion did last week, they can be an excellent way to get forward quickly, freeing pacy forwards to run behind the defensive lines.

2. They can also be aimed directly at a target man, one who is big enough and strong enough to win the aerial battle and bring the ball down. He can then hold it up and bring others into play.

3. If the striker doesn’t have that physical presence, the third option is to have him contest for the ball to disrupt the defenders and then have wingers or attacking midfielders, whoever is closest, swarm that area and win the second ball to move possession up the field.

On Saturday, Birmingham did none of these.

Multiple long balls were aimed straight at Ronaldo Damus, a 5’9” forward who is much more comfortable running in behind (as seen with his first goal last week) than implementing any sort of hold-up play. The Haitian forward was asked to contest six aerial duels on Saturday, compared to just one against El Paso.

While he is credited with winning two of them, that doesn’t mean much if nobody is there to pick up the second ball. Legion’s lack of intensity, which we’ll get more into later, meant Enzo Martínez and Kobe Hernandez-Foster did not adopt the same high positions as they did against El Paso, and Damus, even when winning long balls, had nobody to play them off and promptly lost possession.

As a result, Legion’s top scorer was virtually invisible in Connecticut, despite playing the full 90 minutes.

The hosts’ low block prevented him making those dangerous runs in behind, while the team’s insistence on attempting to find him with long balls left him isolated. He ended the game with just 6 completed passes (from 10 attempts), and no shots, crosses, offsides or chances created.

A surprising lack of intensity

Coming into Saturday’s game, Hartford Athletic was 0-4-0 with a single goal and just five shots on target from their first four league games. Coupled with key absentees, you could not have dreamt up a better opponent for Legion to face as they looked to build some momentum.

And yet, the Three Sparks opted to sit back for the opening 15 minutes and let the hosts dictate the game.

Avila and Martínez both said pre-game that they weren’t entirely sure what to expect from a Hartford team still figuring itself out. That lent itself to a wait-and-see approach to Saturday’s game, one which ended up being the Legion’s undoing.

Like any other sport, soccer is often a game of momentum. Hartford were coming in low on confidence after four consecutive losses, including an upset in the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup, while the Legion had the wind in their sails after finally getting off the mark in league play.

In that situation, you would expect the Three Sparks to press their advantage and go for the throat from the off. Get an early goal, and Hartford would almost certainly crumble.

“The game could be won early or lost early when those type of situations arise,” Martínez said pre-game.

But Legion looked more afraid to lose the game than eager to win it.

Other than one fifth-minute chance that saw Tyler Pasher sky a shot from inside the penalty area, Legion appeared content to let Hartford dictate the opening exchanges. By the time the Three Sparks started to put their foot on the gas halfway through the first half, Hartford were well-established in the game and therefore confident they could get something out of it.

The hosts ended up dominating the Black and the Gold in the duels — Legion’s 43.9% success rate was their lowest since the opening-day loss to Loudoun United — further proof of the confidence those opening minutes gave them. Legion gave them a chance to establish themselves in the game, and, once Hartford were, they were always going to be harder to get past.

On paper, Legion is a team with the star-power to challenge nearly any opponent in the USL Championship. They should be setting the tone in games like this, going into it with the mentality that they are the better side and Hartford will need to come up with answers to what they bring. They should never be traveling to the team bottom of the league with a plan as reactive as they showed on against Hartford.

While there was hope after El Paso that the Black and Gold were turning a corner, Saturday was the sign of a team still severely low on confidence in their own abilities.

Possession without purpose

In the positives column, Legion did finish the game with the majority of possession, the first time they’ve done so in the USL Championship this season. So how is it they registered their lowest shot tally of the year (8, tied with the Detroit City game)?

The answer? A lack of ideas once Plan A wasn’t working.

Though the Three Sparks started the game in a reactive shape, the attacking plan was still clear. The focus was going to be on wing play.

Danny Trejo was asked to run at his fullback on the left, while the opposite winger, Pasher, drifted inside from the right. This allowed Dawson McCartney, a natural winger playing right-back, to join on the overlap and give the Legion an extra attacking outlet.

While Pasher had a couple of good combinations in that inside forward role, notably with his early chance and when he drew the foul for Hernandez-Foster’s stoppage time free-kick, Trejo was the real danger man for Legion in the opening 45 minutes. The Mexican forward, who created that early Pasher chance, took his man on time and again with success.

Trejo consistently looked dangerous and likely to make something happen when he received the ball and quickly became the go-to outlet for Legion’s attacks. As a result, Hartford started double-teaming in. That extra player covering the right side of Hartford’s defense should have opened up space elsewhere for Birmingham to take advantage of.

Instead, the Legion looked stumped by the tactical shift, and their attack stuttered to a halt.

Attacking right to left, Birmingham Legion heat map vs Hartford Athletic.

If you look at the game’s heat map, two things quickly become clear: Legion wanted the ball in the wide areas, and they spent a lot of time possessing it deep inside their own half.

Once the wings stopped being an option, the team failed to shift to a Plan B, giving them plenty of possession with little penetration.

Damus was a non-factor, and neither Martínez nor Hernandez-Foster pushed high enough to make up for it. As a result, the team created virtually nothing through the middle.

That isn’t to say the two midfielder weren’t involved, they just did so significantly further down the pitch than you would want from them. Their respective average positions put them right on top of each other in the center circle.

Hernandez-Foster finished the game with 69 completed passes, the highest of any player on the pitch. As the right-sided half of the central pairing, he probably accounts for a large part of the red blob just outside Matt van Oekel’s penalty area. His 92.8% passing accuracy was also one of the best, beaten only by Legion’s fullback duo.

But though it might be counterintuitive, a high success rate for an offensive-minded center-midfielder is not always a good thing. Sometimes, like on Saturday, it’s a sign that he just wasn’t trying enough risky passes, the kind that have a chance of unlocking the resolute defense Hartford exhibited.

I singled out Hernandez-Foster because his numbers reflect the problem, but he was far from alone in deserving blame. Legion completed 451 passes with with 88.9% accuracy. Both are season highs, but far too often these were sideways passes with no real penetration.

Avila’s only response to the decreased impact of his wingers was first, in classic Tom Soehn fashion, to have them swap sides. Later, it was to replace them with Sebastian Tregarthen and Preston Tabort Etaka. Neither change made a difference, with both subs struggling to get into the game.

Despite playing 15 minutes when counting second-half stoppage time, Tobort Etaka completed just one pass in his cameo, while also sending in one unsuccessful cross.

Poor crosses were the norm for the Legion, who used them as last resorts once the wings dried up. Across the 90 minutes, the Three Sparks sent 19 crosses into the Hartford area. Only one reached its intended target.

It’s fair to say a lot of these numbers make for very grim reading for the Legion faithful, but they aren’t wholly unexplainable.

The change in head coach allowed Legion to surprise El Paso last week, but now that Avila has shown his hand, he needs to learn to plan for contingencies. That will come if he keeps the interim role for the foreseeable future, as he will have more time on the training ground to instil a Plan A, B and C into the players.

For now, it’s normal for a head coach with barely a week in the job to have spent most of his time drilling his primary tactics. Only once those are truly ingrained into the players will he likely move on to variations.

The question becomes whether Avila will be given the time to do so, or if someone else will be brought in before he has the chance. If it is to be the former, the interim head coach will do well to make sure there isn’t any mixed-messaging coming from the other man on the sidelines.

In defense of Matt van Oekel

There’s no hiding it, van Oekel made a pretty horrendous mistake Saturday to allow that Hartford goal. The shot seemed tame and pretty much straight at him, and the veteran goalkeeper let it slip off his glove and into the back of the net.

Some fans took it as a sign that it might be time for the 38-year-old to take a back seat and let either Trevor Spangenberg or Fernando Delgado assume the No. 1 role.

Sports fans are, and always have been, prone to knee-jerk reactions, and soccer is no different. So it isn’t a surprise to see such takes in the wake of a disappointing loss. But some people would do well to remember the performances the goalkeeper has already put in this season alone.

There wouldn’t have been any points for the Legion against either Louisville or Detroit without some big saves from the Virginia-native. Even in the loss to Pittsburgh he came up with big moments, including one save nominated for USL Championship Save of the Week.

Van Oekel is a consummate professional and he knows better than anyone else that his mistake wasn’t good enough. After the Louisville game, one where he made five saves and conceded just once to a team that scored nine past the Three Sparks across 2024, he still wasn’t wholly pleased with his performance. He doesn’t need to be told that he messed up, and he will undoubtedly bounce back better for it.

Goalkeeper is a uniquely lonely position at times, because one mistake can often make or break a performance. Even though Ramiz Hamouda was just as culpable in the play, van Oekel took the headlines because his error is more directly visible.

But even the best goalkeepers make mistakes. Just ask David de Gea, the five-time Premier League Goalkeeper of the Year. Despite playing so well as to earn a record four Manchester United Player of the Season awards, the Spaniard was also capable of some pretty shocking moments during his stay at Old Trafford.

With a USL Jägermeister Cup game up next for the Three Sparks, there is a good possibility Avila chooses to rotate his goalkeeper, either to give Delgado a few more professional minutes under his belt or to keep Spangenberg sharp if he’s ever called upon. And given that the Legion play a USL League One side, there is a chance they might even keep a clean sheet.

If that is to happen, the calls for whoever plays Sunday to replace van Oekel in league outings might grow louder. But it will be important to consider the context and remember further than a week back if they do.