Matt Privratsky
The University of Minnesota and University of St Thomas have gone a combined 11 games without a win as they’ve transitioned into Big Ten and Summit League play respectively. At times, the teams have shown well defensively – nearly two thirds of those matches have seen the teams allow a goal or fewer – but on the offensive end, we just have not been seeing Minnesota’s DI programs put many goals on the board. With 6 games remaining for each team this fall, let’s dive into the offensive struggles and what could be done to turn them around down the final stretch of the 2023 season. What player steps up individually? The simplest way to gut check a team’s lack of scoring is to ask: are the scorers actually scoring? Are you getting goals from your forward line? Are your attacking midfielders converting the chances they’re getting and creating? Are your aerial threats scoring on the service they’re getting? Because at a certain point, you can create as many expected goals (xG) as you want with your buildup play. But when that xG is created, is it actually being converted into a goal? As star Gopher Sophia Romine puts it “someone’s just got to want to score.”
When a team like the Gophers has as much attacking talent as they have – particularly in the midfield, but also in the forward group – it’s not crazy to put some real scoring expectations on them. The team’s total offensive stats look ok overall, but 14 of the U’s 17 goals have come in three games. In 5 games, they haven’t scored at all and in the rest their scoring has been a significant challenge. For this group, that is – frankly – unacceptable. And it’s led the Gophers to continue to tweak the starting group, the way they sub, and who’s in the rotation as the season has gone on in an attempt to unlock individual players. For a team like St Thomas, the tweaks have been even more dramatic. The rotation overall has been as broad as you’d expect from the Toms. 20+ players might see time in any game. Even the centerbacks might be rotated (a rarity in virtually any level of competitive soccer). Part of the reason for so many Toms seeing time is that St Thomas really does have a mountain of players who are capable of – at minimum – contributing on a Summit League team. But so many players being rotated in and out also limits every individual player’s ability to settle their role both in that individual game and as their role shifts from game to game. That leads into the next layer of analysis. Are players in the right place within the formation and system? If you simply scan a box score after a game and see a traditional forward or attacker didn’t score, didn’t have many shots on goal, etc, your instinct might be to walk away thinking “why did *that player* not step up and impact the game?” And while a certain chunk of responsibility for their performance lands at each individual player’s feet, the role they are asked to play within their team’s system and formation also play a significant role. In their most honest moments, Gopher attackers might say “this system is somewhat new to me, I’m not getting enough minutes, or I’m not getting enough service.” St Thomas attackers might say “my role changes game to game and my shifts are so short I can’t settle into a rhythm.” And regardless of precisely how much truth there is in those kinds of statements for each individual player you pick out from each roster, there is truth to the fact that where someone plays in a given formation can (significantly) change the way they produce offensively – AND the impact can change wildly game to game based on how the *other* team plays. In short: finding the right spot for a single player can be hard, and finding the right spot for an entire team can be exponentially harder. It’s why we’ve seen so much tinkering. Ellie Tempero can play as a holding mid/6 but also as more of a box to box mid/8 or even as a technically gifted attacking mid/10. But she’s strong enough and savvy enough that Head Coach Sheila McGill has now deployed her as a centerback. Megan Nemec is a natural winger who has received national acclaim for her ability on outside but Head Coach Erin Chastain has, at times, shifted her to the sole central forward role in the starting lineup to see if something can be unlocked (and to get all three attacking mids – Sophia Boman, Paige Kalal, Sophia Romine – into the starting lineup. Something I don’t disagree with. They all can ball.) But where people play and how many people play can also be a double edged sword. Play too few and you might be leaving options on the table in terms of unlocking a rotation. Play too many and, despite feeling like you’re making more players happy, you might actually make *fewer* players happy because even fewer of them feel like they’re being given the sized role they feel they’ve earned. In other words, those lineup choices can be unbelievably sensitive. If you find the coach that nails the intersecting factors of communicating roles to players, keeping those roles consistent and/or known, playing enough players to unlock the best performance for their team, but not playing so many that the growth of their best players is limited: let me know. Because it seems like an almost unwinnable challenge. Is it the correct system and formation? And finally, even if individual players are doing their best AND they’re put in the best position *within* the given system and formation, things still might not really work. That’s when you might see teams make more foundational tweaks to their formation or system itself. At times you’ve probably seen me speak about formation choices in an overly simplistic binary choice such as “trying to increase the odds of scoring/wing” vs “trying to decrease the odds of conceding/losing”. Add a holding midfielder in place of a striker so your defense improves even if your chance creation theoretically gets reduced a bit in the final third. Aside from being overly simplistic, it’s also not always entirely accurate. Many times the formation is decided because of a number of factors: the mix of players you have that year, which players can shift to a different position most easily, adjusting to a weakness you’ve had in the past, focusing on unlocking certain players even if it means others might then have to adjust more significantly, etc. But even after weeks of testing in the spring and multiple days of training before the season starts to set up the lineup you think grapples with those numerous factors best, the games that count in the fall get weighted much more heavily in the calculus of formation and system. After ten games of real life experience, your theories no longer exist as hypotheticals – your games have told you how those theories holdup. Patterns that return game after game no matter how different the opponent is are not some whim to dismiss during a film or strategy session. The challenges that present themselves in those recurring patterns are now nearly objective truths – at least in this moment in time, with this group, in this schedule. Your formation alone is not the reason for those challenges you continue to face. But after tweaking everything you can about individual performance and where individuals are being played in your formation, changing your formation itself *might* be the thing that helps you finally address them.
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