Though his team defeated Charleston 3-2 on Wednesday to advance to the fifth round of the U.S. Open Cup, Atlanta United manager Gerardo Martino was an admittedly unhappy man after the game.
He frowned, he sighed, he didn’t want to talk about individual players in his post-match remarks. When it was pointed out he didn’t seem happy to win a tournament game, he said he wasn’t.
“The positive was we found a way to get through it, but we did make a lot of errors and the team didn’t really follow the game plan we had going into the game,” he said.
Why was he aggravated after watching his team rally three times to win – the first time it has done that this season?
The list is long:
He didn’t want to play Josef Martinez, Miguel Almiron and Jeff Larentowicz for the game’s entirety. The plan was to pull them in the second half. Martinez was making his first start after being off for more than two months with a thigh injury.
The team will host Columbus on Saturday and three points are almost a must for the Five Stripes. Having that trio will help. Martino didn’t say how Wednesday might affect Saturday’s lineup.
They did play well: Martinez scored a goal in the second half against Charleston to tie the game at 2, Almiron’s pass led to Mikey Ambrose’s assist on Brandon Vazquez’s goal that gave Atlanta United a 3-2 lead, and Larentowicz was forced to play centerhalf, and did so well in a man-of-the-match performance. Kevin Kratz scored Atlanta United’s opening goal that tied the game at 1.
Martino’s plan also didn’t include subbing out Zach Loyd and Miles Robinson at halftime. Both players were making their debuts with Loyd at right fullback and Robinson, the team’s first draft pick, at centerhalf. It was Loyd’s first action in more than a year after suffering a concussion while with Dallas.
Both players had good moments but also some shaky moments right in front of Martino’s technical box in the first half. After replacing them with Julian Gressel and Ambrose, which required adjusting the lineup, Martino had to use his third and final substitution for centerhalf Anton Walkes, who suffered an injury in 60th minute.
Asked how the debuts of the younger players went, Martino said he didn’t want to discuss individual players. Each of those three players were starting for the first time this season.
“I don’t think it was a chemistry problem because all of these guys train together every day,” Martino said. “It is true that this 11 hasn’t started an official game together, but they train everyday so we know that whoever plays they are comfortable with whatever we want to do. I don’t think chemistry was an issue. I think it was more lack of motivation and we weren’t thinking things through.”
Walkes was replaced by Andrew Wheeler-Omiunu, who also made his professional debut. That necessitated wholesale changes along the backline that included Mark Bloom playing three positions in one game: left fullback to right fullback to centerhalf. At the end of the game, the backline featured Wheeler-Omiunu at right fullback, Larentowicz and Bloom at centerhalf, and Ambrose at left fullback. Bloom joked everyone predicted that would be the defense at the end of the game.
Martino’s team gave up another goal on a set piece when Charleston’s Forrest Lasso outmuscled Robinson to a win a header for the game’s opening score on a long throw-in. The goal wasn’t entirely Robinson’s fault. It appeared that Walkes let him go, though the team was marking man-to-man. Loyd was called for a penalty on a corner kick later in the first half. However, Charleston missed the kick that would have given it a 3-1 lead. Bloom said the skied shot gave the team a new sense of hope. Martino said in each situation the team was marking man-to-man, so breakdowns were the result of losing the individual battles. The team gave up three goals on set pieces in a loss to Vancouver three weeks ago.
“We knew that they take long throw-ins like that and obviously their defender jumped high and won the header, but we usually mark man-to-man, so there had to have been some mistake on our part,” Martino said.
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