Reality check for FC Dallas
Beyond long term injuries, the team is fully healthy now — and needs to find answers
The first half of the season has been a brutal run for FC Dallas. An injury crisis that spilled over from 2023 became entangled with a tactical shift that, in retrospect, wasn’t perhaps ideally suited for this set of personnel in the first place.
The results have been difficult to watch, as a team that admirably found ways to grind out results in the spring has unraveled over the last game and a half, now falling into a truly troubled place.
The last two matches have been, put succinctly, two very bad nights at the office. The team lost a three-goal lead at home (a 3-3 draw with Real Salt Lake) and then fell apart defensively Wednesday (a 3-1 loss at the L.A. Galaxy). If not for goalkeeper Maarten Paes, who continues to be FCD’s top performer this year, the result may have been yet more lopsided. Major League Soccer’s official stats pack put the Galaxy’s expected goals at a whopping 4.3 (compared to 0.5 for FCD).
It was a Riqui Puig-led beatdown, as FCD simply couldn’t match the Galaxy’s midfield dominance.
It won’t get any easier tonight as FC Dallas meets LAFC and one of the league’s fiercest goal providers, Denis Bouanga. All of that, and they’ll need to engage LAFC and Bouanga without top defender Nkosi Tafari, who is suspended for collecting a red card (two yellows) in Wednesday’s dishevled proceedings at Dignity Health Sports Park.
What wingback Marco Farfan said about Wednesday’s loss:
“In the second half we were better and were on top of them till we fell apart. I don’t think they beat us because they are better than us, they beat us because we fell apart and gave them the opportunity to get those chances.”
That’s the dark-and-stormy background. Now for what’s ahead, because it’s good or bad, depending on how you see things.
Here’s the reality of the situation
FC Dallas can understandably lean on the ongoing injuries as a reason the 2024 season has gone sideways. (Although at some point, the team must closely examine its performance staff – what we sometimes call the strength and conditioning group – to ensure everything possible is being done to reduce the above-average incidence of injury.)
Now, however, the team is healthy. Beyond the three long term injuries (Alan Velasco, Geovane Jesus and Paxton Pomykal) everyone is healthy and available. No, everyone isn’t at full fitness, and that must be considered. Several important contributors have only recently returned and cannot be expected to be 100 percent sharp nor ideally conditioned. But they are available. And every player has been training fully with the team for more than a week now.
So, with a small asterisk on tonight’s match due to Tafari’s absence, this is very close to the set of personnel we expected to see in 2024.
These are the guys. Beyond Pomykal, this is the roster the team’s technical staff put together (with the knowledge that Velasco and Geovane Jesus wouldn’t be available until August at the very earliest). Beyond their important homegrown midfielder (Pomykal) this is very close to the group Nico Estévez and his staff had from the jump.
It’s time to perform
Here is your 2024 inflection point. It may not be all or nothing tonight against LAFC, a team that has reached the MLS Cup final two years running. And a team that has, statistically speaking, been Major League Soccer’s best club at home since its 2018 MLS debut. Steve Cherundolo’s side is 6-0-2 at BMO Stadium this year, having dropped just 4 of a possible 24 points in its near-downtown ground.
But FC Dallas needs to look better than it did Wednesday down the road in Carson, Calif. There’s one more road match beyond tonight before the team returns home. When it does play in Texas again, that contest June 15 vs. St. Louis will mark the season’s midpoint. So …
Petar Musa has to convert a few more chances – and FCD has to create a few more chances for its record-setting transfer. Jesus Ferreira has to get back to the goal scorer and chance creator he was over the first half of 2023. Veterans Paul Arriola and Sebastian Lletget have to find ways to be more productive and more influential in matches. Dante Sealy must demonstrate that he can be trusted to make good decisions. (He has probably reached his own personal inflection point, as the club reaches a verdict on whether all that raw talent can be developed into a piece to build around for the future?)
All the players around them must be more confident and more aggressive about making runs and attacking defenders and making bold choices in the final third.
If the team is set on playing with wingbacks, fine. But those wingbacks must have conviction to push further into attacking areas, providing more crosses, being more of a threat to get to the end line and spreading back lines further across the field.
Behind them, players must clean up some of the faulty positioning and the mental errors in midfield and in the defensive third. Sloppy giveaways, lack of tenacity in closing down shooters and getting tactically stretched out of position has led to conceding goals lately – and those are generally mistakes that professional sides shouldn’t be making.
All of this, and the coaching staff has to find solutions, identifying principals of play and a tactical alignment that squeezes the most from the most players. When Estévez and his crew arrived into the 2022 season he found a flawed team with its confidence in low places, but he found solutions and helped set up the players for success. So we know it can happen.
The issue now is that a different set of questions stands before the team. Estévez and his staff did answer the questions in 2022; now the coaching crew must demonstrate it can answer the updated test questions, and then inspire the players to rise to the challenge.
The roster is healthy. Demanding a win tonight might be a bridge too far, especially considering Tafari’s absence. But an improved, dogged and fighting performance isn’t asking too much. And from there, at some point, better results must follow.
Excellent overview of FC Dallas at this point in the season.