Analysis: Minnesota United’s strikers are important, but for coach Eric Ramsay, it all comes back to defense

MINNESOTA UNITED | ANALYSIS

Striker is soccer’s glamour position. It’s the forwards who score the goals and sell the jerseys, and it takes something pretty special for players at any other position to break through to that level of fan popularity.

Minnesota United played two strikers last week against Seattle, with a three-man midfield behind them. As the Loons travel to San Jose on Saturday to take on the last-place Earthquakes, it’s easy to focus on the glamour up front. It’s just not where the Loons themselves are necessarily focused.

New signing Kelvin Yeboah scored twice against Seattle. Breakout star and leading goal-scorer Tani Oluwaseyi will return from injury. The Loons still have veteran star Teemu Pukki, ready and willing to bang in a few more goals. It’s natural to ask: If they play more often with two forwards, which striker partnership might look the best, score the most and provide the most star power?

It’s instructive, though, that when you ask coach Eric Ramsay about playing with two strikers, he can’t help but end up talking about defense.

“The difficulty sometimes with playing with the two forwards is how you defend, and we’ve made a really big point about making sure that we get real aggression from how the wingbacks defend,” Ramsay said. “We don’t want the wingbacks defending as if they’re fullbacks in a flat back five, and we certainly don’t want them attacking in that way.”

Having three midfielders instead of two seems like it should be more defensive, not less. The positioning of the players, though, means the problem becomes the width of the field.

When the Loons play with three up front, the two widest forwards — Ramsay refers to them as “number 10s,” the designation usually used for attacking midfielders — can naturally drop back on either side to defend on the outside, across the midfield area. This means the wingbacks, whose natural spot on defense would be in a back line of five players, don’t have as much responsibility to bolt out of the back five and defend the opposition’s wide players in midfield.

“You can defend the width of the pitch with four, so it’s slightly easier,” Ramsay said. “Sometimes, you can get less pressure on the ball, but it’s definitely easier to defend the width of the pitch.”

With two forwards up front, there’s no natural, balanced way for those forwards to drop back. And so if the wingbacks aren’t active, then the three midfielders are strung all the way across the middle of the pitch, constantly having to chase the ball.

Even with two strikers, there are times that both Loons wingbacks will be in line with the three center backs, as part of a back five. But far more often, the two wingbacks — Joseph Rosales on the left, and increasingly Sang Bin Jeong on the right — need to hustle into the midfield on defense, not just in possession.

This means that playing with two forwards also has a knock-on effect all the way back to the three center backs. When a wingback jumps into the midfield, the back five becomes a back four, and the outside center back on the wingback’s side must be comfortable defending as a traditional fullback.

Ramsay singled out new right center back Jefferson Díaz as being notably comfortable with this, whereas former defender Kervin Arriaga, for all he brought to the team, wasn’t nearly as comfortable covering as a wide defender.

Offensively speaking, playing with two forwards also puts more responsibility on the plates of the two offensive-minded midfielders, roles played last week by Hassani Dotson and Robin Lod. Apart from the defensive responsibilities, both have to be able to recognize and react in transition as the Loons go from defense to attack and vice versa.

There are times those midfielders need to stay home and build up the attack, times they will need to get forward and provide width in place of a wing-back, and times they’ll need to rotate to cover for other players that have gone forward.

So while two of Yeboah, Pukki and Oluwaseyi are up front, hearing the cheers, just know: There’s an awful lot going on behind that front line. And when it comes to the Loons succeeding or failing as a team, it has more to do with something outside the success of the front two.