Soccer kids across Minnesota might pretend to be Kelvin Yeboah or Robin Lod or Tani Oluwaseyi, scoring game-winning goals in the dying moments of important games.
Young aspiring managers, though, might be pretending to be like Eric Ramsay in the second half of Saturday’s 4-1 victory over St. Louis: making a triple substitution, then having all three players almost immediately combine to score a goal.
“I don’t think that will happen often,” Ramsay said after the game, with a slight smile on his face.
Minnesota United, which was the better team in the first half, struggled to open the second half — to the point that the Loons were having trouble just getting out of their own end, never mind in the confident one-and-two-touch way they were doing so in the first half.
“We did look like we were pretty content to defend the one-nil lead,” Ramsay said. “It’s a symptom of us knowing that we can do that, knowing that we over the last 10 games have shown ourselves to be one of, if not the, best defensive teams [in the league]. We’re very comfortable defending for long periods of time, and it’s certainly not something we want to do by design, but I just felt in the second half the players had almost resigned themselves to that being the case.”
Ramsay waited until the 68th minute to make a change, but when he did, it was the entire attacking line — Yeboah, Lod and Joaquín Pereyra off; Oluwaseyi, Franco Fragapane and Sang Bin Jeong on.
It took three minutes for the trio to combine on the first goal, Oluwaseyi to Fragapane to Jeong; six minutes from the end of the game, Oluwaseyi found Jeong for another goal. Not bad for one substitution window.
“We were getting pinned down a little bit,” Oluwaseyi said. “So at that point, you just need someone to try and hold the ball up, or stretch it even. And then it works out that all three of us touched the ball on the second goal, so it’s cool.”