Backpass: Why do the Rapids keep conceding at the half?
Colorado has conceded eight goals in the final few minutes of the first or second half. We look at why it's happening, and how Chris Armas can fix it.
A few years ago, when Pablo Mastroeni was Colorado’s head coach, I would shake my head at the end of a 0-0 first half and brace myself for defeat. That’s because, anecdotally speaking, it seemed like the opposing coach would adjust tactics in the second half, while the Rapids would keep doing the same thing. The Mastronaccio, as some fans like to call it, was an effective but simple approach to football: a 4-2-3-1 with a two-way midfielder, a striker up high and alone, and eight other guys defending for their lives. In 2016 it worked, mostly because Colorado got really good at scoring that 70+ minute go-ahead goal. Colorado won 13 games by 1 goal – out of 15 wins. they won eight of those games on a go-ahead goal in the 70th minute or later. That’s 16 points picked up… in the dying moments. Insane.1
In 2015 and 2017, though, the ‘defend for your life, score at the death’ approach didn’t work. Colorado lost 19 games in 2017 and had just 33 points.2 Shkelzen Gashi was hurt a lot. Tim Howard was in decline. Axel Sjoberg, it turned out, could only do one cool trick, and that was clearing the ball. Left backs Mekeil Williams and Mike DaFonte were not up to the task the way Marc Burch had been.3 Mastroeni was fired midseason.
I bring this up not to re-litigate the 2017 season, but because the 2016 and 2017 seasons demonstrate that weird, fluky, late goals can have an outsized impact on your team. In 2016, Colorado counted on late goals and it worked. In 2017, it didn’t.
So far in 2025, the Colorado Rapids are predictably midtable, with 4 wins, 4 draws, 3 losses. They’re winless in their last three matches. But fans have noticed a pattern to Colorado: they tend to collapse at the end of the first half.
If we extend the conversation to ‘ends of halfs’, Colorado also conceded a goal to San Diego in the 89th minute (didn’t matter, they were up 3-1 at the time and won 3-2) and to Houston at 90+6 to give the Dynamo a home draw.
The question is: what could account for a team being consistently vulnerable to end the half? Here’s a list of possible answers.
It’s a focus thing.
The first answer I will give, and reject, I will call the ‘Drive-time Sports Talk Radio Answer.’ That explanation would be that the team lacks focus; they drop their attention like a teenager in the final 5 minutes of a math class before the bell rings.4 That’s a stats and tactics free answer favored by people who want a simple explanation. To be fair, sometimes the simple answer is correct. And it might be the case that Colorado has a mentality problem; that the team for some reason lacks focus or confidence in seeing out matches. The remedy, then, would involve nothing more than some good ol’ motivational speeches before games about being “LOCKED IN” for “NINETY MINUTES”. Additionally, head coach Chris Armas could spend some time at the ends of training, when the team is tired, pretending to defend a lead.
I’m not a huge fan of this theory, mostly because at the MLS level, these guys have been playing competitive football at a high level for a long time. Individually, most of them wouldn’t have made it this far if they had a penchant for dropping their concentration as the game draws to a close. It’s possible, but its also too convenient, if only because anything that can potentially be solved with a locker room speech doesn’t seem like a real solution. It makes me think of folks who listen to motivational tapes in the car to become thinner. I mean, maybe that’ll fix your problems: but I think diet and exercise is probably the sure bet.
It’s a fitness thing.
Related to focus would be fitness: the brain gets fuzzy when it’s tired. Reaction times slow. Speed drops. Maybe Colorado is more fatigued to end the halves than their opponents, and that causes them to make mistakes.
This would make sense if the team was running or training less than other MLS teams. I don’t think thats true, but I can’t know that for sure. I know that it isn’t an age thing: the average age of the eleven Rapids players with the most minutes is 26.5 years old. The average age of their opponents to date is 28.0 years old.
That all said, this theory might have some legs. The fitness staff might want to look at some of the data they receive from those StatSport ‘vests’5 and see if it reveals when players exertion, pace, and heart rates change in training. I’ll add that ‘they just need to run more, and harder!’ might not be the solution. A critique of the Jurgen Klinsmann era of the USMNT was that he would gather a team of in-season trained professionals who had played and trained with their clubs, and then kill them with physically punishing training sessions before international matches. And then the players would look … tired. So ‘they need to run more’ could be the answer. But ‘they need to run less’ could also be the answer. Still, I dislike this theory compared to the next one…
It’s a game management thing.
You can’t expect players to hell bent for leather for 90 minutes straight, no matter what coaches will tell you in the postgame presser.
Slight digression: one of the most irritating soccer experiences I ever had was watching the USMNT-Belgium match in the 2014 World Cup. You remember. The game where Tim Howard earned the monicker ‘Secretary of Defense’ for his 15 save performance. I watched that game down the block from me at Maria Empanada in Wash Park, restaurant packed to gills, and for all of extratime, some idiot kept screaming at the US players to RUN HARDER and WHY AREN’T YOU EVEN TRYING. I am fairly certain this man just did not understand soccer: nobody runs at a sprint for 90 minutes a game, let alone 120 minutes. On some level, soccer is all about gaining the wisdom to know when to jog, and when to sprint. I love me some Ollie Larraz and Cole Bassett, but the fact that they run their asses off all match does not make them better players than Sergio Busquets and Lionel Messi, who, at their advanced ages, sprint when they need to and jog the rest of the time.
Coaches often tell teams when and where to exert their energy. A coach can say ‘we are going to run our asses off for the first 15 minutes to try and get a goal’, or say ‘we’re gonna bunker and defend till 60 and then turn the tables.’ A coach can inform the team to either fast break in transition, or play at a modest pace for possession. A coach can play long ball to the wingers, but that means the wingers will be sprinting a lot. A coach can set a high press, but that means expending energy on defense to win the ball that will have a price in offense, or in the late game. This is what coaches do: they create a strategy, and that strategy is based on two simple ideas in soccer: 1) your players cannot cover the entire pitch at all times, and 2) your players cannot run at full speed all the time.
It is possible that Colorado is pressing and running too much at the start and middle of the half, and the team is fatigued at the end of the half, and that’s why they break in the 45th (or 90th) minute. To determine if this is the case, the coaching staff will need to look at who is pressing and when; what stretches of time they have been emphasizing or not emphasizing; and especially how far and fast players are running from 0-15 minutes, 16-30 minutes, and 31-45 minutes (or particularly 40-45 minutes). For all the complaining we’ve done about Kevin Cabrál’s lack of production offensively, nobody can claim he doesn’t press like a demon early on in the half. But perhaps that means he’s not quite as effective to end the half. This is conjecture, but that level of scrutiny could be applied across the board and regarding Chris Armas’ approach. If Colorado’s early press doesn’t yield measurable results in terms of turnovers and goals, but the team is demonstrably tired to end the first half and is getting punished for it, then Chris Armas needs to change the way he manages the games.6
It’s a defense thing.
To concede a goal to your opponent, three things need to happen.
You turn over the ball to your opponent.
Your opponent successfully moves the ball from their end of the field to your end of the field – from their defensive third, through the central third, and into the attacking third.
In the final third, you allow passes into dangerous positions and fail to defend or block shots in dangerous positions, and your opponent scores.
We’re not gonna dwell on turnovers. They happen. Possession-based soccer is great: you can make it awfully hard on your opponent if you simply deny them time on the ball. But that’s not the jam of the 2025 Rapids, so let’s move on.
So then it’s either #2, or #3, or possibly both. Are the Rapids failing to step up in the central third, or the final third?
Against DC United, Colorado dropped back into the final third in two blocks of four to defend, letting DC United walk it up into the final third mostly unchallenged. Both goals came because a wide ball came into the box and was finished beautifully. On goal one, Cabrál was late to his man on the entry pass, and Christian Benteke dunked on poor Chidozie Awaziem. On goal two, Aaron Herrera got separation on Djordje Mihailovic and Jackson Travis and bent in a ball to Hosei Kijima for a filthy finish. Reggie Cannon gets absolutely pantsed by Kijima there to get space and separation. Final third defending is the culprit here.
Against Seattle, Colorado got caught on a quick restart at midfield and the Sounders knifed through the team like a lightsaber through a Obi Wan in Episode IV. No one defender is at fault; there’s like six guys that are a step too slow in defending. But this is a ‘central third’ problem.
Against Portland, it was a dumb own goal on Josh Atencio. Colorado didn’t get great pressure to the ball and it was definitely mediocre final-third defending that was the culprit.
Against San Jose it was on an absolute worldie of a goal from Chico Arango off of a set-piece. Doesn’t fit my narrative in that the defense can’t really be blamed for this one. Bangers happen.
Lastly, against FC Dallas, through the middle third Colorado allowed Dallas to work it in down the wings. In the final third, Dallas made a series of clever passes with movement from the wings, to a cut-back pass, to a goal. Cole Bassett loses his man, or perhaps is anticipating a turnover to switch to transition. Keegan Rosenberry gets a little lost. Ian Murphy gets a lot lost. Reggie Cannon chokes. It’s not great. Colorado were up 2-0 at the time. This game would get goofy in the second half and end 3-3. This end-of-half goal was another moment of not-great final third defending.
So overall, it’s mostly poor final third defending that’s conceding these goals. In three of the five cases (or, 4 of 6 if you consider that COL conceded 2 to DC in the final minute), the team had fallen back into an organized defense with numbers and then got beat. So definitely the back four, or really ‘back eight’, need to have a conversation about their defending late in the half. Rafa and Yapi can sit in lounge chairs or practice PKs while Chris Little and Chris Armas make the others run line drills7 and practice clearances.
It’s a tactical thing. And also a quality thing.
In throwball (ok fine “American football”) there’s a coaching oddity that when teams have a big lead and they need to preserve it, their defensive tactics rely on the ‘prevent defense’ – pull off a defensive end or two, put in an extra corner back, and drop back into zone coverage with five or six guys. I have no idea if this works from a ‘big data’ perspective; throwball’s not my sport of choice. But a popular fan theory/adage is that ‘the prevent defense prevents you from winning.’ The challenge is that a team that doesn’t apply pressure on a pass-russ inevitably allows a Quarterback infinite time to throw, and Wide Receivers infinite time to find space. There’s probably some truth to this, even though I would assume that this defensive scheme is still a good idea in general.
In soccer, our friend Colton Coreschi suggests the same idea exists. He texted me this:
Late-half scoring is part of a tactics vicious cycle. Teams need a tying or go-ahead goal, so the offense pushes more players forward. Defending teams need to compensate, so they add more players to the defense and drop deeper.
But Colton adds that little wrinkle in the second message: “Increased pressure causes weaknesses of bad teams to get exposed and strengths of good ones to be heightened.” In other words, the real Colorado Rapids we see is the one we see in minute 45.
This is ominous and pessimistic, but I don’t think its wrong. As I said on HTHL podcast this week, the Rapids aren’t a great soccer team. I’m starting to think the back four are all sub-par for MLS, particularly Reggie Cannon and Andreas Maxsø. This means that perhaps there’s a personnel decision to be made in July in order to right the ship: to make the playoffs, Colorado needs to find one more defender that can add quality. This is probably a tough sell: Chidozie Awaziem, Reggie Cannon, and Ian Murphy were all added in the past 12 months. Andreas Maxsø is in only his second season, and he’s a DP. Giving up on him is a pretty brutal admission of failure. And its still only 11 games into the season, and the data set is still a little inconclusive.8
The 4-2-2-2 that Chris Armas has switched to seems to have defensive liabilities – although to be fair, three of these games mentioned above with defensive collapses happened when COL was playing a 4-2-3-1. I don’t think the Rapids can be called ‘a bad team’. But I do think we’ve seen over the past several weeks and with some dissapointing dropped results that the Colorado Rapids have a lot of work to do to become ‘a good team.’
Marco Pappa scored two of those game-winners. I generally only think of Marco Pappa as ‘that guy who got stabbed by his beauty pageant queen girlfriend,’ and started the year on the injury list.
And it could have been much worse! Alan Gordan scored 3 game-winning goals in the final 10 minutes to get 3 wins. Without him, Colorado ends the season with just 27 points.
From a roster construction/moneyball standpoint, your left back is probably the most important and cost effective position on the field. You can spend $6 million a year to get a great striker and it can improve the team. For $1.5 million, you can go out and get a top-five leftback that can have almost the same level of impact. Left back is where it’s at.
Or, in my case, a teenager in all 50 minutes of my math class as I daydreamed about my somewhat hot geometry teacher at the all-boys school I attended. My math grades were bad.
They’re man-bras. Let’s just put that out there. No shame in men wearing bras.
If the problem was a second half /90th minute problem, the ‘game management’ question would be about using subs, and subbing out players who are noticeably fatigued. But nobody in the soccer world makes 40th minute subs for fatigue: the athlete’s body doesn’t work like that. This is kind of obvious but I wanted to say it anyhow.
These used to be called ‘suicides,’ but that word has been retired. I might suggest other names that are a riff on suicides, like Chop Suey! drill (System of a Down changed the name of the song because ‘Suicide!’ wasn’t considered appropriate); or ‘Killer Drill’, or if we’re going with the Killers motif, perhaps we play with other 2000s alt radio bands. I really like the idea of a ‘Panic at the Disco! Drill’.
I don’t think mediocre defense is ‘a fluke’, but I do think a five-game win streak with five shutouts would make dumbass couch surfing pundits like me shut the hell up about our defenders needing to be replaced.