MLS

What we learned from Round One openers & what comes next

What we learned from Round One openers & what comes next

Eight separate series, eight Game 1s in the books, and damn that’s a lotta chalk.

This continues a trend from last season, in which the higher-seeded team won seven of the eight opening rounds in the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs. Kind of an argument for the importance of the regular season!

Let’s take a look at what happened, and what should come next:

Game 1 in a Sentence: Brad Guzan kept Atlanta from getting blown out.

Stat that Tells a Story: Miami had 49 touches in Atlanta’s box. Atlanta had… 11.

Miami posted a bunch of one-goal wins this year. What usually happened in those was they played badly but Drake Callender made a couple of spectacular saves, and then Lionel Messi & Co. created a few high-leverage moments. Those guys can decide the games and just kind of score whenever they want, and so they do, and so Miami won the Supporters’ Shield.

This wasn’t at all like that. The Herons played really, really well – they were all over Atlanta from the jump (Luis Suárez scored inside of two minutes) and could’ve made it 2, 3 or 4-0 by the half-hour mark if not for Guzan’s heroics. When Saba Lobjanidze evened things five minutes before halftime, there was maybe the tiniest moment of doubt.

Not really, though. The Miami winner was always coming.

What’s gonna happen in Game 2?

I imagine the rhythm and shape of the game will look similar, both with Miami having 60% or more possession, and playing out of that 3-5-2 with Messi & Suárez up top. What I would expect, though, is for that Miami line to drop a little bit deeper in order to invite Atlanta upfield with the ball, which then creates room on the counter. If that’s how it plays out, look for Diego Gómez bursting out of midfield when one of the forwards – it’ll be Messi and Suárez up top again – drops in.

Atlanta’s job is simple: attack the center of that Miami backline. Sergio Busquets has been kind of a disaster back there this season:

That sequence starts with him needlessly playing a suicide ball up the gut. It ends with him neither reading Saba’s run, nor organizing the backline to step…

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