CHESTER — Union manager Jim Curtin will never diminish the importance of goals off set pieces. But with everything at play Sunday night, the two goals off set pieces seemed just a little bit bigger.
The Union chose a fine time to break through in that category in a 4-1 win over the New York Red Bulls. With their midfield diminished by suspensions, the club trying to rebound from one of the season’s poorest performances in Toronto and facing a rival against whom the last eight games have been nip-and-tuck affairs of two total goals or fewer, any goal would be magnified.
To pump home two off set pieces via center backs — the equalizer from Jakob Glesnes in the 29th minute and Damion Lowe’s 57th-minute winner — couldn’t have come at a better time.
If nothing else, with the Union (14-8-4, 46 points) forced into a three-man backline by a paucity of midfielders, it meant exploiting the advantages the game presented. The Union had scored their only goal in the last meeting, a 1-1 draw in the Leagues Cup quarterfinal, by Nathan Harriel, and a got a boost with center back Sean Nealis’ 44th-minute red card.
“We said tonight, with Nathan’s ability on restarts, with Damion Lowe joining in and — I guess there’s really no other way to put it — (Red Bulls) have a lot of short guys, they really do, some tiny guys,” Curtin said. “That was a big advantage for our group on the restarts tonight.”
The Union pressed it early. Kai Wagner, the primary set-piece taker, set up the opener for Glesnes off a corner, though he didn’t get an assist after goalie Carlos Coronel’s partial clearance. The Lowe hookup was direct off a free kick, and Wagner added two primary assists from open play. The first was for Julian Carranza’s goal in the 58th, set up by a defensive recovery near midfield and a proactive forward pass from Lowe. The second sent Daniel Gazdag in for his 11th goal of the season.
“We were talking yesterday that we will have a pretty big group on the pitch,” Wagner said. “I think they saw it and they were probably a little bit scared of us. I think the deliveries were good today and I think we won a lot of duels today, so I’m happy that we scored.”
The set-piece strikes threaded into the recovery narrative from Wednesday’s stinker. The Union were bad in Toronto, a 3-1 loss to a team that had lost eight straight. Glesnes, in reigning MLS Defender of the Year, in particular had a horror show, a rarity for the steady Norwegian.
So for him to set the tone with a goal in the first half was a piece of personal redemption and a sign that, even though they’d conceded early again, the Union were going to be OK.
“It’s no secret that I had a tough game on Wednesday,” Glesnes said. “I had in my mind already when I was coming in today that I had to score a goal today.”
“Jakob has become a real leader of our group,” Curtin said. “It’s a situation where he knows he didn’t have his best game in Toronto, but if you rewind literally one game before (in D.C.), he was probably the best player on the field for both teams. I don’t have to say anything, I don’t have to sit with him, he just knows how to respond. I respect him so much as a person, as a player.”
Lowe was bitten by bad luck on the Red Bulls’ opener. He made a fine play to block Omir Fernandez’s initial shot in a scramble in the box. But the ball fell right back to the Red Bulls midfielder to fire home in the 11th minute.
Curtin was impressed by the center back’s resilience. Away from the team for three games to attend to a personal matter in Jamaica, he didn’t allow the early goal to bring him down.
“When he gets unlucky on the block and it bounces back and they get the goal, a lot of center backs would put their head down and shrink in that moment,” Curtin said. “But he raised his game. He gets a great goal off the restart that we needed, and I thought won his aerial goals and his tackles.”
In the big picture, there was little chance of the Toronto performance spiraling. The Union have assembled enough positive performances the last few years to write it off as an outlier. With a bevy of home games awaiting at a park where they’ve won 18 of their last 21, they’d have a chance to rebound.
But the way in which they did so against Red Bulls, even a side mired in 13th place in the East, is indicative of the resilience that Curtin feels is baked into his team’s character.
“We know how hard it can be playing against Red Bulls,” Lowe said. “The last game, they scored early on us in the Leagues Cup, and this game again. It was kind of frustrating, but we know how good we are at home and we know to stick to our identity. We got the goal back – that was the aim, to get to halftime either tied or ahead, and we got the red card and controlled the game from there.”
Source: Berkshire mont
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