It was a dream start.
In its return to MLS play, St. Louis CITY SC’s new-look attack soared in Saturday’s match at Portland. The club tallied three first-half goals for only the second time in its history, buoyed by the play of its newest players. But none of the offensive output matters much if that production comes at the expense of the team’s defensive structure.
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After a 4-4 draw against the Timbers, CITY interim coach John Hackworth will have some serious tinkering to do as his squad prepares to host the Western Conference-leading LA Galaxy at CITYPARK on Sunday.
“Across the board, we have to be better,” striker Simon Becher says. “We have to win duels, win second balls. … We just have to be better as a team and see that out.”
Becher found himself in the middle of several key moments this past weekend. While the forward scored the opening goal and later drew a penalty to help St. Louis jump out to a 2-0 lead, he—along with the usually strong-on-the-ball Eduard Löwen—was dispossessed three times as CITY pushed aggressively into the attack.
Although CITY posted three separate two-goal leads, Portland answered each time while exploiting the space vacated when St. Louis pushed into the final third. Becher, Löwen, Marcel Hartel, and Nökkvi Thórisson each contributed in the attack. But CITY struggled to slow Felipe Mora and Evander as the Timbers repeatedly took advantage of St. Louis vertically.
Hartel recorded three assists in his MLS debut—he became the first player in the league to record such an output in his first game since Carlos Hermosillo set up three goals for the Galaxy in 1998—but that production understandably gets overshadowed when the team ultimately drops crucial points in a winnable game.
“Really don’t know what to say,” a seemingly-exasperated Hackworth said. “It’s hard to imagine coming to a place like this and scoring four goals, being up, and then just losing one-versus-one defensive battles.”
On the other side, Portland would have been angry if it weren’t able to grab a share of the points. The Timbers’ 32 shot attempts converted to 4.32 expected goals—the most CITY has allowed all season. While the focus has been on Evander’s last-minute free kick golazo, St. Louis’ carelessness in transition gave Portland plenty of chances to claw back into the match.
Moving forward, Hackworth wants to see better attention to detail.
“Sometimes, the number of goals you give up, or the number of goals you score, can hide a lot of the transition moments. An easy way to prevent some of these defensive [miscues] from happening is to just be better with the ball.”
This weekend, CITY hopes to have forward João Klauss and winger Rasmus Alm available. The return of both players could boost CITY’s depth. But if this past Saturday is any indication, the club’s current set of problems has less to do with players available, and more to do with players’ ability to connect for a complete team effort. Case in point: in back to back matches, CITY has taken an unlikely lead on the road, before coming undone by turnovers and an inability to see out the performance late into the match. Both América and Portland found equalizers after the 79th minute.
“We are playing better,” Hackworth says. “But on the same side, we’re not when we give up those many goals and do it in the fashion that we did it. While we have improved a lot as a group, we still have so many areas we have to get right.”
And yet, the season is almost over. St. Louis, which is 10 points out of the final playoff spot, is running out of time to close the massive gap it faces. If CITY is going to return to the postseason this fall, it simply must build off Saturday with a better transition effort against the Galaxy—one of the best transition offenses in the league.
“We just have to go on with it,” Hackworth said. “[We’ll] try to see if we can look at the game film and identify a way where we can look at this going into [the] Galaxy [match] and improve. This is definitely an Achilles heel—our Achilles heel right now—because we’re giving up too many goals, and it’s very frustrating.”
