Yusuf hat trick helps New England Revolution throttle DC United
DC United suffered their first loss in three months as they fell 3-0 to the New England Revolution before 13,848 at Audi Field on Wednesday night. Alhassan Yusuf had the hat trick for the Revolution as the Black-and-Red suffered their worst home loss since a 4-0 thumping by FC Dallas in early April.
First, the better team won without any doubt, very good at ball,” head coach René Weiler said after the match. “They took their chances. They had maybe three and scored two goals [in the first half]. Of course we have to defend it better, but [they were] very efficient…And at the end, the better team won. A disappointment, of course, but we don’t have time. We have to recover quickly and try to prepare the next game.”
DC United captain Lucas Bartlett was back in the lineup after serving a one-match suspension for yellow card accumulation. Brandon Servania moved to the bench, with Matti Peltola operating alongside Andre Dozzell in the center of the midfield. Head coach Rene Weiler was also back on the sidelines, as he did not travel with the team to Montreal over the weekend due to an illness.
There wasn’t a lot of action in the first 15 minutes of the match, with both teams getting just a couple of decent chances on goal. DC United had a great chance to get on the board in the 20th minute, as Kimito Nono almost got his head on a Louis Munteanu cross into the box that hit the ground in front of the net. New England goalkeeper Matt Turner was able to get a slight touch on it to deny it from entering the net. On the ensuing corner kick, Munteanu got his head on the ball and dropped it to Jackson Hopkins, whose shot right in front of the box was blocked.
Three minutes later, the Revs made them pay. On the cross into the box on the other end from Jack Harrison, Peyton Miller headed the ball into the middleof the 6-yard box. Alhassan Yusuf got a running start on the header and was able to finish it to give the Revolution a 1-0 lead.
For the fourth straight match and fifth in six matches coming out of the World Cup break (including the friendly against Loudoun United), the Black-and-Red found themselves needing to come back from a deficit. In the 35th minute, they had an excellent opportunity, when Tai Baribo was able to head the ball over to Jackson Hopkins about 40 yards from goal. Hopkins volleyed it forward to a streaking Louis Munteanu, who beat his defender to the ball and was able to do a half volley chip with the outside of his boot over Matt Turner. However, Munteanu’s effort stayed out of the net, sailing just over the crossbar and out of play.
Just a few minutes later, Munteanu had another chance when Baribo’s shot was blocked by New England’s Brooklyn Raines and bounced through the box to him on the left side. Munteanu ultimately pushed his shot from about 8 yards high and over the bar.
Just before halftime, New England struck again. Once again, it was Jack Harrison on the cross, finding Alhassan Yusuf on the far post. Yusuf calmly tapped the cross into the net to give the Revolution a 2-0 lead on the edge of halftime.
Yusuf had yet another chance early in stoppage time to make it three, but the teams went to halftime with the Revolution holding that 2-0 lead.
“Yeah, they were a lot better than us today,” Lucas Bartlett said after the match. “They were good possession, had a lot of good deliveries. They had a lot of runners in the back line. They were really fluid. We were very competitive with that sluggish possession. We were aggressive on the back line, and that’s something I take a lot of accountability there. Three goals in our back line. So, we got three days until our next game. No better chance to fix that.”
The second half started with Nathan Ordaz subbing on for Jackson Hopkins and Brandon Servania replacing Sean Nealis, shifting their attack to a 4-3-3 formation in the hope the move would spark more scoring opportunites and goals. It almost produced a quick goal, as Kimito Nono fired a shot in the 49th minute. That shot went just wide of the net.
DC United continued to struggle to generate attacking opportunities, with the new shape failing to create good shots on net. In the 65th minute, it was New England who created another chance. On the cross, Dor Turgemen got a free header right in front of the net. This time, Sean Johnson was able to make a point blank save and push the bar over the crossbar.
Just over a minute later, New England got a 3-0 lead. Receiving the ball from Matt Polster, Jack Harrison sent in another cross that found Alhassan Yusuf in the middle of the 6-yard area. Yusuf finished with another header to earn his hat trick, with Harrison picking up his third assist of the night.
DC United were in a deep hole now, and head coach René Weiler subbed on Hosei Kijima nand Nikola Markovic to be able to send more guys forward. Nathan Ordaz almost got a goal in the 71st minute. Off a corner, the ball deflected through the box to Ordaz, who was in the left top corner of the penalty area. He tried curling the ball into the upper right corner of the net, but his shot was deflected out of bounds on the save by Matt Turner.
In the 89th minute, former DC United homegrown Griffin Yow entered the match for the Revolution in his first match at Audi Field since he left the team in 2022. He almost immediately sent a cross into the box that was deflected towards goal but out of play.
DC United mounted one last effort to try and get a goal, but it was not to be had. The referee blew his whistle for full time, and DC suffered their second-worst loss of the season. It was also their first loss since a 3-1 loss to Chicago in mid-May.
“[At] the end, it has to be very well connected [within] our team,” René Weiler said, speaking on the defensive breakdowns that led to the three goals. “And today, of course it wasn’t the best game, but without any doubt, I repeat, the better team was the opponent and not DC United. So, maybe [that’s] the way to become a really strong team. We are much better than we were today, but the way is a little bit longer than some people think and maybe they should be a little bit more patient.”
DC United have a quick turnaround, heading south on Saturday to take on Charlotte FC. The players said that the focus will shift quickly to that match to try and turn it around.
“For us, the game will come quickly. So I think that’s good from the player’s perspective that especially after a loss like this, that you just want to move forward as soon as possible,” midfielder Matti Peltola said. “Now we just gotta bounce back. We know we’ve done it before and we know we’re able to do it. So now it’s time for us to clean our faces and make sure we get a win on the next one.”
I haven’t commented on Louis Munteanu since April. I was convinced after the Knoxville debacle that he was going to fail badly. Then while I was on vacation he scored several goals, and I didn’t find them generally impressive but I wasn’t watching whole matches and figured we should let it bake a while. Now we’ve had some more games after the WC break and… well, I think I’m back to roughly my original conclusion, though for different reasons.
Much of what we observed early on remains true:
And then there are a few things that show better now than at the start:
But he remains, for the most part, such a mediocrity that I feel like you could readily approximate him in Football Manager (1-20 point rating scale for the uninitiated) with all attributes between 9 and 11, except for two things: he’d have Flair 18 and the behavior “shoots with power”. But Flair 18 doesn’t really cover it, because his power of creative improvisation is inversely related to the amount of time he has to think about the play. Once or twice a game he’ll have a touch where there’s absolutely no time to ponder and he just acts… and you get the scorpion kick assist, or a half-blind cross onto an open head, or a bicycle goal, or whatever.
Now, what the bleep do you do with that, tactically? He’s too slow to hack it on the wing without much better dribbling skills. He doesn’t separate, find space, or confuse defenders well enough to play as a 9. He doesn’t control attacking play nearly well enough to be a true 10. As a second or in-the-hole forward, he’s only a complementary player; if the 9 and the wide guys are really dynamic, he could possibly shine in their shadows, but there’s no way he’s going to push the river on his own.
So tl;dr he’s not actually hopeless as an individual player, as he first seemed, but I can’t see a role on this team (now or in the foreseeable future) where he’ll actually succeed. And that is of course a big problem. We had a lot of issues tonight, mostly with defense, structure, and integrity, but one of the big problems was that Munteanu doesn’t create enough space for Baribo or for himself, and so we were treated to several long outlet passes that he was beaten to by faster Rev defenders, muzzling our attacking options.
He’s still got the rest of this season, at least, to demonstrate that the above assessment is inaccurate or unfair. But I’m not particularly hopeful based on everything I’ve seen to date.
I can see a role — he’s a good complement to Baribo, but they require help getting the ball to them in dangerous spaces, and not always with their back to the goal. Nono is showing pretty well, but neither of them bring the danger that Harrison and Yusuf showed tonight.
They could get by with Nono on the right, but they need much more precise and probably speedier play play than Hopkins offers on the left. Hopkins will take a bad first touch and then try a shot that is too easy to block because his bad touch and ponderous set-up gives the defense all the time to get in the way, or maybe he’ll dribble too much and too far, and then turn the ball over trying to get past a 3rd defender.
The attack is just too slow developing and too predictable. Every once in a while Louis pulls off some magic, or Baribo is able to get on the end of a sharply delivered cross, and they get goals. But, they usually don’t threaten much during a game, and tonight they just looked pitifully slow and clumsy.
DCU defenders did a lousy job of tracking /staying with Yusuf — Nono let him go by him into the box without reacting to help the back line on the first goal; Kurokawa let him by on the 2nd goal, and Peltola let Yusuf get behind him thinking he’d be offside (Hefti and Peltola both words for each other) — but the first sin in each case was playing soft defending Harrison. If Nono wasn’t going to follow Yusuf, then he should have gone wide to defend Harrison.
I really wish DCU had someone as good the ball as Harrison is. Louis is pretty good, but not at Captain Jack’s level. Anyway, you give him the chance to pick apart your defense, and he will do just that. Yusuf’s pace running into hte box is also something DCU lacks.
NE Revs showed how to win in MLS. Lessons there for DC United, but they need to find players who can do it.
Separately to the above, a thought exercise: If you could wave a magic wand and put Carles Gil on our roster, what percentage of our problems would that solve?
I ask not particularly because of the specific answers one might give to that question, but rather as a springboard to a second question: are Weiler & Sogut (inadvertently) slowing down the rebuilding process by taking their time getting hold of a DP who can run the attack? Their public argument seems to be that the team culture and work ethic needs this whole season to revitalize before they can seriously start fitting tailored acquisitions in.
IMO, what we saw tonight is what happens when you do roster construction by throwing a bunch of (fairly safe) stuff at the wall to see what sticks. With a Carles Gil in our midfield, you could measure everyone else against that yardstick, evaluate them much more incisively for tactical and mental fit, and start to build a plan A. Without, we have to stay in the conservative shell and don’t get to assess what we have relative to a winning plan; instead we assess what we have relative to abject capitulation.
This is not to be overly critical, as I think the FO have done a lot of good work this year. But I wonder.
With a Carles Gil (there haven’t been too many of him in MLS) and a skilled winger like Harrison, and a speedy attacker like Yusuf, that would solve almost all our problems.