The Columbus Crew continued their winning ways, downing the New England Revolution 4-0 at home. DeJuan Jones opened the scoring against his former team in the fifth minute, cutting inside and placing a curler into the side netting. After that, the pitch became the Alexandru Matan show. The Romanian would score nine minutes later to double Columbus’ lead and then twice more in the second half to complete the hat trick. The Revolution seemingly had no answers for the Black & Gold in Caleb Porter’s homecoming, with the Crew coasting to another easy three points.
This game was about Columbus’ play, but the bigger factor was how poorly New England was set up tactically to deal with the Black & Gold attack. Let’s dive into all the tactics that secured the win for the Crew.
Porter’s poor defensive tactics
By now, Columbus fans are well verse with Porter’s tactics from his time with the Black & Gold before Wilfried Nancy was hired. Porter likes to employ a high passive possession system, with targeted pressing in a 4-2-3-1 formation. With the right players, it works. Look at the Crew in 2020 or Portland in 2015. However, it can be calamitous if you do not have the right players for this system.
In this game, it was a defensive disaster for the Revolution. In the first five minutes, everyone saw how the game was going to turn out, and how flawed the defensive gameplan for New England was.
There are two ways that teams can defend Columbus’ fluid attack. One way is to drop deep and force the attackers to get the ball to their feet and turn at the defense. This approach gives the defensive line a deeper look and more defensive stability, but it allows the Black & Gold to grow comfortable with the ball and pin the defense in. Another way is to manmark and press the attackers to the touch. This would be an attempt to disrupt the attack and ramp up pressure on the attackers to make the right play.
Both philosophies have ways around it, but it depends on the manager’s preference on how they want their team to defend. For Porter, he opted to go with pressure, and it cost his team.
The Crew attack with five to six players across the frontline, already overwhelming the four-back system that New England plays. Now this wide attacking line forces the Revolution’s defensive midfielders to drop in and help defend, but each play is still one on one against an attacker.
This meant that the entire game became a series of little matchups all across the backline. There was no real sense of team defending from New England because they all had to deal with man-marking a player for Columbus.
We see evidence of this defensive breakdown in the first five minutes of the game. AZ Jackson gets the ball into his feet and with one quick turn, he beat his defender. Now because the Revolution defensive line is so high up trying to press the Black & Gold, Jackson can run into the box and force New England to play transition defense.
This bombarding forward run drew Revolution players out of position, forcing them to become compact and get out of their matchups. This freed up Jones to have enough space on the right side to cut back inside and curl the ball into the back of the net.
Another problem with this defensive approach was New England’s tendency to jump the gun and press too early. With a man marking the backline, it’s easy to get dragged out of position with how much the Crew attack moves. This happened on several occasions, where a defender or two would step up, but the other two would stay deep. That action opened up space in behind those vacated areas for attackers to run into and then go one versus one to goal.
This happened on Matan’s second goal. Substitute Jacen Russell-Rowe pulled a center back over towards the sideline, which allowed Matan to run into the space behind that vacated defender. With a long ball in from Rudy Camacho, the Romanian simply settled the ball, dummied the defender and placed it into the back of the net.
After the first two goals, you would think a coach of Porter’s quality would make changes on the defensive side, but he did not. The Revolution did not change their defensive tactics, in fact, they were the same during the entire drubbing.
A few minutes after Matan’s goal, Russell-Rowe got a chance of his own. Diego Rossi dragged the other center back out of position and allowed the Canadian striker to go one-on-one against the center back marking him. Russell-Rowe hit the post, but New England had no answers for the Columbus attack.
Defending the Black & Gold’s attack is no piece of cake, but the Revolution made every mistake possible on Saturday night. They got caught overshifting and left their backside defenders outnumbered, got pulled out of position by decoy runners, preemptively pressed attackers leaving space in behind, and did not track secondary runners. Typically, one of these avenues is left open for the Crew to exploit in a given game, but New England gave Columbus the keys to their defense to expose them in every way possible.
The brutal fact is the Revolution was not prepared, equipped, or ready to face this Black & Gold attack. This is most evident in Matan’s hat trick goal. The Romanian drops into the midfield followed by a New England defensive midfielder. With Derrick Jones driving forward, Matan makes a run towards goal. Due to a lack of communication and preparation, the Revolution defensive midfielder does not follow Matan, assuming the right-side center back will cover him. The only problem is that center back had been pulled centrally by Russell-Rowe an easy slip pass in behind and the Crew went 4-0 up courtesy of a Matan hat trick.
It is easy to retrospectively judge teams based on their performance, but this was truly defensive malpractice by Porter and New England. There was no adjustment or resistance after the first goal went in, essentially making this a game for all of five minutes. Columbus will not mind the defensive breakdowns though, allowing them to net four goals and grab three more points.
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