DAVENPORT, Fla. – After dispatching the Montreal Impact at the end of their first stay in Orlando, the New York Red Bulls ran into a bit of trouble in their second friendly against MLS competition.
Local side Orlando City SC handed the Red Bulls just their second defeat of preseason thanks to a late strike to break the deadlock, effectively overturning their halftime deficit. As has continually been the case, head coach Jesse Marsch deployed two entirely different teams on either side of halftime in order to evaluate as many players as possible.
The first half featured what may well be New York’s first choice starting XI come the start of regular season play, with many familiar faces in the fold. After conceding the game’s first goal, the Red Bulls answered nearly immediately to level the match. And for the remainder of the half, New York appeared to be the side in the ascendency.
“I thought it was a good shift,” defender Sal Zizzo said of the team’s first half performance. “The game was pretty hectic, which is pretty similar to how the games go in the regular season at the beginning. As it wore on, things became a little bit clearer and I thought we controlled the game a little bit more. It’s tough with the field and the wind conditions, but overall I thought it was a good performance.”
“On a personal level, and even talking to some of the other guys on the team, we feel a little bit more fit. After 45 minutes against Montreal, you could feel yourself starting to wear and think, ‘Man, it’s going to be tough to get to 90.’ But after playing 45 here, a lot of us felt strong afterwards, like we could have kept going. I think we’re moving in the right direction.”
The second half saw a bit more edge to the play as the game became increasingly intense. Both sides seemed to be treating the friendly as if it were a match that counted in the standings with plenty of tough challenges and physical play.
For New York, returning their mindsets to “game mode” proved to be a tough task after getting just one training session under their belts in Florida. Following a week of training in Hanover in which fitness was the main focus, the plunge back into MLS-level competition was a good way to gauge their current standing.
“It was another good test for us,” Marsch told NewYorkRedBulls.com. “I thought, for the most part, our ability to do some of the things we’d like to do was not bad. You can see that we’re still in preseason mode a little bit where we’re not able to be sharp enough and be on the same page quite enough. That being said, Orlando really caused us problems, mostly on set pieces. That hasn’t been a major focus quite yet but we’ll continue to build that in. We learned some things today but we also accomplished a lot.”
There are certainly lessons to take away from the loss, as defender Kemar Lawrence noted after the match.
“It’s more about how we position ourselves both on and off the ball and how we set up the next play,” he said. “We need to focus on the defensive side, but we’ve been scoring goals so we need to keep doing that, as well.”
The Jamaican international surely did his part, notching a goal and an assist on the day. But in the end, it wasn’t enough to nick the result.
Admittedly, results are hardly the main takeaways from these types of friendly matches. While the Red Bulls surely would have liked to be on the right side of the score line, there were still plenty of positive takeaways that New York can hang their hat on, including preseason debuts for two Red Bulls players.
“The details of the performance are more important than the actual result,” Marsch added. “It was good to get Gideon Baah on the field with the first group so that he understands a little bit of how we try to do things. Alex Muyl got his first action in a preseason game. In that sense, it was a good step forward.”
