The idea behind this new weekly(ish) column is to highlight something you may be interested in paying a little extra attention to from a game each weekend. We'll mostly focus on the Revolution for now and see where we go from there. The goal is to highlight something tactically that could be important or at the very least interesting and then let you come to your own conclusions.
There is a lot of great tactical analysis about soccer these days but most of it is telling you what happened, or someone's interpretation of what happened, or telling you what you should have saw when you watched a particular game. All fine and good, to be clear, I personally got pulled into soccer because of the absolutely brilliant Zonal Marking blog a long, long time ago.
Here though we will simply present something to watch and it will be presented with as little jargon as possible and few statistics, none of the advanced variety. So no need to worry if you don't know what an inverted winger is or what it means when someone says a team is playing with "tandem 10s" or "double 8s" or "twin 6s" and so on. No zone 17 references here.
Soccer is a wonderfully visual game, we may at times all be over reliant on drawing too strong a conclusion based on what the stats tell us. All that will be minimized here and, in the spirit of Zonal Marking, largely replaced with heat maps, charts and jargon free tactical talk.
The soft launch of this column can be found here on BlueSky, where Carles Gil's positioning was highlighted as worth keeping an eye on.
This week, we might find it worthwhile to keep a close eye on what is happening on the right side of the field for the Revs. Hopefully you didn't do that last week because if you had, you would not have seen very much of anything encouraging in the team's season opener.
The right side of the team featured Keegan Hughes at centerback, Ethan Kohler at right back, Matt Polster as the right sided center mid and Dor Turgeman at right mid in the Revs' 4-2-3-1 defensive shape. This quartet struggled immensely in both phases of play and in both halves of the field. Hughes' struggles were mostly down to poor individual decision making and a lack of technical proficiency. The other three could not get on the same page with their pressing or attacking coordination.
The ineffectiveness of the Revs right sided press is perfectly encapsulated in the image below from our good friends at MLS Analytics on BlueSky:
Aside from one clearance just inside Nashville's half, the Revs literally did not intervene defensively in a quarter of the field. The primary source of this dilemma was Turgeman who was put in an unfamiliar position out wide and it showed. And in fairness to him, he, like most of us, did not expect him to be deployed out wide where his pressing ability would be tested in this way.
His difficult night of knowing who to press and when to press them complicated matters for Polster and Kohler as well, they had their own pressing duties disrupted. In one sequence Turgeman was easily drawn out of the midfield line of three where he put himself into a 1v2 and was easily played around. In another sequence, his indecisiveness caused Kohler to drop off when he should have stayed high and then had Polster desperately racing out wide to press an open player, only to leave his mark, Sam Surridge, wide open in central midfield.
It was a bit of shocking site to see for a team coming out of five weeks of prep. Especially when you consider that one of the more impressive points of Marko Mitrovic's two stints with USMNT under age teams was their excellent and consistent defensive shape and pressing coordination.
How this is solved and how long it takes will be of the utmost importance in the coming weeks. Does Mitrovic, as hinted at this week, stick with Turgeman out wide and let him work through all this or does he change it up and move Turgeman up top where we all expected him to be? Luca Langoni, for all his struggles in 2025, is a diligent and effective worker on the defensive side. He's able to use his speed for pressing just as much as attacking and he also will track back as far as needed to fulfill his defensive duties.
Mitrovic had high expectations for his wide midfield/forward players with the USMNT setup, they were expected to double back and create defensive 2v1s and track the opposition outside back all the way back into their own penalty area. In some moments, this was carried out so thoroughly the team was effectively in a back 5 defensively because of high positioning of an opposition outside back.
What do we see then, Langoni come in and do the job we know he can do or does Turgeman get another crack at it?
This decision might be taken out of Mitrovic's hands today as Leo Campana might not be available. Even so, if Turgeman moves up top, would we also see Alhassan Yusuf come in for Polster or Ilay Feingold in for Kohler? We almost certainly know that Brayan Ceballos will be in for Hughes.
How quickly can this week's right sided quartet click this week?
Share your thoughts below on this week's focus and let us know if you have a better name for this column or an idea for next week.
