It started off badly. Then it got good and felt like a step forward. But it also, in the end, felt like one of the more massive – maybe even the most massive – missed opportunities in club history.
That was all a mixed bag, wasn’t it?
When Orlando’s front office went out last winter and bought a DP No. 9 – Colombian veteran Luis Muriel – instead of a DP No. 10, that told me two things:
- Duncan McGuire was going to be sold.
- Martín Ojeda – clearly the best chance creator on the team – would spend the whole year as the No. 10.
Weirdly, neither thing happened. The hilarity of McGuire’s failed transfer to Blackburn was well chronicled throughout. The explanation for Ojeda being a super-sub for most of the first half of the year, and only entering the regular starting XI in late June… that’s still a mystery. Head coach Oscar Pareja has largely elided the issue, offering only vague half-explanations when pressed.
Whatever the reason, Ojeda’s usage neatly broke the season into two halves. In the first half of the year, Orlando were a fringe Audi MLS Cup Playoffs team that couldn’t create chances and were down near the bottom of the league in most of the “hey, this is a good team” advanced metrics.
In the second half of the year, with Ojeda as the 10, Orlando went 13W-5L-5D across all competitions, including an appearance in their first-ever Eastern Conference Final. Which they hosted.
Basically, it was a gold-plated invitation to MLS Cup.
The upshot of moving Ojeda to the 10 is it allowed the team’s best player, Facu Torres, to just be an attacker. He didn’t have to worry about orchestrating or chance creation anymore – he could just ride the wave of the game, pick his spots and find winners. It’s basically who he was in 2022, when he led this team to the US Open Cup title.
So when this breakaway unfolded on Saturday night, I knew exactly where he’d be. Torres is not especially physically gifted, nor is he a 1v1 wizard. But he’s brilliant at reading how attacking movements are going to unfold, and with an unselfish chance creator like Ojeda in behind like that, there was exactly one way the attacking movement…
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