An open letter to Felipe Martins: If you want Austin media to see the positives in your team, play like it

Dear Felipe, 

I saw your midweek press conference in which you groused about the Austin media not seeing the positives in what Austin FC is doing this year. Let me start by noting you weren’t here last year, because there was a lot more to be negative about, and each post-match press conference, in a season that turned into a veritable win desert by season’s end, was a grind in which positivity was hard to find. This year has been a refreshing contrast – so if what’s happening this year makes you question the Austin media’s propensity for optimism, you really would have hated last year. 

And as your own coach can tell you — putting aside the Jorge Iturralde video skewering Julio Cascante for a moment, which we’ll get to — the media covering you in Austin is an uncommonly large, engaged and knowledgable group. I’ve been to a lot of press conferences around MLS, and this is easily one of the biggest, best and fairest press corps in the league. 

But I get it: Being mad at the media makes for a convenient foil, and if that gets you up for matches and helps you win, go for it. Because, even though we don’t root for you in the way that arguably the best fans in MLS do, we like it when you win. 

More people want to read articles and listen to podcasts about an Austin FC team that wins than an Austin FC team that is failing to consistently get results. Again, we’ve lived the difference between 2021 and 2022. Austin FC maintaining its position in the standings means at least two home playoff matches, and I can speak for every member of the Austin press corps when I say that we want that. 

At The Striker, our number one objective in covering Austin FC is to chronicle it all. We're here to extol your virtues, scrutinize your shortcomings and enter into a dialogue with everyone invested in the team’s fortunes. Rather than clip together a Cascante lowlight reel, add an out-of-context quote and put some circus music over it, we’re going to actually watch 10 matches worth of goals and do a deep dive for our readers on what concerns us as fans — and what should concern you as players. 

But I’ve got to say, Felipe, I really expected more from a fired-up, mad-at-the-media squad – if you were indeed speaking for everyone on your team — than what we got Saturday. You had a chance to clinch a playoff spot, to vanquish an MLS giant that’s been on the ropes for weeks now, get three points closer to your season-long goals, and awaken from a slump that has all your fans concerned. 

Instead, we got a lackluster performance that your own coach called “disappointing.” He said, at the risk of sounding negative, that the team has lost some of its “luster and bite” over this recent stretch. You’ve now lost your last three matches to potential playoff teams by an 8-1 margin. In losing last night to the reigning CCL champs, who no one wants to see in the playoffs, you opened the door to them getting right back into the playoff race. 

It’s indeed plausible that you’ve set things up with that loss for a playoff bracket that gets you a rematch against Seattle, a team Austin’s never beat, and then against Dallas, also a team that Austin’s never beat. 

(And, if the trends continue the way they are right now, that could be facing FCD in Frisco rather than at Q2.) 

My friend Kevin Morris did find one positive to share with everyone to prove that we can find the positives — Verde won the xG battle last night!

But as we’ve also dug into at The Striker, xG doesn’t tell the whole story, especially one in which the only first-half shot on target your team managed was Alex Ring passing a ball directly to Stefan Frei, who tweeted this after a match in which you could have troubled him. 

We would have loved to have found positives in Saturday’s match, but given that the first goal featured both Nico Lodeiro and Raul Ruidiaz in acres of space, and given that the second goal featured Ruben Gabrielsen getting a bad angle on Jordan Morris, resulting in trying to win a straight-line footrace with Jordan Morris, which is a terrible idea and one I’d advise against if you’re trying to win a soccer match, and given that the third goal was an own goal on a set piece, and this all happened after transition defense and set piece defense have emerged as concerns we were assured the team would address … you can see where it might be hard to be positive. 

But here’s how I asked your coach about it all — and you’ll note that I came at it with a balance: 

This might be a little deja vu from last game, but obviously, some bad moments in transition defense and a set piece got you. I mean, obviously, this is the team that beat LAFC a few weeks ago. They've got that in them, but also, this is another loss further from that. How do you get that back?

And here’s what your coach said. 

“It's a great point. This is still a very good team. Right now, we've lost a little bit of, certainly, our bite and intent and, again, the personality that we've shown. So, is it fatigue, is it complacency,  just knowing or feeling that we're in the playoffs? We’ve got to continue to push and we're at our best when we have a bit of, you know, a little bit more of … not that the world is against you, but you’ve got to go and prove something.

“We still have plenty to prove. We still have to make the playoffs. We want to clinch. We don't want to back in and we want to host playoff games. So those are things we’ve got to recommit to, and obviously we can freshen up the group in some certain areas as well.” 

So, if you really want to court more positives from the Austin media — but really, if you want to do your fellow players, coaches and fans proud, because that should be the only motivation you need — I will challenge you here, as someone who wants to write about this season for as long as you and your teammates can extend it. 

Play like it. 

Play like you want praise. 

Play like you want to stand on a stage and do a trophy lift on Nov. 5. 

And get back to what y’all have done in your finest moments this season, however you can. 

It can start on Wednesday against RSL. This is a rematch of what we know as “the Dani Pereira red card game,” a disappointing loss to another team you could face in the playoffs, in which your captain said after the match (which you led before giving up the two deciding goals), “I hope we learn from this.” 

And then it can continue on against Nashville against Saturday — a team that outplayed you just a week ago, and a match in which we saw Hany Mukthar overtake Sebastian Driussi for both the Golden Boot lead and the MVP race in real time over 90 minutes. Saturday represents the last best chance for your best player to reassert himself as the real MVP, and if Verde can’t get up for that match, Verde can’t get up for a match, period. 

And if you need further motivation, think about where you are in the standings right now versus your rivals four hours to the north. Remember when you won Copa Tejas and you had to celebrate it in the parking lot because they wouldn’t let you do it in their stadium? Do you really want to go back to that stadium to play with MLS Cup on the line? That’s where it’s trending right now … but if you win out, you can ensure that match gets played in Q2, in front of your fans. 

So, Felipe, whatever it takes, I honestly want to see you do it. If it means more of making me and my colleagues the windmill to tilt against, so be it. I would think, between RSL, Nashville, Dallas, and pride in closing out a season that’s surprised and delighted many, you’d have enough to motivate you, but that 8-1 margin and the way in which that’s happened maybe says otherwise. 

And yet, we all saw that match against LAFC and know what this team looks like at its best. It wasn’t that long ago. We all know what you’ve got inside you. Dig deep, and we’ll see you at Q2. We are, in our fashion, rooting for you to succeed.