When coach Hans Backe took over a Red Bull team whose incompetent defense was matched only by its impotent offense, he made his priorities clear. They diligently drilled on defense, on keeping their shape and marking from the forwards back, saying they’d worry about the attacking part of the game later.
Three games into the season, the Red Bulls look like a team that focused on defense, allowing just two goals and holding a share of the Eastern Conference lead. But they also look like a bunch that bypassed attacking practice, with just two goals _ tied for worst in the league, and fewer than five individual players.
Juan Pablo Angel had 45 goals through his first three seasons since joining MLS in 2007, more than any league player in that span. But he hasn’t scored yet this year, and even more foreboding going into tonight’s tilt vs. Dallas is that the Red Bulls aren’t failing to put away chances _ they’re not even creating them.
“That is worse,” Angel said. “As a striker, I would rather miss the chance _ not that I want to _ I’d rather have the chances and miss them, because obviously that’s something you (can) work on. Right now I haven’t had a lot of chances in the last three games and generally we haven’t been creating them.
“There hasn’t been much in the games for any of the strikers. Last game (at Chivas USA) we ended up playing with four strikers, and none of us created anything. So obviously it has to be down to understanding and movements and those things come with practice. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”
For the first two weeks that Backe spent running practice _ even after they flew to La Manga, Spain and started playing games against European competition _ Backe insisted on working exclusively on defensive shape. Now, the past week _ after a 2-0 defeat at Chivas that was the first loss he suffered in 13 preseason and regular-season tilts with New York _ Backe has started honing the attack.
“We haven’t spent as much time as we have on the defensive side, so you can tell there’s a big difference from when we defend and when we attack,” Angel said. “There’s some new players, so obviously it takes time to learn each other. But we started to work on it this week and started to emphasize it; and hopefully we’ll start to be more creative and more clinical in the final third.”
Those aren’t words I’d use to describe their attack.
Despite unleashing the third-most shots in MLS, the errant Red Bulls are just 12th in shots-on-goal (nine) and 13th in goals (two). For sobering perspective, Frenchman Sebastien Le Toux of expansión Philadelphia has put as many shots on frame all by himself as the Red Bulls have, and five players have more scores.
Yes, they’re far more organized than they were under ex-coach Juan Carlos Osorio, but they have a glaring hole on the left (they hope incoming Brian Nielsen can fix that), a need for speed (they’re banking on Nielsen and target Luke Rodgers for that) and a lack of patience in the middle of the pitch (which they expect to get from injured Carl Robinson, once he returns).
“We have to work with our attacking game, because (Dallas is) compact in the middle of the park, so the wide areas are important for us when we attack,” said Backe. Thursday he’d said adding quality like Nielsen to go with Joel Lindpere was the only way to get better service to Angel, but yesterday he amended that.
“One thing that we can do in our attacking game is there’s been too many unforced errors. We need more possession with this team to create more chances. We’ve gone for too early or too quick killer passes. It hasn’t been precise so we need more possession to create more chances.”
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