For a team without a true home, you’d expect NYCFC to preform better on the road.
City’s 3-2 loss away at Charlotte on Saturday marks their 6th visiting affair without a win this season, as the homebodies slip to 0-4-2 outside the five boroughs in 2023. Tough scenes indeed, especially so when you consider NYCFC don’t return to MLS play at Yankee Stadium until May 27th. At this rate, the road ahead may be as long as it’s been difficult already.
But, as a fella who tries to keep things upbeat whenever I can, I’ll try to start with some potential positives from Saturday’s performance despite the loosing effort.
Firstly, one thing we can definitely smile about is the fact that we bagged a pair of goals on the road, which is a big deal for us. Those two goals in Charlotte matched our running tally to-date away from home in 2023.
Plus, our goal scorers were the exact two players you’d want to get on the scoresheet: Santi Rodriguez and Gabriel Pereira. That brings GP to 3G and 3A on the season, and tallies Santi up to 4G and 1A. Those are some solid numbers through 10 games for the two youngsters.
And, depending on how you frame it, another positive you could take from this match is the handling of the Talles Magno and Maxime Chanot drama from last weekend. If you’re unfamiliar, the two got into it pretty heavily as the clock ticked away last weekend in Toronto, and culminated with our young Brazilian flipping the bird to our Luxembourgish veteran.
This public dust up had a handful of fans on Twitter calling for some action to be taken by head coach Nick Cushing, who would surely be looking to steady his locker room ahead of the long road schedule ahead for his squad. His solution? Bench them both in a bit of old school, no nonsense discipline.
While you can certainly argue that benching two shoe-in starters played a pivotal role on our loss, I think the bigger picture will be of greater importance to the gaffer. This type of swift, decisive action from a manager tells me he has control of this locker room. Putting team culture above individuals in what great teams do – even if it may hurt performance in the short term.
Hopefully that settles that, and we’ll see them both in starting lineup next week. Story over.
But of course, there are plenty of negatives I could touch on from this match as well. We lost, we conceded more goals on Saturday than we had in any other game this season, Tayvon Gray left the match early with injury, and our set piece defending continues to be among the worst in the league.
But, I think I’ll let other outlets cover those negative narratives. There are enough critical voices in the press and on Twitter already, so why pile on? If you want to read up on where NYCFC have struggled this season, open up Twitter and scroll for 5 mins – I’m sure you’ll be more than filled in.
For now, rather than dwelling on Saturday’s loss, I think as fans we’re best off shifting focus to the two MASSIVE matches for NYCFC this week: a tough US Open Cup draw at Cincinnati on Wednesday, and the Hudson River Derby on Saturday.
The opportunity to advance in a knockout competition, and the chance to beat a struggling rival on their own turf should be more than enough to heal any remaining woulds from last weekend. Two wins here, and the Queen City defeat will feel far in the rear-view mirror. Bring it on.