Rewatch notes: Atlanta United at Toronto FC | March 23, 2024

A tiny soccer brain keeps trying his best, he promises

After every match, we’re going to do our best to dig into the tactics and personnel that defined the weekend’s action. It’s tough to notice those things when you’re stressed out during the actual game, so we like to take a couple of days to rewatch, take notes and try and understand the part of the game that’s not played on a spreadsheet a little better. It’s not what you’d call an exact science, but at least we’re trying. 

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I planned on breezing through this column to be honest. I felt something close to apathy during Atlanta United’s 2-0 loss to Toronto on Saturday. With so many changes to Atlanta’s lineup, it felt like nothing more than a mediocre barometer for how Atlanta would fare in an extinction-level disaster event on par with the great Achilles snapping of 2022. 

I didn’t feel much more on rewatch either. But, thank goodness, the ever-reliable Dax McCarty hauled off and basically wrote the entire thing for me in the opening segment of his excellent podcast, Major League Journeymen. 

“But I think the condition did play into the game a little bit in terms of the wind and some of the tactics that were employed. And it honestly it caught me off guard a little bit the way Toronto played. You guys know I've given them props with John Herdman and what he's done to kind of shift their focus and their mentality from a team that conceded a million goals last year in the last couple years to now a team that's like very committed, very hard to break down and I knew they wouldn't be. 

But one little tactical shift that I didn't...we didn't expect was that they just went man for man all over the field. And that was like very reminiscent of like the San Jose Earthquakes and it's miserable to play against, especially, you know, if you're not ready for it, and so for me, I was thinking, okay, they're gonna man all over the field. Within the first half with the wind, you're trying to play more direct because you want to try to get your attacking players into one-v-one situations and so every pass you hit, it's bitter because it's ice. It's all pretty much iced over. So it's skimming, skimming out of bounds and they're pressing us high, high, high. 

Second half, you know, we try to adjust a little bit, we're trying to play a little bit more. We try to play in behind in the wind, it's just holding the ball up, so you can't even get behind them even if you want it to. And so you know, it did have a small effect on the game and quite honestly, you know, Toronto, they played well, and they pressed well and defensively you have to give them a lot of credit. They're very organized, they're very committed, and they are a team that, especially coming off a loss, it looked like you know they were going to come and they knew that we had some changes. 

We made, I think we had six changes from the lineup from the first three games, where the first three games we started the exact same team. With the international call ups we're missing guys. And I think we have great depth. But when you don't play right with with guys and in real games that matter for a few weeks, you just miss those little connections, right? And those little connections that you need on the field between your attacking players, between your defenders and your midfielders. You know, we have moments in the game where we took a little bit of control, we had some good spells of possession. We just couldn't quite turn that into dangerous goalscoring opportunities.” 

There you go. That’s the whole game. Toronto (rightly) took a defensive approach that said “Well if they don’t have Almada and Giakoumakis, what if…” and stifled Atlanta. 

Here’s a very tiny-soccer-brained look at a basic example.