There are three things that immediately come to mind when you play Orlando City SC in Florida: the hot weather, Kaka and big crowds. The Red Bulls believe they have the first two covered. The third? Get the lead and control the game – two things they try to do every match – and that should silence even the noisiest fan base.
Let’s take them one at a time, starting with the weather.
“We’re fit,” Red Bulls coach Jesse Marsch said. “Even though in Dallas and Houston, you can’t run as much and you can’t have the same level of intensity that you do in cooler games, but we’re fit and I think we can go down to Orlando and, even in a game that will be hot, still play our style of play and make little modifications for the environment and the team we’re playing, but we’re going to go down and go after the game.
“We’ve been on top of a lot the physical stuff from the beginning. (The players) get it. They’re professional about the way that they handle themselves when they travel. And we’re fit, so we can go down there and still (handle the conditions). We’ve run more than every team we’ve played and we should be able to do that again. The only times we didn’t was when we were a man down, and that’s mostly because that’s one less guy whose yards are added up.”
Okay, how about the Kaka, Orlando City’s legendary Brazilian midfielder? The former FIFA World Player of the Year leads the team with nine goals, tied for fourth in Major League Soccer. At 33, he looks as good as ever.
“I’ve been impressed with him in every way,” Marsch said. “I think he, even on days when his team hasn’t been very good, he hasn’t shown frustration in the game. He’s made a big difference for them. He’s made every play for them in many ways, so that’s clearly going to have to be a focus for us, how we take care of him and manage him. Orlando made a good decision in getting a player like him and I doubt they’ve been disappointed because he’s been fantastic.”
Then there’s the crowd. Orlando City is averaging a little over 34,000 fans per game, second in the league and only 6,000 behind perennial-leader Seattle. That’s impressive in itself, but for an expansion team, that’s incredible, especially when you consider the past two MLS teams in Florida, the Mutiny and the Fusion, were contracted in 2002 for lack of support.
“Because we played in the other New York games and we played in Seattle, those games always prepare you for big games and games like this with crowds and everything else,” Marsch said. “There’s a lot built into what we’re doing and the understanding of roles is pretty cemented, but on the field there still needs to be an alertness and awareness and whatever communication is possible to make sure that whenever we play that we do things as a group, and that it’s not one or two guys at a time but five or six guys at a time.”
The Red Bulls should also be bolstered by the way they played last game, a 4-1 thrashing of the New England Revolution. The Red Bulls passed the ball better than they have all season and it appears that all the new players may finally be clicking.
“We’ve just been a little bit sharper and now fine-tuned some of the movements,” Marsch said. “I’ve said all along, even when we weren’t scoring goals in the stretch where we were losing a few games, that I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t concerned about the goal scoring. That was going to come.
“If you go goals per game, we’re second in the league right now. Again, that’s not a concern. I know we’re going to continue to find ways to be dangerous because of the players we have. Good teams find ways to win 1-0 games and find ways to not give up goals. That’s still something that we need to continue to work on and emphasize as we’re moving forward.
“We did work on a few things in training last week and some of the movements and ideas and timing. These are things we’ve been talking about and emphasizing from the beginning, and in a game like that it comes together in a good way, partly because we’re sharp, partly because we’re into it, fit, the whole bit. We’ve gotten better as the year’s gone on and that game was a good showcase of that.
