Backpass: Time is Cruel
We look at not *how* the goals have been scored, but *when*, to see if that might not be part of the problem.
Timing, as they say, is everything. If you ask the pretty girl out 15 minutes after her boyfriend has just proposed - it doesn’t matter how charming you are - odds are, you’re getting turned down. Ask that same girl out the day after she’s been dumped, and your odds go up a whole heck of a lot.
I think about timing a lot. We bought our house after the real estate crash, when there was a glut of homes and nobody could qualify for a mortgage. ( We got one! Yay!) We sold our house at the peak of the market1, when everybody and their mother was trying to move to Denver because, well, Colorado is wonderful. As the song goes, ‘it’s full of beer, weed, and the Rapids’; although I think ‘lovely weather, a growing job market, and an excellent health-conscious lifestyle’ might be considered by C38 as lyrics for a second verse. And thus, our house sold for a bunch more than we paid for it seven years prior. Timing!
Of course, my life is full of mistimed escapades as well. I have arrived 3 hours late for a plane flight, because I’d misread the arrival time as the departure time. I’ve done that twice. I’ve been fired from my job, for which there is no equivalent employment anywhere in Colorado, while my wife yet had a year to go at CU-Anschutz. That was lousy timing. Etcetera etcetera. I bet you’ve got several moments of your life that were just perfectly timed. And others that were a disaster.
In soccer, timing is really critically important, and I think we sometimes for get that. ‘Goals change games’ or so the aphorism goes. Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers likes to say ‘Scored too early’ when his beloved Everton gets a lead in the first fifteen.2 Often that’s because, real or imagined, the Toffees sometimes bunker up and defend a bit on that 1-0 lead. Which, of course, is dumb, because 1-0 isn’t something a smart team tries to cling to for 80 minutes. Unlike in basketball, where a 20-0 run at the beginning of a game, in the middle, or at the end has effectively the same impact, in soccer a team can radically alter their approach based on a goal or two.
For the Colorado Rapids this season, the largest simple factor in their success or failure is not when, but where.
That tweet from May 27 needs an update: the team is now 6-2-1 at home with a GD of +9 after their dismantling at the hands of Nashville SC on May 29, 3-1. Nonetheless, the team is generally very good at home, and very bad on the road. If the season progressed exactly as it has to date with no change in form, we will go roughly 0-3-8 in our remaining 11 road games and 6-2-1 in our final 9 home games. Added to our current 5-3-6 record, that would be a total of 41 points for the season. No team in the 34-game season era has scored fewer than 43 points and made the playoffs.3
But I definitely didn’t think ‘we need to stop sucking on the road’ was a brilliant enough idea to write a whole Backpass about. So I wondered ‘do we have a game-states problem?’ When do the Rapids score, and is that harming us?
Overall: We score in the middle, and not early
Overall, looking at ‘Pids matches in 15 minute segments, there isn’t a lot to show. Colorado have not scored once in the opening 15 minutes of the match, which hurts their ability to dictate tempo or shape the match tactically. If you chunked the match into thirds though, the Rapids have 5 Goals For, 5 Goals Against in the first third, 8 GF, 7 GA in the middle third, and 3 GF, 5 GA in the final third of the match. Slow starts, big middles. This seems like a ‘let’s feel things out and not concede early’ approach to the match, followed by a willingness to open up and attack once things have gone on for a bit.
Perhaps this is an idea worth re-evaluating. The team isn’t scoring early, and isn’t overwhelmingly succeeding overall. One way to shake things up for the Rapids might be to simply come out of the locker room attacking from the get go - less ‘direct’4, more aggressive, in the first 15 minutes.
Here’s our home numbers. The notable thing is how the team locks it down in the second half at home. Colorado has not conceded in the second half at home this season; of course, before the Nashville match, we hadn’t conceded at all at home. Nevertheless, 7 GF, 0 GA in the second half at home is instructive. The Rapids most frequent scores going into the half has been 1-0 (occurred 3 times) and 0-0 (occurred 2 times).
It would be overly simplistic to attribute this to ‘Strength at Altitude’, since once you look at *when* the Rapids score at home, you see that they have 4 GF, 0 GA in the 46-60 minute slot. They’re gangbusters out of the halftime talk. Why? What is the approach that the team adopts in that time segment? Why does it work? Can that tactical approach be duplicated into additional time periods? This is a question one hopes the coaching staff is thinking about. I’ll note, anecdotally, that it was my impression that Pablo Mastroeni’s Rapids from 2015-2017 were terrible right after the half. Pablo’s Rapids were great if they were winning, and pretty good in 2016 after the half if they were tied and could win it on a late header. In general, though, if the team needed to adjust at the half, they couldn’t do it, and would inevitably lose. Or perhaps they made Pablo’s adjustments, which were not the right adjustments.
Here’s the road numbers. We’re basically terrible all over, but especially in the second half. We leak like a sieve. Like a colander. No, bad analogy, because when you use colander, you’ve got nicely dried pasta at the end. For the Rapids, there is no good result at the end of the leaking. No pasta for you, signore! The Rapids second halves on the road are like that scene of Dan Ackroyd’s completely miserable night in ‘Trading Places’.5
This is an area that must be addressed. What do they change on the road in second halves? In their away matches this season, the Rapids half-time score has been 1-1 three times (Dallas, they lost 3-1; Minnesota, they lost 3-1; and Kansas City, they lost 2-1). They also been up 1-0 at the half (against Houston, that game ended in a 1-1 draw) and drawn 0-0 at the half (against San Jose, and they lost 1-0).
Since the team is 0-1-4 in matches in which they were drawn or had a lead at the half, the chosen tactic for the second half has consistently been a failure. Either they have been going for the go-ahead goal and haven’t been successful while simultaneously opening themselves up to be punished, or the coach has ordered them to park the bus and go defensive, and they’ve failed. I could re-watch all five of those second halves to make a determination, but I don’t think I’d learn anything. Really, knowing whether the coach gave them a plan and it was a bad one, or whether the team failed to actually do what the coach asked them to do, is unknowable.6
Whatever it is - what the Rapids do know is that they do not currently have a second half road approach that works. The note above that points out that we are on pace for roughly 41 points on the season if our road woes persist strongly implies that we had better find a second-half road plan, or we’re going to be on the outside looking in for the playoffs.
It’s Denver so ‘peak’ is relative. I’m sure prices are even higher now. But it FELT like the peak.
There is also a famous belief that ‘2-0 is the most dangerous lead’ because that scoreline breeds becoming complacent and careless. I’m fairly certain that this is not based in fact at all - that most teams up 2-0 do go on to win at roughly twice the rate as teams up 1-0 or 2-1. The idea isn’t wrong though - a team must maintain their seriousness and composure when leading.
The 2012 Vancouver Whitecaps had 43 points to snag a Western Conference wildcard spot. They were bounced 2-1 by the LA Galaxy in the first round. The fourth place Beckham-Donovan-Mike Magee-Robbie Keane roared through the playoffs and won MLS Cup that year over Houston.
In soccer the phrase ‘direct’ means to kick it long or diagonal to a player making a deep run. It’s a low risk attacking strategy which is safe, not-that-successful, and kind of boring.
Are you young? Have you never seen Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd? This is one of the great comedic films of all time. Put this article aside right now and watch this movie. I’ll wait.
Additionally, Robin Fraser, to his credit, would never throw his players under the bus if he told them to do something and they failed to execute on his plan. We just can’t know.