There’s little way to sugarcoat the pasting Loudoun United got Friday night when Hartford beat them 3-0, though I’ll do the college effort on one thing. You’d have to go back to the last game at Segra in 2023 to find the last time Loudoun lost to a USL side by three goals (Detroit City shut them out 3-0 on 10/7/23). They lost to an identical 3-0 score in 2024, but it was in Open Cup play to LAFC, who were the eventual winners last year. Still, it’s not particularly pretty, especially when stuff like this happens:

Yep, that’s a 6.72 expected goals total, the highest since ASA tracked it, going back to 2017. Funny enough, a 2nd Hartford-Loudoun game was ninth-highest, as Hartford thumped Loudoun 5-1 in September 2019. Something about these two teams, man, it’s weird! So, what did we learn about this game?

It’s complicated! Take a look at the larger context for a second; the last time Hartford beat a USL Championship team was two months ago; they did have wins during that eight game stretch, wins over Westchester SC and Portland Hearts of Pine, but those were in the Jagermeister Cup. Hartford played North Carolina FC two weeks ago and lost in stoppage time, and played Charleston last week and came close to grabbing a point back, but fell 2-1. They were trending a little upwards.

By comparison, Loudoun was coming off a three-game stretch of home games with boogie monster teams they’ve had little success against (Louisville, Charleston, Detroit). They won two and drew the other, were coming into play Hartford before turning around to host Louisville in USLC play in the first of another three-game home stretch. Heck, Charleston gave up their game in hand with a midweek loss to Miami (and Bill Hamid), and Louisville lost their first regular season game to North Carolina FC as Loudoun was getting pasted, so the Top 3 East teams all dropped points in 48 hours.

Certainly, you could consider the effort Friday unacceptable (and I think there’s truth in that in the locker room), but I also think for a team that says they live in the moment, some looking down the road may have been involved.

On backline bungles: The folks at The USL Show last week talked about the quality of chances that Loudoun’s defense gave up in the win with Detroit, and that reared its head this week in numbers. Loudoun’s streak of giving up the first goal in games in six of their last seven, and Cole Turner has found himself on the unfortunate end of a fair number of them. Turner’s performance represented the backline in general as they were turning the ball over on the press, and players who normally don’t get caught making errors were doing so. Ryan Martin decided to bring on Robby Dambrot and Drew Skundrich at halftime in an attempt to stop the bleeding, which generally worked, but even at 2-0 at the half, it was hard to see how Loudoun was going to turn it around, and as the second half wore on, Tommy McCabe and Zach Ryan were taken off a preservation, with Moses Nyeman on the bench for the entire run, even as Jeremy Garay (announced as signing a short term deal earlier in the day) got on the field ahead of him. Presumably Moses gets the call Wednesday.

On new ground in a new place: If you’re Loudoun, you took at look at how the last 6-8 games of 2024 played out, and you knew that you had to have the effort in order to take your shot at the big guns. More and more as the season goes on, Loudoun is going to find themselves on the other end of that situation as they play teams like Indy, Birmingham and Orange County, who need points in order to get above the red line. Those teams, like the ones Loudoun’s beaten so far this season, are going to be just as formidable, perhaps more so, because cornered animals can be dangerous. The difference between good teams and truly top level ones is that there’s a level of consistency that has to be on par even when the expectation for a win is there. Can’t take a night off, or that happens like it did.

Random Stat of the Day: 3, the number being the difference of passes registered by Hugo Fauroux (29) and Abdellatif Aboukoura (26).

So, where does this leave us? I began reading The Comfort Crisis this week, which in sum describes the concept of leaving areas of personal familiarity to try new and challenging things as a way of personal growth, health, what have you. And I learned about the misogi, a rite of purifcation which allows one the chance to expedite the concept as long as you a) do something insanely challenging and b) avoid dying. The Dutch do something similar with their kids on a smaller scale where they take them into the middle of the woods and have them find their way out.

In a weird way, Loudoun went through their own misogi with their triad of home games in late May and early June, but I don’t think they’ve quite understood the resilience they came out of those games with. They’ll get to put it to good use with Wednesday’s game with Louisville, play at Pittsburgh in a couple of weeks (speaking of places they haven’t won at yet!), and wrap up July with games at NCFC in the Jager Cup and at FC Tulsa. It’s not the Chucktown/Loovul/Detroit set, but it’s still tricky.

Loo and the Battery have opened up some room between themselves and everyone else, so Loudoun doesn’t necessarily have to think about keeping pace, they can find their game again and play how they did in the first couple of months that had the success they saw. Getting some players back to help with the summer push would help as well, but as they continue the journey of learning about themselves in this new space, keeping nights like Friday at a minimum will help tremendously.