Minnesota United coach Eric Ramsay shows he’s not afraid to mix things up — and it’s working

MINNESOTA UNITED | ANALYSIS

Plenty of coaches, in MLS and beyond, are convinced that there’s a single way that’s the best way to play soccer. Some will demand that players be acquired to fit the system; others will merely pound as many square pegs into round holes as are required to support the plan.

Through six weeks of Eric Ramsay’s tenure as Minnesota United coach, it’s become clear that the Loons are not going to have a single system, at least not in terms of always playing the same formation. In Saturday’s 2-1 home victory against Sporting Kansas City, they again featured five defenders, as they did the previous week — but up front, they tried something different, then switched things at halftime.

“I’ve said all along that we’ll be a team that — works within principles, and then we’ll be pragmatic and flexible when it comes to shape,” said Ramsay. “I think there’s a couple of starting points there — number one, who’s available and who’s in form? And then once you work that out, what are their individual strengths?”

Fitting the plan to the players available makes intuitive sense, but it does require added flexibility from the players — not only to play different systems from week to week, but in being ready to change as often as the coach does.

The most obvious requirement from the players’ side is the versatility to play different positions. Over the past three weeks, Robin Lod has played in a two-man midfield, a three-man midfield and as a right wing. Kervin Arriaga may be a midfielder by trade, but Ramsay saw him — at 6-foot-3 and with a midfielder’s skills on the ball — as the perfect candidate to play as the right-sided center back, in a back three. Arriaga has played 90 minutes there, two weeks in a row.

Second, though, is a type of mental flexibility from his players. Traditionally in soccer, the idea of being substituted at halftime has generally been seen as an embarrassment, an acknowledgement that a player was so terrible that the coach had no other choice. It’s been seen as the soccer equivalent of removing a baseball player in the middle of a defensive inning.

MLS standings

Ramsay, though, has felt free to make lineup changes at halftime, and has done so in three of the past four games — including a double switch at halftime against Sporting KC. And he’s asking his players to accept that it’s just part of the deal.

“I want the players to feel that we’re a genuine squad, that we’re more than that 11, 12, 13 [players],” he said. “And I think that’s becoming more pronounced in the last couple of years, where you can make five changes [during games]. It’s not an insult to be taken off at halftime, it’s not an insult to be taken off on the hour. We’re going to use the squad within games and then from game to game.”

So far, the Loons coach has his squad buying in. Two wins in a row mean that MNUFC is up to a tie for second place in the overall MLS standings, based on points per game — behind only the star-laden squad of Inter Miami.

Minnesota’s newest wrinkle against SKC was an attempt to play strikers Teemu Pukki and Tani Oluwaseyi together, instead of one replacing the other partway through the second half. Offensively, it made sense. One is the highest-paid player on the team, brought to Minnesota to score goals. The other is the breakout young striker star in the league this year. Why not get them both out there and see how often they can score?

Defensively, though, it didn’t seem to work. Having Pukki and Oluwaseyi up front together meant that Sporting KC’s fullbacks had time and space along the sidelines to send long passes in behind the Loons back line. Minnesota’s defenders had trouble turning and chasing SKC front-man Willy Agada and the rest of the visitors’ speedy forwards.

Sporting KC scored one goal this way and should have scored perhaps twice more. By halftime, Ramsay had seen enough, replacing Pukki and Franco Fragapane with Bongokuhle Hlongwane and Caden Clark, two more traditional wingers that could help pressure Kansas City when the opposition had the ball along the sideline.

“The nature of playing the way we play with two forwards, sometimes you do find it difficult to cover the width of the pitch, once you get pinned in a little bit, which was the case for us,” said Ramsay, who was mostly unhappy with how his team played — despite the victory, and despite his team’s 2-1 halftime lead.

One outcome of MNUFC’s shift to a 5-2-3 formation is that the two midfielders — Wil Trapp and Robin Lod, against Sporting KC, and Trapp and Hassani Dotson the week prior – have had to put some serious miles on their shoes.

According to league data provider Sportec, in both games that the Loons have played with that back five, the two midfield players each have run more than 7½ miles during the game — the most any players have run in a single game during Ramsay’s tenure.

The workload will be something to keep an eye on as games pile up. Minnesota gets an 11-day break in the schedule, following Saturday’s game in Atlanta, but following that break, the Loons play five games in 18 days. With Dotson missing the SKC game with a hamstring injury, the Loons will be watching his health — and perhaps also depending on backup Alejandro Bran to log some miles of his own.