Oakland Roots 3-1 Tacoma Defiance

Oakland are better than Tacoma. We were briefly deprived of this knowledge by one of the most incompetent ARs I’ve ever seen, but there’s no denying it now: Roots are the superior side. That’s really what it came down to on Wednesday night at Las Positas. They also managed to get a little lucky. It adds up to a reasonably comfortable win.

First, the luck: In the tenth minute, Tacoma attempted to clear the ball from their own box, but the clearance went right off the face of Johnny Rodriguez, and then, instead of caroming off his noggin to somewhere innocuous, it fell right to Lindo Mfeka, and it set up perfectly for Mfeka to take it first-time past the keeper. USL is full of weird little yakety-sax sequences that often result in goals. Oakland have not gotten their fair share of those moments this year, so it was nice to finally get one. (Moreover, the quick change in ball direction clearly caught the AR off-guard, and he may well have missed an offsides here. Finally, a close offsides call goes in Roots’ favor!)

Tactically, the headline was playing Lindo Mfeka as the center forward. Not only is this not a role we’ve seen him in this year, but he’s roughly 2 feet shorter than your prototypical center forward. The more-unremarked story, to my eyes, was how Oakland spaced out. I thought they played much more like a 4-3-3 or even a 4-3-2-1 than we have seen in recent weeks. Rather than slotting someone in as a pure #10, Oakland mostly left the space behind Mfeka vacant, and played both Hernandez and Fall in deeper roles. This did, I thought, a few things:

• First, it let Hernandez and Fall torment the Tacoma midfield. Their midfield pressing really prevented Tacoma from doing much of anything positive. Even after Oakland cashed in their third, and Roots started to pull their foot off the gas slightly, the midfield continued to dominate their Washingtonian counterparts. Tacoma simply could not get the ball into dangerous areas. (One downside is that Fall and Hernandez looked especially leggy in the game’s waning moments. We here at the Blog would not be surprised to see Fall get rested against Los Dos at the weekend, allowing him to recharge for next week’s tie against San Diego Loyal.)

• Second, it let Mfeka drop and play as a false nine on occasion, opening up room up top for runs from Johnny Rodriguez and Ariel Mbumba. Mfeka was much more willing to track back like this early on, as Oakland scratched and clawed to get a foothold in the game. As the game wore on, he tended to stay higher.

• Third, because no Roots player regularly occupied that space, Tacoma also abandoned it, meaning it was wide open for runs all game long. We saw Wal Fall, Memo Diaz, Lindo Mfeka, and Jose Hernandez sprint through that space with regularity. Matias Fissore even had a go at it once. It was this space that Oakland exploited for its second and third goals. In the 40th minute, Rodriguez’s through ball to Mfeka (the hockey assist) was a relatively simple pass because there were no defenders between them. Mfeka’s centering pass to Fall found him completely unmarked at the D. In the 52nd minute, Mfeka made a half-field run through the middle of the pitch completely unmarked. After Fall wriggled his way out of a 2-on-1, he had a wide open passing lane to Mfeka, who again slammed it home first time.

I doubt there’s much of anything to take from this game except momentum and three points. The developmental squads clearly can’t hang at this point in the season. Tacoma is in a better spot than Lights or Los Dos, because they have some guys with a modicum of experience (and size) and are not forced to run out a lineup of teenagers every week, but they’re still dreadful on the road. This was a match Oakland had to have, and they went out and took care of business. You can’t ask for more. And, in fact, the Blog will ask for exactly the same thing (and no more) this Saturday.