Let’s start this off with the biggest shocker: when did you last see a graphic like this?
This shows the Legion’s overall shooting in this game. In total, the Three Sparks racked up 32 shots. To give some context: the highest shooting team in league play this year is Louisville City. No surprise there, really, but they are averaging 17.3 shots per game, a little more than half what the Legion just managed. The Legion—which is a respectable 7th in shooting—is averaging 12.9 shots per game, barely a third of this output.
Going a bit further: the Legion had 10 shots on target. Some of the misses were extremely close as well. 17 of the shots were from inside the box, well over the total shooting average. 8 of those were blocked but 6 were on target. Only 9 shots were off target and of those just 3 inside the 18.
Obviously, those are massive numbers. There is one slight caveat to that: the Three Sparks had 63.4% possession in the game. But even if you adjust that down to 50%, the shots still add up to 25. Conversely, compare that to the Indy Eleven game back on April 19th; the Legion had an absurd 70.6% of the possession but put up only 17 shots with 4 on target.
The Indy game is in fact very relevant here, as both Indy and Tulsa play off the back foot, ceding the majority of the possession. Against Indy the game ended 2-2, largely due to defensive lapses. That’s par for the course, and indeed the Tulsa goal was much in that vein, with Nico Brown letting Logan Dorsey get by him for the header.
Two other features of Tulsa’s style: a 3-man back line and sending in crosses. Let’s deal with the latter first. Tulsa generated just 11 crosses (versus 22 by the Legion). Of those, 7 were in open play. Only one found a target, nicely in the middle of the Legion box, in fact. That also produced a header by Logan Dorsey but it went wide. All 4 set play crosses were corners and only one connected, but it was a short corner that barely qualifies as a cross. Tulsa did get 8 into the Legion box but with that one exception they were all snuffed out. Tulsa were limited to just 9 touches in the Legion box and only 1 in the 6-yard box, which was the goal. 2 more were shots off target, 2 were blocks and the other 4 were unsuccessful passes.
Which is to say, the Legion, despite working with a jury-rigged defense, was ready to deal with the threat.
As to the 3-man line, that mostly works for Tulsa because of the narrow field they play on at home. Several other USL Championship fields are also not overly wide; not so Protective Stadium, which is as big as you can get. This allowed the Legion wings to operate in space and also forced a lot of corners. Tulsa gave up 12 corners overall, and of those only 5 were off target; several were relatively short, but even so, that’s abnormally high. In open play 10 crosses provided 5 contacts, all but one in the box.
To illustrate how this was done, let’s flip the script a bit. Look at this:
Normally, we would focus on the average positioning of the Legion players. This is in fact showing the average positions of the Tulsa starting XI. The red lines highlight the 3 centerbacks (Alonzo Clarke, Delentz Pierre and Lamar Batista, top to bottom). As a group they are narrower than the 18-yard box (which is 44 yards wide). Moreover, they are not much wider than the Legion’s 2 centerbacks (Kadeem Cole and Bryce Washington, in green).
To make things worse, Batista gor a yellow card in the 41st minute and Clarke another in the 72nd, which put them at a disadvantage. Indeed, 2 of the Legion goals were scored after Clarke’s yellow. It also didn’t help matters that Jeorgio Kocevski, a defensive mid, was shown yellow in the 63rd minute. Simply put, the Legion were able to play around the Tulsa back line.
Moreover, Jay Heaps pulled a switcheroo. In the first half the Three Sparks concentrated on the left wing, with Dawson McCartney and Gevork Diarbian taking the ball as deep and wide as possible. In the second they shifted to the right wing, especially after Diarbian was subbed out for Serge Ngoma, with Serge playing on the right and Nico Brown switching to the left.
From the wings the Legion was able to crash the box repeatedly. Ultimately, the team amassed 47 touches in the Tulsa box (albeit only 6 in 6-yard box). And over a third of those were shots. 28 of them were in the second half. 10 were after the 75th minute (a total of 21 minutes with stoppage time). A real no-mercy approach.
Jay Heaps explained the plan to get around that 3-man back line:
“It was really about where Peter-Lee [Vassell] was starting. Because what happens is that they high-press. But if you start to stretch the field and they drop, that is where we found space. If you notice, we found a lot of space in front of them…[so] I didn’t want [Peter-Lee] dropping deep, because if you drop deep—and that’s what a lot of teams do to keep possession—everyone gets behind the ball…
“But if you find that line behind the midfield and then start to drop on their centerbacks, if they don’t come with you, play the ball [i.e., recycle it]. But our plan was, if they did, if they came with you, then you spin and go. And that’s what Peter-Lee did a couple of times.”
The theory, then, was that Peter-Lee would draw the centerbacks to himself, which would release the wingers, Gevork Diarbian and Sebastian Tregarthen, to create havoc on the outside.
From a vantage point directly behind the Tulsa goal line it was also plain to see the focus and determination of the Legion players. It was written plainly on all their faces. There was a clear get-the-job-done mindset and it worked. Of course, thanks in large part to Jacomen’s 6-save goalkeeping performance, they didn’t quite get the job done. In fact, they were 4th in the USL Cup wild card tiebreaker, goals scored. The Charleston Battery and New Mexico United were both 1 better than the Legion’s 7 goals and The Miami FC took the prize with 11 goals by putting 5 past Sarasota Paradise as the Legion were beating Tulsa.
All of which leads to two questions. First, where has this team been all year? And second, will it show up again? Well, Jay Heaps put it this way: “I thought our entire team played tonight at a level that I see every day…That’s been the most frustrating part; I see what they did tonight pretty much two to three times a week. You’ve seen us at home have glimpses and stretches, but tonight was, whenever we felt like we were gonna hit a wall or something was gonna go bad against us, even when it did, the mentality around it did not dip, and I love that. And that’s something I’m trying to make sure we take note of.”
So that mindset was always there; it was an issue of transporting it from the practice field to the playing field. Well, for the next game at least, that is not going to be a problem at all.
