Hartford Athletic return to action on Saturday night as they take on Brooklyn FC at Maimonedes Park in USL Championship Action. It’s the first meeting between the two clubs, as Brooklyn are newcomers to the league.
The Latics are once again playing a road game on a tight turnaround, having defeated FC Motown 2-0 in U.S. Open Cup action in Newark on Wednesday night. Brendan Burke’s squad stayed in the New York area in the intervening days, focusing on rest and recovery.
While Burke didn’t think the level of the game was very high he was happy to get through the game with a result.
"We were massively rotated, the guys executed, they did a good job," he said. "For a lot of those guys that was their first exposure to a real game with us.”
Some of those players may be called on again – Burke said the all earned a degree of trust – as Hartford will once again be without some key contributors.
“We’ll be missing six key players,” said Burke, ”but I still feel like we’re going into the game with enough to get something out of it. I would never have been able to say that last season.”
As for Brooklyn, Burke was very clear about what he expected to see from them.
“Very direct play, transition heavy. They press hard," Burke said. "I wouldn’t be surprised to see them be very direct, be very combative. In the Indy game, the ball was barely ever in the run of play, it was set pieces, it was throw ins, it was corners.”
Through two weeks of the season, Brooklyn have been one of the most vertical teams in the league, and with Hartford also playing quite vertically, it does seem as if the game might tend in that direction.
Burke has said before that his side is happy for the game to turn into a transition game, and they ran out 3-0 winners against Sporting Club Jacksonville, another side that tried a direct approach. With Hartford’s defense playing well in the early going – they’ve yet to concede a single goal in any competition – that might be their edge on Saturday, as through two games, Brooklyn has been one of the weakest defenses in the league.
A new club also brings a new stadium, and while Brooklyn plays in an admirable location on Coney Island, the stadium itself is perhaps not well-suited for soccer in its current configuration. Having had a chance to practice on the field at Maimonedes Park, Burke was less than complimentary.
“We trained on their field today, it’s horrible," Burke said. "It’s a really bad venue for a professional soccer team. If you go in there thinking you’re going to roll the ball around, it’s not conducive to that.”
Like other fields around the league that do double duty as baseball stadiums, there are serious limitations when it comes to the quality of the pitch, and things can become quite cramped given the realities of the dimensions of the stadium.
"You have to be playing forward first, the ball has to come off your feet faster, and you can’t be afraid for the game to be ugly," Burke said. "You’re in for a lot of dueling, you have to try hard not to foul. Both teams are going to press, it’s going to lead to a choppy game.”
Following the game, Hartford will have a full week to rest and recuperate before its home opener against Indy Eleven on March 28. For now, though, the focus is on getting through this game, however choppy it might be, and concluding this early-season road slog with another three points.
