Before Saturday’s 0-0 tie with DC United, the Fire had scored six goals over their previous two games. Generating little offense and their inability to convert chances has been one of the biggest stories around the team since coach Ezra Hendrickson’s arrival, and the Fire were hoping to build off that output.
While he was clearly happy with that offensive production that didn’t continue Saturday, what didn’t thrill Hendrickson during those two games was how the Fire defense crumbled. Despite leading 3-1 against FC Cincinnati, the Fire allowed two late goals then settled for a 3-3 draw. Then a week later, the Fire scored the first two goals at Inter Miami before allowing Miami to connect twice to even the match.
Kei Kamara’s winner gave the Fire a dramatic victory in Miami, but didn’t make Hendrickson forget why his team needed a late score to take three points.
“It’s not even so much the [squandering] of the lead; it’s the type of goals that we are letting out,” Hendrickson said Wednesday. “We are a team that prides ourselves on being very organized and making it very difficult to score. Teams are not playing through us, dribbling us in the back and putting the ball in the back of the net. It’s simple little crosses back-post that we’re missing, it’s not clearing the free kick.”
On Saturday against DC United in front of an announced crowd of 8,621, the Fire could not win their second in a row. Playing without Xherdan Shaqiri (right upper leg) for the third straight week and beginning a three-game homestand, the Fire generally controlled play in the first half but got nothing to show for it.
The Fire were then on defense for much of the second 45 minutes, but the letdowns that plagued them during the Cincinnati and Miami matches did not return. There were not goals allowed near the end of halves, and opposing attackers were usually marked.
In general, the defense was much better than it was against Cincinnati and Miami, when the Fire were victimized by themselves as much as the other team.
“If teams were completing 15, 20 passes and putting it in the back of the net I would say you know what, we need to revamp this whole way of defending, but it’s not that,” Hendrickson said. “It’s that five-second lack of focus, concentration, that’s putting us in these situations. Hopefully that’s out of our system now and it’s, you get the lead and you stay ahead and don’t let teams back in because it’s very troublesome when it happens like that.”
A goal that really bothered Hendrickson was Miami’s first. The Fire were seconds away from going into halftime up 2-0, but allowed Franco Negri to get free at the back post, halving their lead and changing the complexion of the game.
The Fire eventually got past that lapse, but moments like that can crush teams, even if their offense has improved.
“We worked a lot on the attacking part of things in the offseason, and we are seeing that benefit in us, but also, we need to make sure we get back to keeping teams at zero because it makes it so much easier for us to play when we don’t give up those soft goals,” Hendrickson said. “I thought that goal, it was so untimely at the end of the first half, in Miami, it was just a bad goal to give up, what, 30 seconds or so to go in the first half, which kind of gave them momentum.”