Just when you thought this season couldn’t get any more embarrassing, it does.
Atlanta United is out of the 2024 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup after an uninspiring 2-1 defeat against Indy Eleven on Tuesday.
Several first-team starters were featured in the lineup for this match. Josh Cohen was stationed between the posts behind a back three of Efrain Morales, Stian Gregersen and Luis Abram. Caleb Wiley, in potentially his last match with the club, started at left wingback opposite Ronald Hernandez at right wingback. Tristan Muyumba and Ajani Fortune formed the midfield duo while the attack was made up of Tyler Wolff, Saba Lobjanidze and Nick Firmino as a No. 9.
Things looked bleak from the start for the Five Stripes as Indy Eleven took the attacking initiative early and took the lead 22 minutes in after a turnover in midfield led to a counterattack which Augustine Williams capped off with a simple finish. A combination of poor defending and lethargic tracking back put the Five Stripes behind and threatened to end their Open Cup journey.
By the end of the first half, Atlanta United had yet to put a shot on target and looked disorganized in all aspects of play. The attack looked uninspired and was missing a significant spark.
Things did not improve in the second half. The Five Stripes did manage to put two shots on target, but Hunter Sulte saved both. Atlanta United’s situation worsened when Dax McCarty scored an own goal in the 83rd minute, doubling Indy Eleven’s lead.
Nick Firmino pulled one back for Atlanta United in stoppage time after successfully getting around Sulte and firing into an empty net. However, with so little time left, the team was unable to complete the comeback and fell by a 2-1 score.
For the second year in a row, Atlanta United is the victim of a shameful cupset in the U.S. Open Cup, but probably most disheartening is the fact that five to six regular first-team starters were in the lineup. The team now prepares to return to MLS regular season play against CF Montreal on Saturday.
What did you think of the match? Let us know in the comments and fill out your player ratings below.
[…] United had a tough run in 2024’s Open Cup, where they were eliminated by USL Championship’s Indy Eleven in the quarterfinals. LAFC would go on to win the tournament, defeating Sporting Kansas City 3-1 in the […]
Atlanta better not hire Gregg Berhalter when he gets fired from USMNT.
Not wasting another moment or penny on this club. When they get serious about putting something legitimate on the field, then I will get serious about putting myself in a stadium to watch. Until then, I will spare myself the hypertension episodes.
Bye Felicia.
Didn’t watch or follow, but not surprised by the result if I just look at that starting xi and also the number of games played recently. We don’t have the depth to rotate and handle so many games and we have no talent left on the field.
The starting xi here simply reinforces what we all think, which is that no one cares about the usoc. Which is totally fine by me, because I also didn’t care.
I think anyone drawing conclusions from this game is a strong overreaction though. No conclusions to be drawn here other than the ones we knew when Almada left. We have no talent.
But hey, at least we have an analytics department! I might recommend they switch their analytics focus to fan apathy.
Only real conclusion I can draw from that debacle is that Matt Edwards needs to work in his crosses something fierce.
The conclusion I drew was that aside from Brennan, the kids are not quite ready yet.
i would assume your not including morales and cobb in that “not quite ready” group?
and yes, i would love to see brennan get a few starts ahead of rios and thiare. i think he’s earned it.
TBH, I didn’t think Morales looked “ready” in that match. Not sure Cobb is ready to start quite yet either, but he’s played okay in his opportunities with the big club so far.
Brennan looked like the best player on the field, at least for us. Need a bigger sample size, but he definitely passed the eye test for me.
Agreed on Morales. He wasn’t impressive.
I’m probably too harsh on Cobb. The US U20 CONCACAF Team selection is a big honor.
From recent ESPN article…guess either these managers are clueless or…
“But from a pure managing perspective, international managers have less of an influence on team performance than club managers. And club managers don’t have as much of an influence as you think.
Don’t take it from me, either. “I’ve said it many times: We, the managers, are overrated in our influence” — that’s a quote from none other than Pep Guardiola, the most influential manager of the 21st century. Or how about the most influential manager of all time, Johan Cruyff: “If your players are better than your opponents, 90% of the time you will win.” And what about the guy who just won the Champions League for a record fifth time, Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti?
“The most important role is never that of the coach,” he said in April. “I am very clear about one thing, and that is that there are two types of coaches: those who do nothing and those who do a lot of damage. I try to be the first. The game belongs to the players and you can tell them a certain strategy, convince them, but then they decide their quality and commitment. A technician has to focus on making the group understand the importance of teamwork.”
Most analysis suggests that a great manager can improve a team by a couple points per season, and that lines up with the economics of the sport. “A few points per season” is generally the value of the best players, and salaries for the best managers are in line with those of the best players.
Were Klopp able to have the same kind of impact with the USMNT, it wouldn’t even be perceptible in the same way. Although he’s been the coach (mostly) since 2018, Berhalter has only managed 45 competitive matches for the U.S. — just slightly more than a full Premier League season. If Klopp added, say, five points to the USMNT’s performance over a 38-game sample when compared to Berhalter, that’d be less than two-tenths of a point per match. On a game-to-game basis, Klopp’s influence would be a barely perceptible increase in a few percentage points of win probability.
Klopp, again, is fully aware of this…”
any and every good manager or leader worth a damn will say exactly that….it’s not me, it’s my team. it’s the people around me. they’re the ones doing the great work.
is there truth in that? to a degree…of course. the best leader in the world with a crappy team will probably fail. but the greatest team without leadership, vision, strategy, focus, motivation…will also fail 9 times out of 10. and the 10th time they might succeed but underachieve.
talent matters. leadership matters. the right combination of the two creates success…in business, on the field, in the classroom, everywhere.
That’s literally not what they’re saying, though the other part about humility is also true and another story. It is also true that a toxic manager can have detrimental effects…as can toxic fans or making knee jerk changes that alter chemistry, motivation, etc. But again, not the point that was being made, which is in part that the difference between and avg and a great coach is prob not buying much in the way of actual points. Of course, what managers are often are shiny objects..the easiest change to make when attempting to appease the rabble. Regardless, this roster is middlin…and part of the unfortunate results for the remainder of the year was the mistaken belief that this roster is one of the best in the league, that Almada and GG are ballers, etc. (the club is ironically better off without them despite the post hoc reasoning some would cite). Anyway…fun to watch the wheels coming off…and it will actually get worse when players are checked out, RSL performances become the norm at home in front of even sparser attendance. Woot!
What are the knee jerk changes this team has made?
I’d say coaching/getting out-coached probably impacts 3-4 results a year, especially in a league set up to assure rough parity in overall talent from squad to squad.
Up to 9 to 12 points a year is a lot. The job of a coach is to pick the best strategy for the team based upon your own personnel and the opponent. We have not been great at that lately.
I’m not sure the point you are trying to make, but it feels like there are a lot of assumptions.
On the whole analysts think a great manager only adds a couple points per season. I’m pretty sure that is talking about the non salary-capped leagues, so it is not clear if that even holds for MLS.
Then taking that analysis and applying it to the national team setting makes just as little sense.
Finally, all of this is under the assumption that the current managers, a la Berhalter, aren’t actively detrimental to the team.
Agree with this. I’d say coaching/leadership is much more impactful in leagues like MLS where the team-to-team talent level is generally pretty close, by design. Good coaching would make a much bigger difference in MLS than in the Premiere League or WC.
I’d agree if you’re Man City with some of the best talent in the world on your roster, the coach mainly just needs to not F it up. National teams are much the same – talent levels are not close to equal, so coaching probably only matters in games between top 5 or top 10 teams. If you’re facing an inferior team (kinda like US vs Panama), the coach just needs to not F it up and players should refrain from punching a guy on the other team in the back of the head.
We’ve been playing a pretty consistent, possession-oriented style for the past few years, maybe even going back to FDB before the revolt, which I presume has been the strategy implemented by the managers over that time. Generally speaking, it has been a failure. They tried to play this style last night and failed. That suggests to me that the managers have been a big part of why Atlanta United has been on a downward trajectory for so long.
Same style of play under Tata. He did abandon it against NYRB in the 2018 Cup, where he countered them unexpectedly.
I don’t really remember it that way, but maybe it was more that when we got the ball under Tata there seemed to be more directness and purpose. It always seemed like whenever we got ahold of the ball it was on and exciting. The style of possession we’ve had for the past 4+ years has been generally slow and boring.
The primary distinction of those Tata teams were Josef and Miggy. Almiron had more pace than the league and could out chase defenders to mediocre through balls into space. Josef was clinical and fearless in the box. That’s it. That’s the difference. After Miggy we lost the ability to turn mediocre passes behind the lines into break away attacks.
Miggy was faster WITH the ball than anyone else was WITHOUT it. Huge advantage and so fun to watch.
Miggy Almiron was the happy, joyful golden retriever bounding around the yard chasing down everything happily. The players brought in to replace him are nippy ankle biting herding dogs. Miggy was the unicorn of the first iteration of AU.
That said, I am reticent to attribute “just get the ball generally close to Miggy and he’ll do the rest; Josef, crash the box.” to some tactical brilliance from Tata.
I was thinking the same. But I did cursory look at the possession numbers at the end of the season on FbRef, and we were 2nd across the League in 2017 and 4th in 2018. Granted, these are just season end average stats, so grain of salt.
From re-collection, I would say the 2017-18 team was much better at playing direct when the opportunity arose. Also, their possession had more intent and risk-taking, compared to these past teams where possession seems to matter more than anything else.
worst match muyumba has played for us imo. and hernandez gets the armband? wow…
hey…at least you can’t say we’re not consistent!
Hernandez wore the armband in some of the earlier rounds of the US Open Cup as well, so it wasn’t a huge surprise
that doesn’t mean it was a good (or deserved) choice
Crapfest.
is that a quote from our analytics department?
We’ll see what the off season brings, but to be honest… I’m done with this season (and I think the players are too). Embarrassing to even be a ‘fan’ and invest in this garbage.
A shambles. Sad to see. With all the departures there’s a lot to get straight. Hopefully they can find an experienced coach to shake things up in a good way.
I don’t think these professional players are “done” for the season. We’ll see what happens in the transfer window, but there is still plenty of time left to make a run, get in the playoffs, and make some noise
The team expected to lose Almada this summer. They lost Almada, GG, and Wiley. They have players playing out of position and their depth is non existent. If Muyumba and Saba are your creators and Daniel Rios is your finisher, you’re not going to look good at any level of competition. Any team that loses 3 of their top five players in a single window is going to struggle until those roles are back filled.