Three Things: Breaking down the USMNT's 3-2 win over Senegal
The US made mistakes, but it's easy to feel optimism after a cohesive & relentless all-around performance
It has been our springtime of discontent. We’d all been going through it together, thanks to a March window that let all their air out of a balloon that had been filled with a perhaps irresponsible amount of optimism over the course of a magical autumn.
You remember the results as well as I do: 5-2 vs. Belgium, and then 2-0 against Portugal. Back down to earth we crashed. Gone were dreams of a quarterfinals appearance, replaced with hopes we wouldn’t get grouped.
As I wrote last week, the US were not actually as bad as they looked in those games. They were also not quite so good as they’d looked in autumn, but man, over the first 25 minutes of Sunday’s 3-2 win against Senegal, it was easy to breathe all that optimism back in. It was probably the best ball the US has played during the Mauricio Pochettino era, and while the rest of the performance wasn’t quite so good – there were a couple of defensive disasters, one from the starters and one from the subs – at least we now have reason to banish the last two months’ nightmares.
Here’s three takeaways:
The Usual 3-4-2-1 in Possession
I don’t think there was ever any doubt that the US was going to end up in that formation in possession. The real question was how they would get there.
In games past, Pochettino’s tried a few different looks:
- A back four with two fullbacks, and when one attacked, the other would slide in and become a third center back. It’s essentially a pulley system, where one would go and one would stay.
- Using that same back four, except one fullback always goes, and the other slides in to be a permanent center back in possession. You can call this an elbow back, or a flex back.
- The old la salida lavolpiana, where a central midfielder would drop in between the center backs, who would then split while the fullbacks would push up to become attacking wingbacks.
- A variation on that, where one of the central midfielders would drop into one of the outside center back roles, while both fullbacks push up into the attack.
- Just starting in and staying in a 3-4-2-1 across multiple phases of play.
