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Santiago might join us later. We might get a cameo appearance from Santi, so stay tuned if you miss his salacious voice that usually joins us on Sunday mornings as we record. This is also the earliest ever Fly Over Fallout that we've recorded as we are coming at you live on YouTube and on socials right after the press conference of our 2-1 win over the San Jose earthquakes. If you're listening to this later on, it might have a different flavor because these are knee-jerk reactions. We watched it with a little bit of an analytical eye knowing that we'd be doing this right after the game, but these are fresh takes, so we'll see how well they age. Before we go, we've got to thank Noble Ice vineyards for sponsoring our show, so thank you so much. This Fallout is for you, Noble Ice. I hope you appreciate it. If it were a little earlier, if it was like a 730 or a 630 game, we'd probably be having some Noble Ice or the Swirls or the Sangries or something, but we're just fighting to stay awake at this point. That'd be perfect. I think the air's going to get cooler tomorrow if I saw the weather correctly, so a little bit better for that. All might be here. Well, Matt, let's dig into the game. I am going to make you do the lineups because you're just so darn good at it. So let's start with the STL lineup. Yeah, it's a little bit of a surprise compared to what we thought we were going to get. We had Roman Berkey and Net, Janus Horne, Kyle Heber, Josh Yarrow, and Thomas Taughlan made up the back line. Chris Durkin was our lone central midfielder, Nooki Thors and Marcel Hartle, Cedric Toy shirt, Rasmussen were the attacking mids and Klaus was our striker. This was a 4141, which postgame Hackworth did confirm this was a new formation for them. It's not something that they had tried really before, at least under Hackworth's leadership. He also kind of alluded to the fact that on the attack, this was more of a 433, so they had a little bit of a different shape in who they pushed up, pushing Durkin more into the midfield with Hartle and Toy shirt. But no matter what, the surprises to this lineup, formation aside, were mainly surrounding the central midfield role. It's not just that Chris Durkin was able to go and Henry Kessler was not able to go with concussion protocol. It was also the absence of Edu Louvin and Hackworth postgame, let's just cut right to it, postgame told us that it was his hamstring and they're just managing that load. It's not necessarily that he has an injury, but he did liken it to Chris Durkin where Durkin playing, Hackworth was not concerned about re-injuring or re-agravating the knee. It was knee inflammation that Durkin's been dealing with. And so Durkin was good to go, as Hackworth said, surprisingly, given his designations throughout the week and how cautious he was being, talking about it. While Durkin was able to go, Louvin was left behind. Louvin stayed in St. Louis, didn't make the trip out. And so this is more precautionary maintenance. There is going to be interest in the coming week to see how Louvin trains with the team, but ultimately I think this was an effort to make sure that they're just managing that and that he's good to go for the Derby next week. Yep. And I think there was, you know, let's talk about the lineup debate because I think we were like, is it 4141? Is it a 4231? And each would have worked in the way that it was listed as usual on the lineup announcement from the team. And so, you know, I think we were kind of arguing over it, well, is Hartle going to have to play like a Louvin? I almost said, if he played in that position, it would look kind of like O'Strack meets Louvin with Hartle playing in that eight that moves forward and Durkin's kind of staying back. So, you know, I was a little worried about Hartle having to defend, but I thought he's done a good job in the past tracking back. I think we've all seen that in the past, what, six weeks, eight weeks? So he can do it, I think, but, you know, that's a lot of defensive responsibility for our number one playmaker in this game. But instead we saw a 4141, which in that case, for me, the worry is what is Toikert defending going to look like because we're going to see as we go through this game that clearly he had some responsibility and he definitely had to track back and do number eight things at times more than he's ever done with the city at least. Yeah, and that was where I saw in the second half, most notably, it was Marcel Hartle, who I thought felt was tracking back where at this point, Durkin had already been subbed out and so it was a keel watts. And that in and of itself, I think that's worthy of a conversation later on when we get into that second half piece, but the way a keel watts was managing that central midfield role was vastly different. I think that what Chris Durkin was doing. And in conjunction with that, we were under such a heavy assault in the second half compared to early on in the game that I think by necessity, Hartle kind of dropped back a little bit until JGR made his parents, which was pretty late in the game. Do you want to go over the San Jose lineup or do we just jump in now? We just jump in. There weren't too many surprises for San Jose. He had Jeremy Abobosi back in Christian Espinoza, Malpel Greeno, those guys were in. Honestly, the biggest thing that I think frames this match from a San Jose lineup perspective is that Daniel was not their goalkeeper, it was William Yarbrough back in the lineup. And if you listen to my solo job on Flyer Footy last week, this was a huge difference maker. Just having Yarbrough in, Yarbrough had zero saves in this game. He only had two shots on target, so it's not like St. Louis was peppering him and that will be something we talk about in a minute. But in general, Yarbrough is just such a bad shot stop compared to Daniel. And I think, I don't think Daniel would have stopped the toy shirt goal early on in the game in just four minutes in. But the sheer fact that Yarbrough was there over Daniel was a difference maker that I made note of. Absolutely. Okay, well, let's jump into it. It came hard and fast. I definitely noticed that as the team was attacking, you would kind of see the two center backs furthest back, Durk and sitting in front of them, and then everyone else able to get forward. In the second minute, I kind of noticed that that's what was happening in the build out. And so a lot of guys forward, only Durk and two center backs guarding the counter attack, which I like. I thought that was fun. Lots of attack there. In the third minute, we don't have to wait long. Toikert gets his goal. It's a quick play down the left with Horn and Hardell interchanging very nicely. Cross goes in. It skips to a wide open toikert on the far. Oh, no, no. Pardon me. Yes. The wide open toikert on the far side of the field and all gave it a nice dummy on the way through. I'm not sure if we touched it or not. I liked that a lot, but Toikert hammers it home in the second minute. We get our first goal nice and early. It felt so good. Such a relief away to get that early goal. Yeah, I don't think I'll touch it at all. And the thing that I really enjoyed about that goal was the lead up to it. The way that Janice Horn had to throw in from the far side, and he threw it in while he made his run high, a couple of St. Louis city players were passing it back and forth drawing the defense back. And that was key to free up the space for Janice Horn to maneuver out wide. And then it was just off and running that transition. And so in that transition, the spacing of the attackers was so vitally important. And it was notable to me that you had all come in so hard towards the ball that he was on the inside part from center toi shirt, because obviously all plays that right wing position on this game. And so having him cut in so hard. It almost post game center toi shirt talk to us. And he reiterated that his favorite position is underneath the action right right underneath where the strikers are right underneath where the the main attack is. And so it allows him to see that part of the field kind of clean up all of the dirty do all the dirty work to clean it up. And this was kind of like that where the ball was crossed in and toy shirt had positioned himself so well that he just had this vision of the field in addition to the fact that his spacing left him so wide open and he had an easy angle for a goal. So like holistically, I felt that this play was the tone center that we needed to really start things off. Not to mention we had all going very high and cutting very far inside and torquered by playing that eight roll, not underneath the striker had the latest run and ended up in a really nice place. So you know, coming from deep is hard to defend and it worked out here very nicely. In the fifth minute was the first time I noticed a very clear in defense for one for one. So nice and easy to see that every time they kind of lined up in defense. It was very organized. We have a passing diagram that showed it very clearly as well that came out after the game. Six minute we see Toikert for the first time. I just wanted to note that he was the first time he had to track back, get real dirty into a tackle kind of far back on the field and then it popped out and he still had to go run it down in the middle a little bit further back had a guy in his back and he still got out of trouble. He did a fine job as an eight on doing the dirty work there. So that was nice. In the seventh minute, there's a turnover and a counter in favor of St. Louis, Thor keeps it alive after a pass from the left. Klaus gets what I assumed would be a goal and it went wide with his left foot. It was like the Klaus kind of moment actually maybe the Klaus moment of the game I would say the kind of thing like the Klaus kind of goal, the Klaus kind of chance and unfortunately not the Klaus finish. Definitely the best chance. That's for sure. And I think part of that is the fact that we didn't have very many shots in general, less shots on target. We only had seven total shots in this entire game. I made note that we only had four total shots up to the first 75 minutes. So this was definitely Klaus's chance and the ball was a little bit behind him. So it was it was one of those plays that was I think I referred to it as like pinpoint accuracy, but it was just a millisecond behind each player I felt, Thorson's pass over to Klaus just a little bit behind and they were almost just barely keeping that ball in play. And so Klaus didn't have a good angle when he kind of swept the swept his leg back to get to the ball and he didn't really have a good angle to turn his body to be able to get it on goal, but dangerous opportunity, good positioning overall by the attackers. 10th minute, the possible PK, I did not see this live, Matt, but there was a VAR stop and I was like, what are they even looking at? And it was hard getting taken out by Rodriguez at the top of the box. Was it in the box? Was it not? Was it a PK? Was it a foul? Was it a nothing? It was ruled a PK. Heck was asked about this afterward and he said, I don't know what anything is anymore. What did you think Matt? What did you see? Hi, when I saw it live, even right after that replay, I thought that he tagged his foot just outside the box. And so I was into the impression that where the actual contact occurs is where the foul is or where that focal point of the foul is where the penalty would get called one way or another. So Hardill is obviously at the top of the box. He's moving in. He recovers the ball and so he's moving into the box. You can even argue that his forward foot is in the box, which I think it was, his body is in the box and the foot that gets clipped by Rodriguez is outside the box. But they reviewed it. They saw it a couple of different ways. The angles that they looked at, I thought were fascinating because I think the Apple broadcast did a good job of showing us the different angles and the speeds at which they were looking at this. They even looked to the build up just to see live what it looked like and then slowed it down trying to identify where the contact took place. But this is, whatever the reasoning was, it was a clear, nobius foul, that's for sure. And I wonder if it was just at that line so close that they made the call. So live watching it, I thought it was just outside the box, but I will absolutely take it because we've been on the receiving end of plenty of these no calls for sure. Yeah, well said. I completely agree with that. So in the 12th minute, the PK goal happens, classic stutter from Hardell that gives me a freaking heart attack every time. Luckily, Yarbrough kind of went to his left and Hardell placed it low and left to the bottom corner, not hard, but at that point, Yarbrough made his move and couldn't move anymore toward the, so it's a goal to over explain the PK. That's the PK. 13th minute, I noticed there's still more chances coming, passes in and around the box. Great run inside from Tottland, but it was sent a little bit too far from him on the far post. It was out for a goal kick. 14th minute, Shakiras is chopped down for a free kick, about five yards outside the box or so. Lopez kicks it into a wall and offside stops play after that, but it was a decent cross like it was a little bit of a scary moment for San Jose or for scary for St. Louis after the cross. Dangerous. And not the last time we're going to see a cross be a little bit scary. For St. Louis, I guess cross balls, when you watch a team, they're like the top crossers in the league. They said that a few times as far as the number of crosses in the league. And so any team that crosses it in a lot kind of tends to give me heart, heart attacks in general. Well, that's Shakiras free kick right there was the first big opportunity they had on a dead ball. And that's one of the things that San Jose really tries to target. They try to earn these dead ball opportunities, whether it's a free kick, whether it's a corner kick, and that's where they try to get the bulk of their goals. You know, they're one of the lowest scoring teams in the league, but they are the worst team in the league when it comes to open play goals. So this to me was the first indication of, okay, we need to make sure we see how we're showing up early on these free kicks, because this is going to be one of their bread and butters. They're going to go back to this a few times. And they did. They earned some fouls. They earned a couple of these opportunities throughout the game. But I think St. Louis did a good job mitigating the free kicks. The corner kicks, I'm always just worried about us giving up corner kick goals. I feel there's something to our corner kick defense in 2024, but thankfully we did enough to prevent that. And it all started with this 14 minutes to cares for kid. Yep. So it was blocked. Everything went ended up just fine in the 22nd minute. I noted that all was back in defense in the defensive third and he did a like a facing our own goal. He kicked it over his head. So behind him flips around and he's got two guys all over him. I think there's actually three guys in the area. Yeah. And they kind of croy side passes it out into open space for a nice counter attack. It didn't end up in anything, but I thought that was really good play from all who had many of those kind of moments throughout the game. That was my favorite. The 23rd. Oh, go ahead. On Rasmus, all one of the things that I think Hackworth had said this past week that he had tried him at like a right wing back at one point last week. And the fact that he was working as a legitimate right winger, not even a right mid. He was given the space on the right side to move. I think this gave him some flexibility to track back as well. So the width that we gave with that four one, four one look did offer a little bit of an opportunity for our wingers to move up and down the field. You didn't really see Thor go up and down as much as Hartle. So there was some movement on that left side to cover and track back when we needed to, but it was definitely all on that right side doing it. Indeed. 23rd minute. There's a chance after a long ball, Klaus controls it, but Thor slips so much Thor hate in this game. It's a field too. I mean, like, yeah, this field was just not and PayPal I think has this reputation of it's a grass field. It's a nice field. But for whatever reason, it's just always tough traction and you had Jay read later on slip a couple times in this. So when I saw Thor go down, I was like, okay, this, this isn't Thor. This is the field is what I attributed it to. Yeah. And there were two big Thor slips that could have been something special for St. Louis, perhaps. And then he was a bit wasteful in this game more than usual. So I will allow the Thor hate in this game, but y'all get a little bit out of control. Let's just, let's just keep it a little bit controlled here. 24th minute, Durkin gets hurt, Matt, you know, there were a lot of comments after. So I'll let you kind of talk about this one. Yeah. He went down on the field and then he subbed out. You could just see he was telling Hackworth that he can't go. And the important thing to note is what Hackworth's comments were post game about Chris Durkin. And it's very different than Eddie Lubin. And honestly, Hackworth had said post game that he had no real concerns in starting Chris Durkin. He said he has a bruise and a bruise on his knee and his knee yesterday was in today. In fact, was fine, but he took another knock and he hit a ball and he just felt like it was really weak. And Hackworth didn't have any concerns starting him. But after that comment saying in a weak knee, I don't think they were messing around with it anything after that. So Hack didn't seem like he was concerned about long term implications for Durkin even going so far. Like I mentioned earlier, to when talking about Eddie Lubin, Hack was saying that it's a night and day difference, not even the same conversation where Lubin didn't play because they didn't want to aggravate or re-aggravate a hamstring type of a thing, Durkin inflammation of the knee, no concerns with re-injury. It's not that type of an injury concern. So the feeling weak, the hitting a ball and just feeling not right, get them out of their precautionary. The big problem with this sub though ultimately was that it impacted every other substitution decision that Hackworth made after this. It was such a big cascade effect. I almost sent out a tweet, but things were going kind of pretty fast and furious at this point. Hackworth mentioned earlier this week and it was a question by Tom Schwartz from St. Louis Soccer United. We used to be a show on Sunday mornings on 590, the fan. But he asked a question about substitutions and timings and Hackworth's propensity. Does he want to or would he recommend subbing in the first half? And Hackworth was very adamant. No, that's not his MO. You would never recommend doing that. You want to give your guys a run out no matter who you start, you're 11. You give them a go and you see how they go with 45, at least. This changed everything with that. And so it did, it was the inflection point to me. You can argue that it happened a little bit earlier in that, in the game. But when Watts came in for Durkin at 24, everything kind of changed. The actions of both of those players while occupying the same spot was vastly different. That Watts was honestly pushing higher a lot more at times, whereas Durkin, I felt, was doing a fairly good job of staying within himself there in between the lines. He was kind of migrating between the lines at times, but he wasn't moving up too high like Watts did a handful of times. And I think that changed a little bit of what we needed to do elsewhere. In addition, it also changed things like the Janus Horn sub. That occurred at halftime because Hackworth did not want to use another sub window because he already was down one from the Durkin sub. And so all of your horn was asking to come off in the 40th minute. That's something I knew until Hack talked in the post-game presser. Yeah. So there's a lot of nuances that went into this with Durkin that cascaded to the rest of the game. Yeah, and let's talk about the Watts sub too, because I think a lot of people were upset about that for whatever reason. Watts is a trusted guy from Hackworth. They've been together for a very long time, and so it's not terribly surprising that Watts came on here. I think a lot of people expected JGR because in a 4-1-4-1, someone who plays like a hybrid center back sixth role makes a lot of sense. But in the build out, I have a lot of moments where we're going to talk about some of Watts' bad moments come very quickly here, and then Watts makes up for it throughout the game. You kind of see why he was in, he's weak in some areas, he's strong in other areas, and so we're going to be very fair to Watts in this one. But when he came on, we talk about how good Durkin is in the midfield rotation when we're trying to play out of the back. Once Durkin joined this team, that was something we could do regularly. It's something we should have felt very lucky to have once he came into this team, because it wasn't something that happened regularly last year without Lou and really dropping in and taking control. And so that's something we've had, that's something we've been lucky to have, and it kind of disappeared with Watts, and I think that should be something that we take note of. And so Santiago's joining us now, actually Santiago, how's it going? We're talking about Watts joining the squad, as Durkin came out, and the good and bad of that, the bad kind of came first, but let's welcome you before we continue the conversation. How are you doing tonight? Doing great, guys. Happy, happy that the team finally won an away game, and yeah, it may not matter anymore, but still a good feeling. And now the team comes back to St. Louis to play against the Sporting KC, you know? Hey now, to be fair, and I was, let's just get this out of the way right now, that St. Louis has not been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, but you know who has been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs? Sporting Kansas. Oh, there you go. They have officially, with tonight's results, been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. And in addition, let's just get this out of the way, because we buried the lead on this. With this win, St. Louis is no longer able to win the wooden spoon. Oh, thank God. We have gotten over that hump. We are no longer in contention for that. So those two things are reason enough to celebrate. Yeah, I agree. I've been worried about that. That was going to be my next question. Like, what's the wooden spoon math? That's, that's what I want to hear. So I'm glad that's not a thing anymore. We lost time. We just got some connectivity, problems that we'll bring him back back. All right, so right away here, the 26 minute, there's a giveaway after Yarrow, it looks like there's a couple buildouts that just things weren't looking as natural as they normally look. Yeah. And there was some problem solving being attempted by Yarrow. So if anyone's mad at Yarrow for losing the ball, he didn't have anyone to pass to. All he had was moving forward. And this is something that's a good quality in a center back if they have the confidence to push forward into the midfield, find a pass. That's an awesome thing. It's a problem solving thing that even the national team struggles with sometimes. Now Yarrow gave it away once he got upfield and that's a little bit more scary than punting it, you know, if it could have been another option here and more conservative option. But this led to a counter attack. It was maybe Berkey's best save here. There was a cutback pass and a shot Espinosa to Lopez. Great shot. Lower left. I believe Berkey stopped it. Honestly, a lot of the, I mean, a lot of the sequences that you noted Phil after this Durkin thing before they ended up scoring are like rinse and repeat. It's St. Louis is unable to get possession. St. Louis is stuck deeper in their zone. We've got some giveaways. Berkey's save there at 26, 27 was the first real chance that San Jose had. And that was this next piece of the inflection point where Durkin went out that they had this good chance Berkey made a worldly save. And then they continued to not really pressure Berkey necessarily, but they continued to gain the momentum. Like if you look at those momentum charts, they have San Jose taking the momentum overwhelmingly after we scored our second goal and they didn't really let up until halftime when we got a little bit of the momentum back, mostly talking about the possession numbers. This is a San Jose team that is last in MLS in overall possession, average possession per game. And they had a large volume at one point, it was 57, 58% possession in the first half. And that's what they were doing is they were possessing the ball. They were trying to break us down and it turned into a game that I don't think anybody really expected. So that entire sequence there from what you had noted between like 26 up to the late 30 minutes. I mean, Klaus at 38 gets a yellow trend to avoid a turnover encounter. I mean, it's that kind of a thing where St. Louis is on the defensive and we're hoping that something at halftime is going to change. You're feeling like they just need to hold on in the back part of this second half. It is markedly different than what it was in the first 15, 20 minutes. And eventually, San Jose was able to do enough to break, break us down and have the lead. Yep, I want to say one more thing about the, sorry, the buildup problem is that we got, we would get Berkey with the ball, right? And Berkey typically weights or center back weights and baits the attackers to press and then they kick it long, right? They took cover this a lot in the second half. And so Berkey would put his foot on the ball and no one would do anything from San Jose. They refused to press, which was a planned thing, right? They were worried about St. Louis being successful, punting the ball to class. Obviously, that's a good thing to worry about. And so St. Louis didn't know what to do with that. And the buildup without Durkin was a little bit scary. So I just wanted to note that that was like, this was a problem that wasn't solved in the first half that we can talk about in the second half. Honestly, that's such an astute observation because that was a cascade effect from Durkin not being there, but more so from what San Jose was giving us. We weren't really able to play the ball through the midfield and anywhere near effectively, but also even to our wings. We didn't even really attempt to do that. It was to send it long when the 50/50 and progress the ball from about the midfield point up, winning those battles, relying on the duels. And it was kind of an interesting thing to see San Jose do, looking at the stats after the game, it's even more interesting to see the average height of the defensive actions. San Jose had a higher line than St. Louis did, so they didn't have very many actions in the defensive, in St. Louis's defensive half, but they had a lot of defensive actions around the midfield area. And so they were very holed up in what they wanted their game plan to be while St. Louis had the ball. For better or for worse, St. Louis didn't have the ball much in this game, but it was not really exactly what I expected from San Jose overall. Agree. I mean, good coaching there, good game plan for sure. Lastly, I do want to say it did remind me when there was like no problem solving and reminding me of that final playoff game against Casey and Casey, where both goalkeepers were just punting it back and forth, and it was just like, "This is ridiculous." But it's good to note that it wasn't working because eventually that problem does get solved. And the next iteration after they weren't pressing, we didn't know what to do. He did send one to Totten, one or two to Totten, and Totten was able to gather another one to Horn that went out of bounds. So it was a problem. Yeah. We've covered it. I just wanted to make sure that was super clear, and everybody noted the bad and that there was progress made after halftime. Do you want to cover anything else in the first half? Probably the San Jose goal is a good one. Oh, right. That needs to be talked about. Yeah. Around 40 minutes, San Jose took, they still took a lot of the possession in this one. They finally led to a link-up play that Christian Espinosa started it, Jeremy Bobacy ended up getting the goal. The final third was broken down by a given go. And this was something that I think led to the defensive midfield role with the back line in that area, and it was Hebert Yarrow Horn and Watts at this point. They couldn't handle the given go. And this has been a weakness of St. Louis, is you have quick movements in tight spaces between the lines. If you have quality players who can effectively put the ball where it needs to be, then they're going to beat you and they beat us this time. And that was dangerous because this is one of those moments that matters for longer periods of time. 40 minutes is right before halftime. And so now you're sitting there at halftime thinking if you're St. Louis, okay, we've just been shellacked for the past 25, 30 minutes, and we need to figure out a way to turn this around. We just had a goal scored on us. They have momentum now. What do we need to do to turn this around? And if you're saying, Jose, you're going into halftime thinking, we're right back in this. Yeah, we've got punched in the face to start this game, but we just scored. We've been dominating possession. We've been progressing the ball. This is our opportunity. And so that's how they went into half kind of sitting around with that. And on top of that, you had the honest horn injury or the honest horn needing to come out. I wouldn't say an injury, but honest horn had told John Hackworth, like you said, Phil, around 40 minutes or so he needs to come out. And so Hackworth said, I need you to stay five, 10 more minutes. You got to get through this because we need you in. So that's why they made the summit half, which was the like for like. So that explained the Jay Reid for the honest horn as opposed to doing anything more drastic in the strategic of it all. Strategic. Yeah. Very nice. Beautiful goal there. I do want to say that above us, he did some really amazing numbers. He's quality. He's quality. Yeah. Good hold up play and speed and power and finishing all in one play. Well done. Okay. Half time stats, say this has 1.83 XG to not 0.98 to San Jose. So that works out pretty darn close to what really happened. But part of that is the PK. I mean, when you look at XG numbers with, yeah, with this kind of game, 0.79 of that 1.83 was the PK. And so it was pretty even otherwise it seemed St. Louis five shots to San Jose nine, only two on goal for St. Louis, four on goal from San Jose. So Berkey keeping in us in this game, arguably 45% possession in the end of the first half to 55% possession, right? How St. Louis wants it, right? Right. Right. How St. Louis wants it. It's also right how San Jose doesn't want it. So that was another oddity of it. But I guess in that regard, if you're, if you're thinking about how St. Louis sometimes happens where we have a higher number of possession and we are, we have the ball, we have the quote unquote momentum, but we're unable to break down the defense. We're not able to get through. That's what San Jose was tonight. They had the ball for long periods of time. They were pressuring us. We didn't have the high press, high turnover work that we did consistently. But at the same time, we absorbed their pressure. Like this could have ended up so much worse if they were successfully breaking us down. When you're playing a team like San Jose, you have to set yourself above that level of competition. And I think it goes back to what I was saying the last time we played this team, which was winning against San Jose does prove something important. It proves that you are not the bottom of the league. It proves that you have successful things to build off of. San Jose has a difficult time making those kinds of arguments. And so this win, this, the way that we absorb the pressure speaks to how effective we can be when we stick to our game plan in certain areas like possession numbers, but we force teams that typically like low possession counter attack offenses, we, we force those teams into working and trying to break us down other ways. And so I think that has to be looked at as some level of success from St. Louis too. Mm hmm. I want to talk more about that at the end of the game. And this second half isn't as active and exciting. No. Matt will probably have to skip through some of these. I think I. Yeah. On the notes, but. That's okay. I mean, honestly, it's a forgettable half by and large and at 53, I like kind of in your notes. You say San Jose won't press. Yes. And that's that that again highlights this entire half. So after when Jay Reid came in, not a whole lot changed, except for I did think we had better build up on our left a few more times, right? You called this outpost game with John Hackworth and asked him about Jay Reid. And I thought that was a good question because I noticed it too. I noticed there was more of a propensity in the second half, not only for Hardell to be dropping back in to midfield alongside Watts a little bit more, but he was doing so on the left hand side, working the link up play and the overlapping runs with Jay Reid. He was letting read, take a little bit more of a lead into the attack and overlap him than he did in the first half with Giannis Horn. Jay Reid was doing a great job on both sides of the ball. Hackworth called it. How did his performance? Great defensive work. He at some points I made note in the second half, especially later on, was doing a great job against Christian Espinosa. Their right-mid, right-winger, who I talked in length about on Flyra Footy, leads their team in SIS, I think it's 12, one of their leading goal-scores, focal point of their offense. Jay Reid, when he came in, needed to shut him down and he did a good job of doing that. Yeah, his hands full, but I wasn't as nervous as some of those crosses that were coming in, honestly, when I saw those two going at it. Yeah. But yeah, I do think his biggest contribution was the build-up and got to give a lot of credit to Hardl coming in and those two working together. I actually thought maybe that was a tweak, but I think it just naturally happened. But we had an outlet right at that point. The game plan became viable at that point. The problem was solved, figured out how to go up that left, that left-hand side, even if we couldn't press our build-up right through the middle, as we usually do. Next biggest thing is 56-minute Indy and Simon Betcher come on for Klaus and Om, what do you think about this map? It's not like for like, so Indy sliding out to Om's right, Betcher took up top. This was telling me that Hack was okay with how our formation was working. He was okay with how things were playing because he didn't feel he needed to change things up. There was nothing drastic like putting JGR. I mentioned earlier, I think at halftime, that I wondered if Jacob would Reich would come in for a Janus horn or for a Thomas Tallon and you would slide a keelwatts back. You would have some kind of a different look with your midfield, however that was. But he just did like-for-like subs there at 56, and this was his second of three sub-windows, so you really saw not only like-for-like subs, but early. I made note of just how early it was. Before even 60 minutes, you're making your second-to-last sub-window and you're using four of your five subs now. That's significant. Not that it was hot or humid or anything like that. They had the elements to contend with, but you're putting, and Hackworth mentioned this post-game too. He had a lot of trust in some of those players who were being tasked to go 90. Thomas Tallon, he called out, Marcel Hardel, Seder Toischer, those kinds of players who with this move at 56 to bring in Indiana Vassilev and Simon Betcher for Klaus and Rasmussen, you're putting pressure on those guys that they need to perform Thomas Tallon most notably because he hasn't played in the past three games. Kind of a big deal for him to be going 90. Completely agree. We at this point start seeing St. Louis settle in very strongly into the mid-block and just making sure they were going to defend out this game. It's nice that Hack didn't put in more defensive roles because what if they lost the lead? That's something that I think was on every St. Louis fans mind at this point, right? Like can we hold the line? Can we get out of this game with the lead sitting back as much as we are? We know the end so we know that it worked out, but we start seeing a lot of pressure. 67th minute is kind of some of the best possession as San Jose has gotten in the game. In the 16th minute, there's a dangerous long ball that Yarrow kind of fouled the guy running on. This one was dangerous. This one was leading to a goal. It ended up not having anything happen, but I could already see the folks on social media getting onto Josh R.O. for letting the guy get in behind him, but it was called offside. Anger tweets. You can delete those. R.O. did fine in transition there. No, no. He offside trapped him. He did it on purpose. Yes. Yes. That's what we're going to do. In the 71st minute, I noticed St. Louis was having a hard time connecting passes. That was a little bit disheartening for me that it looked like they were kind of doubling down even in their minds on sitting back and defending out a 72nd minute. Another chance created for San Jose, well-defended. Sorry, Matt. I can't read while we're talking to cut ahead. Is there a spot you want to mention next? No. I mean, 75 minutes or so, I made the note that we only had like four or five shots total, and that was jarring for me because not only one of the keys to my keys to the game that I said earlier was we needed volume against William Yarbrough because he'll allow goals if he just puts shots on goal. We were so ineffective at doing that. It really did seem like we were on the precipice of allowing that one moment that would break a line or we'd give up a corner kick and something would happen. They weren't pressuring overtly, but they had enough possession of the ball consistently and they were preventing us from making inroads into the final third and even the attacking half with much, much danger, much bite to it. So once this happened, we had a few more shots, you know, after 75, we had a couple more shots. Simon Betcher had one at 84, the end of Asla had one at 78, but again, these are sub-point one XG per shots. That's like a kind of a good metric for is it a pretty good quality shot, pretty poor quality. Neither of these really had much to them, but then at 78, you know, the substitution that the last sub that happened. Chance before 78, though, that chance was really nice. I think it was the only good chance for St. Louis in the second half where Betcher kind of took it to the corner really early still. Oh, yeah. And they get a throw because he just kicks it off the funder out of bounds, but he throws it into Tottlin and Tottlin tricks a guy. Tottlin had a good game. We saw a lot of Tottlin things. This was the most Tottlin thing of the game, in my opinion. He tricks a guy gets past him and he passes it. But I think it's a back pass that falls to Andy's left foot and he gets a really, for Andy, he doesn't always do this. He often curls it to the far corner. In this case, he slammed it with his left foot. It fell to his left foot and it's deflected out for a quarter. That corner was defended out. Unfortunately, St. Jose's what, 25th or something like that in defending corners or set pieces or something like that. Right. So I was hoping to have a goal to happen. It didn't, but you know, that was a good chance at least. It was, and it was one of our only chances. You could say it's one of our best chances, but it was one of our only chances really. And so it's notable that Thomas Tottlin was involved in that. And also, I'm glad that Andy had an opportunity with that too. Of all the players that have really fallen off in the past month or two since the new guys arrived, you really have to point to Indiana Vasilev as kind of, he's lost his spot, not just to Hardlan Toy shirt, but he's lost his spot to Rasmus Allman, Nookby Thorson, even Simon Betcher, really. So he's losing minutes and so these are important times for Indiana Vasilev to make the most of that kind of an opportunity. So the shot was blocked, but it was a good chance created. Sorry to bring, I wanted to bring that in at least some positivity there in the second half. 78th minute Thor off for JGR. What did you see here, Matt? This was a little bit of a formation change. You went to more of a double pivot. You had Watts and JGR at central defensive midfield. Hardlan moved out left, Toy shirt and Indiana Vasilev were center and right, and then Betcher up top. So it was more traditional 4231 for St. Louis at this point when JGR came on, which was fine because I think dropping an extra guy back in the middle helped clog up a little space and you had some free-flowing abilities from our defensive midfielders in preventing some of those runs, the given goes that they were trying earlier in the game. So I enjoyed this and it didn't necessarily seem like it was parking the bus at all, but it was just reinforcing a little bit of how the game state was going. We needed to preserve the lead and at the end of the day, that helped us do it. I'm not going to question for a second whether it was a good idea, whether we should have been going for a goal or not because we also talked recently about how St. Louis has given up the most points from winning positions. The ultimate goal is to come away with three points and we did that by employing the tactics that we did in order to preserve the lead, not extend it. Only a couple more things left here. In the 85th minute, I've skipped a few of these things where Watts did a good job doing his job as a six. And here we see in the 85th minute, JGR kind of gets the ball in possession and the left half space in the attack and he gets there and he's kind of like he could dribble toward goal, but he kind of dribbles away from goal at an angle, looking at the two teammates on the left side. So it's like clear he's dribbling straight to where he's going to pass it to one of those two. He was never going to turn right and kind of look for a cross or go for goal or anything or dribble in. So we're seeing like a center back who can play the six roll dribble up toward the box, right? So it looks very much a little clunky, I'll just call it that. Not bad. Pretty bit clunky compared to other MLS attackers, of course. So we see that and he wanted, when he gets it out, Watts ends up with the ball and he does dribble a little bit more shifty toward goal, right? Yeah. And he's a little bit scarier. And so I know a lot of people were going off on Watts in this game, but he did serve his role good enough. And while some of some people aren't a fan of how casual he may look in defense, he still got the job done and he still brings a lot to the table as far as passing and dribbling and getting out of trouble. So just to see the clear difference between JGR and maybe why he shouldn't have come in too early in case we needed to get a goal back or something. But it was nice to see Watts and JGR next to each other because it felt like I could breathe at that point that if we needed to defend the game out, that was a much safer look for me. Yeah. And I mean, credit to Akil Watts, I think things changed when he came on, but they're already trending in that direction. So it's notable looking at the stats post game is that Akil Watts had the most accurate passes of anyone to play 45 minutes or more. He had 30 of 30 accurate passes. That's quality, quality work in connecting when he needed to and in trying to progress the ball in meaningful ways, defensive wise, he had five recoveries, two of five tackles one, so he wasn't great at his challenges, but he did have six of nine ground rules one. So a good job by Akil Watts, I would say overall. And he did what he needed to do in preserving that lead when he came on. Great stats there, Matt. Thank you. 88th minute. Hack gets a yellow. We got to mention that. Yeah. He took Umbridge to some tackles that Simon betcher was going through. Yeah. Like this. Right. Yeah. He was animated on the sideline. Betcher did a good job of kind of jumping over and protecting himself, but Hackworth had a few choice words for the officials. Not really feeling there was some consistency going on and called out the attempts on Simon betcher there. But yes, Hackworth was very much and Hackworth was very much okay with that because as he said, post game, it also happened to waste about 30 seconds or so. And at that point, they were definitely trying to kill the game. So he felt like he was doing his part to help the team there. Yeah. Right before that happened actually in the 86 minute read is his best defending versus Espinosa happened where he just totally bodied Espinosa off the ball to the point where Espinosa went ahead and just foul read. Yes. Good job. That's that's one of those moments that I mentioned earlier that when you're killing off a game, you have to have these one V one moments work. You can't be beaten and then open up space when other guys have to peel off of their the guys, they're defending. And this was Jay Reid doing a great job in the dying moments against one of, if not the best San Jose player, absolutely. I want to just give one thought for me and then I'm going to hand it over. We got some stats we can talk about. We can talk about anything we want really, but I think my overall thought was, um, hack mentioned in, in the post game, presser that he was really proud of the way the boys defended. I think he called it brave defending, um, you know, if you look at all the opportunities San Jose had, look at how much they had the ball and you notice they weren't able to do much with it, especially in the second half, um, so I think he was, I don't know, you could see it different ways, right? It could be coach speak, like, Hey, he mentioned, you know, I wanted the guys to press more, but we were up to zero at that point and it just wasn't in the cars or something like that. I'm rephrasing what he said, but these are just things he said and it's like the kind of stuff I'll think about. Yes, these guys defended out great. I keep watching game after game, like, are we going to press more? We get a focus on pressing or we're going to focus on the mid block and we've just been a little bit of both, right? Matt, I don't know what you would think of it though. Well, John Hackworth in general seems to have employed a little less of an all out press or at least a higher press that Bradley Cornell had. Yeah. There are more times where we would fall into a mid block of sorts and we wouldn't have as high of a line. The average height of defensive actions has fluctuated a little more wildly between games and I credit that to an appreciation of the game state and appreciation of your opponent and being more flexible and versatile in how you need to defend and this was kind of part of that where Hackworth said post game that he did want them to press higher, but knowing that the game state didn't call for that. You didn't want to spread yourself too thin and get beaten as a result. If if your high press is beaten, then how are you going to be defending in transition on the backside? That's burned us plenty of times and so if you have players who are knowing and aware of what the game state is and what it calls for and they're pressing appropriately for that to accomplish the goal in preserving the lead, you know, you have to give some credit to that and that seems to be what the leaders on this team in Klaus and Hardel and Toy shirt are doing. When these guys are initiating their press, they're being smart about when and where they're doing it. I enjoyed that and I get the idea of wanting to high press more, but I also know that what they did led to us winning the game in three points. So I'm happy with what they did. Agree, have we been tracking like the PPDA per game? Is that number changing a lot, Matt? No, it hasn't and it hasn't changed because there hasn't been much of a change from the first, I mean, it normalized after about six or seven games into the season and it hasn't changed at all from there. And so what's interesting about that is PPDA tells a large story about high pressing, but it also has to take into account how the other team is moving the ball. So PPDA is passes per defensive action. So you could have seven passes allowed before you make it offensive action and you could take control of the ball on either side of the field. You know what I mean? It doesn't necessarily stay are you are you pressing high or you're taking the ball high or are you allowing them to progress the ball into your defensive third and then you take the ball. It kind of depends on how the opposition, what you're allowing them to do. Are you allowing them to play out of the back or allowing them to send the ball along? I would say San Jose was, you know, they had more control of the ball so they were holding on to the ball a little more. But oftentimes they would just try to send the ball along when they had it. And so there were a lot of loose ball moments. So I feel that the height of defensive actions helps to tell the story along with the passes per defensive action or the location of the defensive actions just as much as as that individual PPDA because it tells you kind of where on the field you're trying to engage the ball. And that that's why I like to cover that a lot on fall out because it works in tandem with the overall PPDA numbers in context of do you press more high up the field? Yeah, we need I want to that's something I'd like to get better at next year me personally. I'd like to track height of that, you know, the point of engagement and then also PPDA and you know, contextually with all of that. Well, part of it too is that I honestly haven't found a good stat site that actually tracks the PPDA itself per game. What I've been trying to do is track the overall numbers and the quantity as it adds up among itself on the websites that do it for the season. And so I'm able to take like a snapshot of before the game versus the snapshot after the game and kind of compare it to get a sense of how we did during that game. If anybody out there knows of a PPDA per game site, I am all ears. That's one of the few stats that has eluded me so far this season. It's always fun to look at the goals added chart, you know, Hardl is pretty much double of the best of the rest. Yeah. So Hardl had a big game in this one. Most of his games have been pretty big. Then Toykirt is totlin number 14, totlin and yarrow and yarrow is number 15. So those three kind of are equal with each other. And then it's hebert and the rest kind of starting to phase out as it goes down. Yeah, and goals added is I always try to give context to what goals added is every time we talk about it. Because a lot, you look at this chart and you see certain players have higher goals added. And so you think that, you know, they, you think about shots and you think about successful passes and stuff like that. And so you think how that they had the best games compared to somebody like Akil Watts, who is one of, it looks like four players who had negative goals added. But the problem with that is it takes goals added takes six different measurements and it views every single action almost with equal weight. So it views a shot the same as a pass, the same as a received pass, the same as a foul or a foul drawn or a turnover or a recovery, you know, all of these actions, every single action that a player takes with the ball or in an action that affects the ball like a foul or, you know, a penalty or something like that. And it, it gives weight to it. And so like Akil Watts, playing the role he had where he made back passes, for instance, let's say he made pass from the defensive midfield back to the center back, well, that's a negative stat for goals added. He will lose points if you pass the ball like that. Same thing with Nooki Thorson. He had passes and actions that led him to have overall negative, but that's not saying that he had a bad game. So knowing where the players were and what their roles were and how they played the game is important context to have for goals added, but no matter, no matter what you look at on these individual players, Marcel Hartle had himself one hell of a game. Yes, he did. Any other thoughts from you, Matt? Oh, gosh, I, this is flying by the seat of our pants this week since we're up into the wee hours of Sunday morning, but I will say that I wanted to touch on the Thomas Totten Jake Newinsky conversation really quick, because this was Totten's first start in four games. And before this, we had, I had gotten a question on Twitter kind of asking, did anybody ask about Totten or Winski at the press conference last week? And I know I didn't, but I did want to say that Hackworth addressed them postgame. And he, he did talk about how Jake and Totten were, have been fighting for, for minutes during training and didn't say anything about issues with either one of them, but just said that he liked a lot of what he saw from Totten tonight. He noted that there has been a very intense positional battle going on with Jake and Thomas Totten called it fierce and said that nobody has played poorly. Totten has, has stayed focused, hasn't wavered and he called tonight Totten's best defensive performance of the year. And I thought in the moment, and this was just an hour ago or so, I thought in the moment I was like, Oh, that's noteworthy because Totten's a two way player. And it's, you know, that's something for Hackworth to very specifically call out Totten's defensive performance. But then the more I thought about it, and as I'm talking, I realized that in the context of Totten or Winski, calling out Totten's defensive performance is basically saying why you started Jake Norwinski over Totten these past few games, knowing that you needed more defensive capabilities on the right. So if you're looking back at these past few games and you're thinking, why is Totten sitting on the bench, Hackworth needed something different on the right side than what Totten had shown. He was best at in the, in the recent past. It was Norwinski is a better defender on the right side and has done enough in training to earn that spot over the past few games. Totten gets the nod tonight and Hackworth calls it his best defensive performance. If you're building off of that, I can already tell you I'm going to be penciling in Totten in my starting 11 for next week against SKC based off of that one comment alone. I agree. The best defensive moment for me for Totten. Did you guys remember when at some point he went so far across the field that he passed up Yarrow and almost met Hebert to head a ball away on a long ball. So he was behind and passed them as far as width of the field. So he did a great job on that one tracking back, making sure that a ball wasn't going to get through. So good job on that. And I think, you know, if you're not noticing mistakes, that's a good thing for a defender as well. So you had to throw that in there as well. Definitely. One last thing that I'll say is I'm interested to see if we run out this 4-1-4-1 again. Because while it was effective at the beginning, you can't really say that it did a lot in generating offense. Our attack was pretty anemic for large portions of this game. And I do wonder if it was because of the spacing of some of the players. You know, you have width for days on the back line and in the attack. But how's the verticality going? Looking at Nick Vithorson stats, looking at his performance, I do wonder if his positioning and kind of where he was might have been impacted just by others around him. So like the center toy shirt, the Marcel Hartle positioning around Nick Vithorson, where he was asked to be on that left wing side, whereas maybe he's kind of more of a second striker left mid. He needs more space to operate in and around the box, and he didn't have that opportunity with Hartle and toy shirt. So I look for probably a little bit of a change. Maybe this was done out of necessity also, not having a new lubin available, and just trying something different in that regard. Could have also been because of the specific opponent in San Jose. So I'm sure that'll play into what we see against SKC. But yeah, that 4-1 4-1 is interesting. I think you can't overlook that teams are still bunkering on St. Louis to try to, you know, try to just get them to, you know, try to score, you know, and I think it's getting more and more dangerous because St. Louis is becoming better and better on the attack. But if San Jose had decided to bunker in on us, maybe let's say we didn't get that early goal and their plan was always to kind of bunker in on us, Thor would have been useful in that case, right? Right. So it's good to have Thor in case we need to break down a bunker defense. When that didn't happen, maybe we should have brought India in sooner, you know, that's the only thing I was thinking is I thought this was an indie game, right? Like we're going to want to counter attack and he's good with that. He's better than that than being in tight spaces. But also, Indy was there for when all needs to come off because he's probably not 90 minutes healthy at this point. So a little bit hand, you know, hands tied behind his back hack worth on that one, maybe, but I don't know. Those are just some thoughts I had. One of the things I look forward to talking about on Thursday is going to be given the fact that Marcel Hartle and Cedric Toy shirt are two of our top attackers. So you figure you put them and Louven in the lineup no matter what happens. What does that mean for others around them? Like we saw in this game is a really interesting case study in the effects of Thorson the effects of Alm and having a single striker up top when those two are doing so much. Like they run and they put themselves in so many portions of the field that it impacts the positioning and play styles of others. And so who is best to fit in them? It's almost like they you have this core now of St. Louis where the caliber and the quality has been raised. So how do you fill in the pieces that make sense to benefit those players the most like those players need to be where they are and so who works best around them in addition to who's just in the best form and Chris Gebhardt mentions next year defenses will have even more to deal with with Celio and Ostrac coming back. So something to keep in mind. I love that. I think that's a good one to close on. If you're happy with that agreed, I will note that we are heading in a Darby week. So no matter when you're listening to this, if you're still up with us on the wee hours of Sunday morning, if you're listening to this on Sunday, Monday or starting your week with us, it's Darby week, Cedric Toy shirt post game mentioned it at least three times that they're getting ready for the Darby game next week. It is already in their minds. They know what's ahead. They know what this means and we're currently tied in the standings on points, even though we have a game in hand. And like I said, SKC has that nice little E in front of their name and the standings now for eliminated from playoffs. They're going to be fighting just to take us down just to eliminate us. If they win, they could do that. So they'll get to hold that over our heads. That's what they're fighting for. It's a fun grudge match coming up this next week. That's well said. I didn't think about how they could play the spoilers. So that's interesting. Yep. All right. Well, thanks for joining us. If you made it for fall out after dark, it's been a fun one. Lots of people in the chat. So thank you so much if you guys joined us and stayed up with us so much. So appreciate it. Yeah, man. All right. Good night, everybody. Hope you enjoyed the game. We'll be talking to you Thursday night about the next one, Darby week, Darby week two one win. Enjoy the week. Bye, everybody. If you liked the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening. Bye. (crowd cheering) You
