Jul 15, 2020; Orlando, FL, USA; San Jose Earthquakes forward Cristian Espinoza (10) controls the ball against Vancouver Whitecaps midfielder David Milinkovic (7) during the first half at ESPN Wide World of Sports. Photo Credit: Peter Casey-USA TODAY Sports
The San Jose Earthquakes are coming off of their most Goonie-like win since Shea Salinas crushed the LA Galaxy in front of 50,000+ at Stanford Stadium in 2018. With a big 4-3 victory over Vancouver, they are now a win or a draw today against the Chicago Fire (who replaced FC Dallas in Group B of the MLS is Back tournament bracket) from ensuring themselves a berth into the round of 16. Coming off of a four-goal performance, you’d think they feel really confident about their offense. There’s a problem: none of what happened offensively against Vancouver is dependable against Chicago, nor virtually any other team in MLS (potential exceptions being Colorado or FC Cincinnati — we don’t yet know about Nashville SC).
When you score more than a goal over the Expected Goals (xG) in a game, you have to really ask yourself why. Sometimes it’s for very good reasons which are related to high-quality soccer. Here’s a different 4-to-3 game: take a look at this xG step chart for Montreal and Toronto FC.
That’s a huge difference (+2.77) between goals and xG for Toronto. Now let’s look at the a couple of the goals for Toronto from this game.
My word, that is absolute ruthless efficiency in an attack. Carlon didn’t even add two of the TFC goals to his thread, but they also fit the definition. Four good opportunities, four goals. Not only is Ayo a beast, but Alejandro Pozuelo is absolutely special as a #10 in this league.
Not only were the Toronto goals all high-quality opportunities, but they all had a particular type of pass that set them up — a progressive pass. A progressive pass in the American Soccer Analysis definition is one that gets the ball 25% closer to the goal without going over 30 yards. ASA video analyst Carlon Carpenter takes us through some examples:
Note: If a pass goes over 30 yards, ASA calls it a long ball instead.
Why is this type of pass special? Well, it’s because since 2015, this happens to be the most efficient type of pass for creating shots which score goals in MLS.
What you see on the left are the buckets for the types of pass (called a “key pass”) leading to a shot. What you see on the right are the types of passes that lead to a goal. Notice anything? Right, the goal bucket is 8% more for a progressive pass. Also, crosses, cutbacks, and throughballs create more goals than “Regular” (read: not special, usually outside the box) passes and shooter-created shots (represented by “None” in the graph).
Now, most of the analysts in ASA will tell you a couple things: 1) crosses are bad, and 2) if you are going to cross, do it on the ground, and do it either early or late. This is where progressive passes and cutbacks come into play. Check out this chart of Cristian Espinoza’s key passes from 2019.
Progressive passes often look like crosses coming from the wings. The key part here is that they are on the ground. Now here’s where the obligatory “sometimes different event coding analysts will code the same thing differently” comes into play: perhaps some of these progressive passes are “crosses” but were not coded as such. Granted. The point here is that both cutbacks and progressive passes are a big part of what makes Cristian Espinoza special as a winger, and why he had the second highest open-play Expected Assists (xA) in the league in 2019 next to Carlos Vela.
How do these special types of passes help the Earthquakes? Let’s compare the key passes of their goals to a few other teams in 2019.
LAFC and NYCFC are chosen here as the top offensive teams of their respective conferences. For fun, we’ve thrown in a poor offensive team, the Vancouver Whitecaps, who aren’t good at anything in particular. This chart shows the +/- of a particular type of key pass in leading to goals against the league average. A tall wick up is much better than the rest of the league, and a tall wick down is much worse.
As you can see from this, LAFC is very good at progressive passing. In fact, they are very good at a particular way of progressive passing.
Let’s take a look at some progressive passing in La Liga, courtesy again of @johnspacemuller.
All this to say progressive passing is very good.
Cutbacks are also very good goal creators, and the 2019 Earthquakes led the league in them. Case in point:
Cutbacks happen to fit well Matias Almeyda’s style of playing through his wingers, and Cristian Espinoza, along with his pace, is a perfect fit for that style. In fact, the Quakes would benefit from someone on the left who also can play that style — maybe Shea Salinas or Cade Cowell.
What’s most important is that a team plays a style which leads to repeatable success. Whether it’s cutbacks, throughballs, or progressive passes in behind the backline, a team has to be good at something to create that final pass that disorganizes the defense (thank you, Gregg Berhalter) for a simple goal. Relying on corners, free kicks, and special shot creativity will not going to lead to repeatable success for most teams in MLS who don’t have Carlos Vela.
In 2020, the Earthquakes have had trouble expressing themselves creatively. In the MLS is Back tournament, both Seattle and Vancouver have largely sat deep while San Jose moves the ball from side-to-side and tries to find openings. Shots are coming, but they are not the ones which get keepers out of position. In these games so far, two great shots from Jackson Yueill which could have found the back of the net in other situations, didn’t because the keepers were in position. Special passes like cutbacks get defenses and keepers out of position. That should be good for the Quakes except one thing: teams now know what to expect. Here are the defensive actions for Vancouver from Wednesday.
Vancouver, for all their failings in this game, didn’t let the Quakes beat them the way San Jose wanted to. The Whitecaps stifled Espinoza’s cutback attempts, either blocking them, or putting them out for corners. Most other attacks were thwarted at the top of the box, preventing other inroads to Andy Rios.
Quakes Epicenter asked Cristian Espinoza if he thought that teams are keying on him now. We shared his comments (provided via interpreter) on Black and Azul on Saturday night.
So far in 2020, the Earthquakes have been unable to replicate their attacking success periods of 2019 and Espinoza and Chris Wondolowski both agree. Wondo’s comments can be heard in the video below.
The run-of-play goals in 2020 aren’t coming from the same places. They are coming from corners, less dependable crosses, and individual effort, such as Wondo’s goal against Vancouver (Danny Hoesen didn’t get assist credit for his pass, because it was blocked into the air).
Because we are only four games into the season, xG is not the best way to take a look at a team’s performances and project forward. At this point, shots are a better indicator of where things may be going. Here are the same buckets but for shots instead.
The long wick for “None” is pretty painful to see, as are longer wicks for corners, and shorter wicks for progressive passes and cutbacks.
Are teams figuring out the San Jose attack? Based on the four games we have so far, in addition to adjustments that were made by teams starting in August last season, the answer appears to be “yes”. Almeyda is going to have to help his attackers find a new way to create dependable goals. This is going to be critical if San Jose is going to get out of the group stage and make a deep run in the MLS is Back tournament. Talk all you want to about “defense wins championships”, in MLS the defenses are not as good as the offenses, and you must have offense to win a playoff spot or continue advancing in a tournament.
