NASHVILLE, Tenn. — After winning pretty against Los Angeles FC last Friday, Austin FC lost ugly two matches in a row. There’s no coincidence. Nashville and Portland each had the same plan to disrupt Verde, and it worked.
Austin coach Josh Wolff knows exactly what needs fixing. A 2-1 loss to Portland midweek might have felt unlucky, but 3-0 to Nashville SC can’t be ignored.
“There's a recipe there that’s hurt us, so we’ve got to learn from it quickly,” Wolff said post-match.
The question is whether Verde has the personnel and the fortitude to combat this particular formula.
“I talked to y'all after the Portland game and I said that Portland are very good on set pieces and in transition,” goalkeeper Brad Stuver said. “And Nashville is pretty similar. They are very good at transition and set pieces.”
It took Nashville a little longer to gain an edge, but it arrived in the same fashion as Wednesday night, with Walker Zimmerman playing the role of big center back beating Austin to a header in the box. (On Wednesday, it was Bill Tuiloma.)
Like Portland, Nashville was patient in defending, allowing Verde to move the ball side-to-side with numbers dedicated to stopping the ball from reaching the middle of the pitch. And when the moments arrived to punish Austin, both teams delivered.
“Through run of play. I don't see us (giving) up a ton of chances,” Wolff said. “But on set pieces we've been beaten too easily on some of these, and we're just giving them away needlessly.”
To make matters worse, Verde is showing a vulnerability on attacking set pieces, when committing its own center backs to a free kick or corner kick and then watching the ball come back the other way.
The third Nashville goal was a cousin of that trend, with Austin committing numbers forward down 2-0. Center backs Ruben Gabrielsen and Julio Cascante both left Hany Mukhtar in a transition moment and allowed him to overtake Sebastián Driussi for the Golden Boot lead with his 21st strike of the season.
In the playoffs, those can be haunting moments. And with five matches left in the regular season, the time to combat these weaknesses is winding down.
“I think these last two games have really shown guys that don't really know MLS what an MLS playoff game looks like,” Stuver said. “The game against Portland and the game against Nashville are very playoff-esque games. Very, very cautious at first, very high energy. And the ability to just kind of grind out a result is something that we need to learn how to do.”
Last line
As has happened too often, Cascante and Gabrielsen were at fault for the Nashville goals.
On the first, Cascante allowed set-piece specialist Zimmerman to get position for a Mukhtar corner kick, allowing him to have a virtually free header 6 yards from goal.
“We failed on that,” Cascante said. “I lost my mark and that was him, and we got punished. In these games those little details are the ones that make the difference.”
Gabrielsen was, true to form, a little more blunt in his assessment of the recent matches.
“We conceded so we need to fix it,” he said. “It’s very simple. We’ll look at it and we’ll fix it. That’s football. Two games in a row where we concede on set pieces and we need to take a look at it and fix it.”
Gabrielsen also took ownership for his mistake on the second goal, a ball that he mishandled outside the box and allowed Alex Muyl to find Mukhtar in transition.
Mukhtar again! Make that 2️⃣1️⃣ goals in the regular season now.
— Major League Soccer (@MLS) September 4, 2022
Shaq Moore finds Hany to make it 3-0. #EveryoneN pic.twitter.com/X73DUJWfID
And in stoppage time, Gabrielsen appeared to gesture to Cascante to stay with Mukhtar, but the Costa Rican instead moved toward Nashville right back Shaq Moore as Gabrielsen couldn’t fill the gap.
The Mukhtar brace rubbed salt in the wound, as Driussi is now looking up at Mukhtar for the Golden Boot, and in the court of public opinion, the race for Most Valuable Player.
“I don't care about who scores, I don't like conceding,” Gabrielsen said. “If the goalkeeper scored two I would still be pissed off. I don’t care about that.”
Frustrated forwards
In attack, Austin had to play a different game without striker Maxi Urruti, who stayed home with a tight hamstring.
It was an opportunity for Danny Hoesen to strut his stuff, and he did have opportunities in 65 minutes on the pitch. Statistically, he only had one shot and one key pass. He was never going to press with the same intensity as Urruti, which limited a usual strength of Verde.
Still, Hoesen was at the center of some key moments, setting up Driussi for a shot in the fourth minute as well as dribbling through Zimmerman’s legs to create a chance in the 40th minute that Nashville had to save off the goal line.
“I got a through ball from Owen, and I looked up and I saw the defenders there so I chopped them, but I think some hit (Zimmerman) somewhere,” Hoesen said. “The ball was just a little bit far (for a shot), and out of the corner of my eye I saw a teammate (Ethan Finlay) so I tried to poke it to him and they cleared it.”
He also had a shot in the 41st off a feed from Driussi that just missed the left post. He left just after the hour mark with cramps in his legs.
“I don't think it's pressure,” Hoesen said. “You need to have minutes to have that game confidence. I was probably breathing a little harder than the rest of the team because training is totally different than a game, and the only way to get top fitness is to play games. We know my situation. The team has been doing great, so I just have to stay patient.”
The man who replaced him, Moussa Djitté, received a red card in stoppage time after arguing a foul call and placing his hand on Moore’s neck in the aftermath. He was judged to have brought down Zimmerman on the edge of the box on a play that could’ve resulted in his only shot.
How romantic djitte pic.twitter.com/vxNNenIqj2
— NG (@NG_Beto) September 4, 2022
Clearly, the frustration of a lack of playing time (250 minutes all season) was weighing on him. Wolff stuck up for the Senegalese forward postgame.
“A lot of mockery is made about soccer players for diving,” Wolff said. “It's a pretty amazing dive (by Zimmerman) and the fact that Nima (Saghafi) takes that and runs with it is pretty poor from a from a reffing standpoint. It's not a foul, and obviously Moussa deserves a yellow for smashing the ball on the ground. I don't know, I think he gave him a red because had hands to the neck, but I don't think it's handled really well. I think it's really unprofessional from (Saghafi).”
The good news is that Urruti will be back this week, Wolff said. The bad news is that Verde’s backup strikers didn’t inspire confidence when given an opportunity.
Wolff in the middle
Starting his first match since July 24 vs. the New York Red Bulls, Owen Wolff slotted into midfield in place of Alex Ring. The way he described it, his job was to do his best impression of the captain, staying connected to Pereira while also finding moments to contribute to the attack.
He completed 100% of the 22 passes he attempted, according to WhoScored.com, no small feat in any match, let alone one against a Nashville midfield including Dax McCarty and Sean Davis. Could he have been more aggressive with the ball? Absolutely.
Remember, he’s only 17 years old and hasn’t started more than a couple games in the midfield after breaking through initially at right wing.
“I take it all the same way as when I was playing,” he said. “I bring the same focus to training, trying to earn my way up into the starting XI and just keep going.”
Next up
Austin has only lost two in a row one other time this season, back in May when it dropped points at home to LA Galaxy and then fell 2-1 at Real Salt Lake. In that instance, Verde followed up two poor results with one of its best of the season, winning 2-1 at LAFC.
It’s going to take a similar performance to avoid three-straight defeats this time, as Austin heads west to face a desperate Seattle Sounders squad trying to avoid missing the playoffs for the first time in club history.
But for Verde, the pressure will be on to stem this slump.
“It's going to be huge,” Diego Fagúndez said. “We know the last games are going to be important. And for us, we need points and we want to clinch playoffs, so everybody needs to have that in mind. We lost two now, we can't lose three, so everybody needs to be ready for it.”
