Results in Toronto and Washington on Saturday night made official something that Philadelphia Union fans have been feeling for a few weeks.
The Union are a last-place team, officially, with a 2-1 loss in Toronto dropping them to 15th in the East, behind D.C. United, which won.
They are tied for last in MLS with four wins. Their 21 points from 23 games puts them 28th out of 29 teams in the overall table, only San Jose’s 14 points cushioning the fall.
What’s acutely painful for manager Jim Curtin is that the Union don’t have the talent of a last-place team, don’t have the on-field play or the underlying numbers of one. But they aren’t making winning plays, particularly late in games, to turn decent play into results.
“We’re tough to play against,” Curtin said Saturday. “I think we gave up two shots on goal, zero corner kicks, but still found a way to make some big mistakes and get punished for them. Again, we haven’t been able to make the little plays to get us over the hump.
“It’s unacceptable how many games we haven’t been able to find a way to win, and the way that we’ve done it has been really, really disappointing. We’ve become very fragile, which is uncharacteristic of this group.”
The Union (4-10-9, 21 points) showed the narrow difference Saturday between not making winning plays and making losing plays.
A 74th-minute own goal for the equalizer was the former, Jakob Glesnes drifting off the line to keep crosser Jahkeele Marshall-Ruddy onside. From there, it’s a 50/50 ball with Dwayne Kerr and Jack Elliott sliding in for a feed crossed low and hard. Kerr didn’t get to it, but the ball caromed off Elliott in a tangle of bodies and flew into the net.
Elliott was culpable on the second goal, with an inexcusable flat pass through the center of midfield that got picked off. He compounded it by trying to step up and erase his mistake with a rash step, which left too much space for Lorenzo Insigne to play in Kerr to fire home the winner in the 78th.
“It goes from us being in control to us completely out of control and picking the ball out of our net from nothing,” Curtin said. “And that’s what hurts the most.”
Those were the only two shots on target for Toronto, their 11 shots including two blocked efforts in a largely feckless performance, fitting a team that hadn’t won in nine games. Yet still, they made the big plays at the big times that the Union are incapable of right now.
Kerr’s goal is the 11th that the Union have conceded from the 76th minute on this year against just eight scored, a crucial segment of the game in which they are being beaten.
The Union had chances to make it 2-0 after Tai Baribo’s opener in the 39th minute but didn’t capitalize. It fits the well-worn script of doing enough to be in games but not win them. The Union are second in the East with 24 away goals scored, but second at 23 conceded to undercut that good work.
In the big picture, goal differential is usually a pertinent measure, and it paints a similarly confounding picture. The Union are at minus-4. The three teams in front of them are minus-12, minus-20 and minus-16.
Toronto, itself struggling mightily, sits eighth in the East with a minus-12 goal differential. The Union’s expected goals allowed are 35.4, and they’ve conceded 41, a significant underperformance.
It leaves a club facing a thorny problem.
The Union should be performing better but are letting themselves down at crucial moments. To Curtin, the only fix to start winning, which won’t happen until they actually win a game.
Each passing game — 17, now, with just one win (1-10-6) — increases the weight that keeps them stuck in place.
While that tautology is likely unsatisfying for most fans, with this kind of mental block so firmly in place, it really is all that the Union have to repair right now.
“It hurts because after every one of these games, you look at it and you go: Were we outplayed and dominated for all 90 minutes? It never really feels that way,” Curtin said. “But we can’t make a play right now to get us over the hump to get a win. And it’s not going to end until we find a way to do that.
“The only cure for that — you can talk about training, running, fitness, you can talk about tactics — it really comes down to us finding a way to grind out a win: ugly, pretty, however it is, and then it’s behind us.”
Source: Berkshire mont
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