Know Thy Enemy: Revolution at Orlando - Caleb Porter's Expensive Vacation Edition
Know Thy Enemy: Revolution at Orlando - Caleb Porter's Expensive Vacation Edition
New England will be without their head coach, and rightly so, as they take on an Eastern Conference foe with fading playoff hopes.
The New England Revolution will be without their head coach as they head down to face Orlando City SC tonight (730 pm EDT, Apple TV/MLS Season Pass) in a vital game for the Revs to keep their slim playoff hopes afloat.
I need to reinforce something at the top here, which I shouldn’t have to do cause both of the things I’m going to talk about should have the same level of obviousness associated with them.
Caleb Porter deserves his $20,000 fine and one game suspension for his postgame comments after the Revs 1-1 draw against St. Louis last week. Complaining about a call or no-call should end at the call, and never devolve into personal attacks against said official or the Soccer Don himself.
That being said, Porter’s suspension was as difficult to predict as PRO agreeing with Tim Ford’s VAR decision last week:
As I wrote about after the game, Tim Ford applied a legitimate interpretation to a situation that I do not think it should ever be applied too. PRO has the benefit of foresight as well as hindsight when they review these calls and should be asking questions above and beyond what the referee crew and VAR booth discuss.
Mainly, questions like, is allowing this play to go unpunished good for the game? Should we allow a half-assed, two steps late “header” that finds an opponent’s shoulder blade to count as a “challenge”? And my personal favorite, should a game known around the world as FUTBOL allow players to effectively punch the ball a significant distance as a part of a “natural playing position”?
Again the answer to all of these should be no. Just no.
There is not a definition of natural position that should preclude any player from a handball foul making the same motion Kyle Hiebert did last week. If your natural playing momentum puts your arm in the path of the ball at shoulder height and redirects that ball with any semblance of force, then it should be a hand ball. It was a handball thirty years ago and should be a handball thirty years from now - it is literally a core concept of the sport. It’s played with feet.
The rework of the handball law was supposed to cut down on very clear situations of ball-to-hand that had little impact on a play but was being whistled as a penalty kick and were far too harsh for the contact that was occurring. This was a good decision and a quick reversal by the powers that be at IFAB/FIFA and elsewhere.
This decision and reinforcement by PRO will remain non-sensical in my opinion for all of time by allowing under broad interpretation anything that resembles a “attempt on the ball” as “natural position”. It defies all logic of the base concept of the game, which not to long ago was to punish seemingly every time a ball hit a hand without impunity to the scenario at hand.
I think handball's were better decades ago when referees were allowed to subjectively award indirect free kicks for unintentional handballs that took away an advantage from the attacking team. We can bring that back with a caveat that attackers can take the IFK inside the box at the spot of the call or the option to take a direct free kick at the closest point outside the area. Advantage is not lost and we’re not pointing to the spot almost every game for a trifling play.
Kyle Hiebert committed a handball offense so egregious last weekend it probably has never been seen before, and might not ever happen again. All the more reason PRO should have the foresight to know the game of soccer is better when that is whistled as a foul than as a no-call.
Notice I haven’t brought the Revolution’s dropped points into the conversation so far. That’s because that result is in the past and no longer relevant to the problem at hand. The Revs losing two points in a season where they’ve lost upwards of 100 total games to injury this year in the grand scheme of things means nothing to the overall greater good that PRO wasted by upholding this decision.
Major League Soccer and the game of soccer as a whole is not better because of this backward logic. It was this kind of decision making that overcomplicated the offside and handball laws and turned normal decision making upside down for a few years with unnecessary tinkering and have led officials down the path of over thinking decisions with needless subjectivity.
The number of situations where it should be legal to Superman punch a ball off your opponent’s chest should be zero. Start there, and work backwards through your subjective and objective questioning to get to that point. It’ll make more sense I promise.
Here to make sense of an slightly less perplexing but still strange Orlando City season is Ben Miller of The Mane Land who hopefully can tell us how far the Lions can go in the playoffs, their post Leagues Cup action, and why is OCSC kind of meh at home, which is very much out of the ordinary for them.
Be sure to head on over to Ben’s site for my answer’s to his questions.
TBM: A group stage Leagues Cup win followed by a knockout loss on PKs to Cruz Azul, then a 0-3 loss at SKC and a 3-0 win vs Nashville in league play...I'm sensing something went very wrong in KC and got fixed a week later, could you elaborate for us?
BM: The big issues in Kansas City were rust and a failure to capitalize on chances. Orlando created some good looks in front of goal early but failed to take them, and SKC used goals on either side of halftime to take command of the game and never look back. The layoff after being eliminated from Leagues Cup seemed to have created some rust that was shaken off by the time the Nashville game rolled around, and OCSC certainly gave a better showing.
TBM: I'm so used to seeing Orlando City being dominant at home, but a 4W-5L-4D record at Exploria...wait, *checks notes* ...Inter&Co Stadium is about as middling as you can get. Last time we played OCSC was in 7th and you're still there, could a few extra home points get the Lions into a better playoff seed or is this what Orlando is this year?
BM: I certainly think the Lions have played much better than they did to open the season, but that's the problem: OCSC had a horrific start, winning only four of its first 15 league games, with Champions league play, international call-ups, injuries, and suspensions wrecking any semblance of continuity. Since June began the team has been much better, but its difficult to dig yourself out of a hole that deep in a tough Eastern conference. A good stretch to close the year is certainly possible, as the Lions have a manageable schedule on paper, but it just depends if they can get and stay hot the way they did to close the 2023 regular season.
TBM: Give us your best case playoff run scenario and maybe what's the biggest need/change in 2025 to improve Orlando's chances at a deep November appearance?
BM: Best case is Duncan McGuire gets back to scoring, Facundo Torres continues doing what he always does once summer starts, Martin Ojeda takes his offensive game to another level, and Luis Muriel manages to chip in every now and then. The defense and goalkeeping stays solid, the Lions get hot and manage a run to the conference finals with a favorable bracket providing an assist. I don't think I see this unit going any farther, but they have a lot of unrealized potential, so I won't rule it out entirely.
The biggest thing holding this team back is consistency of play. No team plays a perfect season, but in this iteration of MLS its usually teams that hold a mostly steady level of excellence from start to end of year that will go deep in the playoffs. Slow starts mean there's far less room for error over the course of a grueling season, and if Orlando can stop hamstringing itself, play to potential, and do so over the course of a season, it should be one of the top teams in the league on paper.
Lineup/Injuries/Predictions/Etc.
I believe Mason Stajduhar will be the only absence, as he's done for the season after suffering a tib/fib fracture. The biggest spot for potential lineup variation is left back, where we'll see either Kyle Smith or Rafael Santos. Neither has been able to nail down the starting job this year, after Santos had a strong grip on it in 2023.
(4-2-3-1) Pedro Gallese; Rafael Santos, Robin Jansson, David Brekalo, Dagur Dan Thorhallsson; Cesar Araujo, Wilder Cartagena; Ivan Angulo, Martin Ojeda, Facundo Torres; Duncan McGuire.
I'll go with a 3-2 win for Orlando on this one, with the home team managing to overcome some rustiness in the second half.