Wait what day is this? Is this the day after our April 28 game against San Antonio FC (3-1 defeat with one red card)? Or our July 26 game against Sounders 2 (3-0 defeat with two red cards)?
Oh, this is a new one. Ok then.
Here are three things from the game.
1. Playoff Door is Shut
If you've never heard of the website fivethirtyeight.com, you should check it out. It's a pretty cool site that uses a lot of statistics and analytics to make sports predictions for a variety of sports - soccer included. They recently added the data from USL, which means that they now have a page that kind of ranks the offensive and defensive output of each team in the league (based on a variety of factors like historical performance, market value, and underlying stats like xG). The predictions are never perfect, of course (nothing is), but they are pretty good in my opinion.
That's the good news.
The bad news is this:
That little "1%" there is the 538 model's prediction of Las Vegas's chances of making the playoffs after this defeat.
Intuitively, this also makes sense. There are about 12 games left to play, and we have 23 points from 22 games (about 1 point per game). Last season, the worst team to sneak into the playoffs got 44 points (and I'm pretty sure there are more games this season, so that number should go up). So in order to be in the hunt, we have to get about twice as many points per game from the next 12 games as we have for the initial 22.
What I'm saying is, keep your money in your pocket.
2. It Didn't Look Like What It Was
In short, this game against a fellow play-off contender was, at the very very very least, a must-not-lose game. So what do the Lights do?
Concede within 4 minutes.
The goal came off of a corner kick. Our defender stuck out a leg to keep the ball off of a St. Louis head, the ball fell to another St. Louis player, whose shot was blocked, then it fell to another St. Louis player, whose shot crept in.
Look, it's a set piece goal, those will happen sometimes. But when the opposing team gets two shots inside the six yard box within five seconds, you can't really blame anyone but yourself when one goes in. The Lights really should have been more on top of things - the initial clearance was a desperate attempt to get anything on the ball because the Lights player had almost lost his man, and after that, someone has to be the first man to react and kick the ball anywhere.
The Lights conceded again within ten minutes, and although we got a bit fortunate with a penalty that looked a bit soft to me (the keeper did take out the man, but he got the ball and I don't think the Lights attacker ever looked like he was going to get to it), the Lights were never really in the game. Not only did St. Louis outscore us, they also hit the post, spurned an open goal, and generally outplayed the Lights.
3. Is It About Honor? Or Is It Really About Soccer?
After the match, technical director Chelis said "There is nothing in training or with our tactics to solve. It’s going to be about honor."
Is it about honor? Is this the same "honor" that saw Chelis challenge a fan to a fight in the parking lot, and has resulted in him getting both a four-game suspension in May and an eight-game suspension in June?
Or is it really about the fact that our squad has attempted 1,000 less passes than the next worst passing team in the league (and at the worst pass accuracy), or that our defensive strategy is apparently based exclusively on fouling (#1 in the league in fouls, yellow cards, and red cards baby!) and not on keeping the ball out of the net (2nd worse record in the league in goals conceded), or that the squad has been almost completely overhauled midseason, or that we haven't settled on an established line-up?
Because if I had two choices - to either improve the team's "honor"; or to improve the team's defensive shape, I know which one I would choose.
And that may be the most worrying part of the whole game. Not losing by three or more goals (again), but knowing that the defeat will not result in any training ground changes whatsoever.
Till next time.
-VSB
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