Hartford Athletic are in search of goals as they host Detroit City on Saturday night, with the Latics having gone the entire month of April without finding the back of the net. It’s a dismal stretch of games that has drawn comparisons to the barren early months of the 2025 season, where Hartford also struggled to generate much in the attacking third.
Speaking to media ahead of the game, Brendan Burke pointed to six clean sheets in ten games as evidence that the structure of his team was where he wanted it to be, but also emphasized the need for a breakthrough in attack.
“What needs to change is our intent in the attacking third, the volume of our good looks at other teams goals, especially here at home," he said. "So that's been a big focus of the last week and a half.”
After the last game against Rhode Island, Burke’s message to his team had been that no attacking player could be assured of their place, and so another focus of the intervening days has been competition for places. Particularly with key players like Samuel Careaga and Barry Coffey coming available, the pressure was on for everyone, and Burke emphasized how much the possibility of this competition means to a team.
“It's it's everything to a high functioning professional soccer team," he said. "I've learned that over decades now. It's everything to a high functioning team. Internal competition, direct competition in your position, it drives you to be a little bit better than you would be otherwise because the reality is you could get pulled back in any moment. And we are going to pull a few guys back this week.”
Who might get pulled back is an open question, but with Careaga available and likely to start at 10, Junior Moreira – who has not been hugely effective in a more advanced midfield position – is one possible candidate to return to the bench. If Barry Coffey starts as well – a distinct possibility given that he’s started all three league games where he was fit and available – then it seems plausible that one of Adewale Obalola or Augustine Williams would drop to the bench as well, leaving the other to play in front of a Ngalina-Careaga-Coffey triad.
Matt Real also seems guaranteed to start at left back, which would return TJ Presthus to the bench unless Burke wants to disrupt his solid back three of Jordan Scarlett, Arturo Diz, and Britton Fischer. The same would go for Baboucarr Njie, who will be fighting for a spot in the gameday roster as he finally returns from an injury suffered late in the 2025 season.
Regardless of who plays, Burke has a high level of confidence that the last two weeks of training have made a difference.
"There's zero lack of understanding in any phase of play, any restart, you know, our guys should confidently walk into this game knowing exactly where they should be relative to the ball and their teammates in every phase of play."
That understanding will be critical against this week’s opponents. Detroit City are coming off an excellent 2-1 win over Louisville City, and boast one of the best scoring defenses in the entire league. Only Tampa Bay Rowdies have conceded fewer goals on a per-game basis, which will present a significant challenge for a Hartford attack that is currently third-worst in the league. Burke views this as a good test, given the structure of Le Rouge, and an excellent opportunity to gauge how his team – with almost all players finally healthy and available – is actually coming together.
“Well, they're just solid, you know, they're good in transition," Burke said. "They're good on set pieces on both sides of the ball. We talk about controlling each phase of play. They're very good at that. So this is a good test for us coming out of two weeks where we talked about controlling every phase of play in various ways. They're actually structurally a great team to test that knowledge. Have we moved that forward? Have we gotten a little bit better in that way at putting kind of a vice grip on the game and controlling more of the ball?”
Detroit are a heavily possession-based team, so Hartford are unlikely to control the game in the sense of having the greater share of the ball. But it’s certainly possible to control the game without having the ball, and that will be the aim of Burke’s side on Saturday night. In Burke’s approach to the game, that control comes from intensity, and a show of intensity in the early going will signal if things are heading in the right direction.
“I think the intensity from the word go, the first fifteen minutes," he said. "That will tell me everything I need to know about the guys that that we're putting out. We know it's going to be a grind with them. You know, in no way, shape or form do we think this is a multi goal game in either direction. We know they're they're likely to be a top four team at the end of the year. And so are we if we do our jobs. So this is a it's a great test at home.”
The work in training aims to eliminate misunderstandings on the pitch, to increase intensity, and all of that is about controlling what can be controlled. The weather is uncontrollable, but it will exacerbate an issue that is controllable: the state of the pitch. The turf at Trinity Health Stadium is in desperate need of maintenance, which has been deferred since the conclusion of the last season, and that will undoubtedly be a factor.
“We still haven't fixed the [playing] surface yet either,” said Burke. “That was supposed to be done last October and we still haven't fixed it. So we're hoping that's fixed by our next home game. But this one's going to be slick. It's going to play really fast. It's going to play hard. It's been hard on the bodies.”
The state of the pitch might not be quite as visible as the absence of a key player, but it’s just as important. And with key players returning, it’s critical that Hartford get these things right as well in order to turn the season in a more positive direction. For Burke, there will always be things outside the club’s control, making it even more critical not to miss opportunities for improvement:
“So you know, again, we need to control the controllables because it's New England in the spring, the weather can be all over the place," he said. "So I bring that back to us. We can always improve our environment. We can always improve our training habits, our our methodology, our everything can be improved at any time, as long as you're alert and looking for ways to improve.”
For now, that improvement needs to start with a goal. It’s been 327 minutes since a Hartford player scored at Trinity Health Stadium, and that unwelcome stretch needs to end tonight.
