Curtin: Loose play of late becoming a concern

Jim Curtin said it, and for a week at least, it was heeded.

A 4-0 loss in Real Salt Lake, Curtin decreed, had to be the outlier, not the norm. And when the Union won 2-0 at home last week in relative comfort over the struggling Fire, it seemed that lesson was learned.

But Saturday night’s 4-0 loss in Montreal brings the whisper of a trend starting. And with a road trip to D.C. United looming next week, it’s a concerning one.

“Overall I was disappointed with the way we conceded,” Curtin said. “Montreal is a very comfortable team when they sit back in, they’re comfortable defending, looking to counter.

“I thought that we handed the ball to them in a lot of instances and gave up basically two-vs.-six, (a) mistake at midfield, come out at halftime and pass the ball right to them and they punish us.”

The optics of Saturday’s trip to Montreal were dire. The Union (11-7-6, 39 points) let an Impact side with a sub-par central midfield pairing and a below-average center back duo prone to rash challenges go relatively untested. They gave up four goals to a team starting one of the least productive strikers in the league, conceding twice to a 20-year-old Finnish winger making his MLS debut. The Impact led 2-0 at half and then, once the Union had steeled themselves with a halftime talk, scored 18 seconds into the second, with Lassi Lappalainen finishing them off to cap a crescendo of errors.

“We failed in a lot of areas tonight,” Curtin said. “Coaches, players, everybody came up small.”

The modus operandi of opponents is becoming clear: Let the Union have the ball, stay tight at the back and dare them to break through your lines. It’s the logical counterpunch to the way the Union shocked teams on the counterattack this season with their high press, and teams home and away have successfully rope-a-doped the Union into exhaustion by absorbing pressure. The 64.3 percent of the ball the Union enjoyed Saturday, for instance, could scarcely be more meaningless.

Thus a two-fold challenge falls on Curtin. The first is to be better at the back; 24 goals allowed in 11 matches (including 15 in the last six outings) with just one clean sheet isn’t it. That part is self-explanatory, and the scattershot approach to the threat of Ignacio Piatti Saturday was shameful at times. Between Ray Gaddis’ sudden penchant for getting confounded by diagonal runs to the seemingly random decisions of Jack Elliott and Auston Trusty to either stay or step, the Union are straining the limits of modesty in saying things need “to be cleaned up.”

“We have to stop leaking goals, and the way we’re giving them away is too easy,” Curtin said. “If teams earn it and make a great play, you kind of tip your cap and say, OK I can live with that. But when you’re passing balls directly to them and it’s leading to breakaways from midfield, I have a tough time.”

But the second is the more existential quandary. MLS has seen the Union, taken them seriously after a many-years gap in doing so, and adjusted to them. The team is 4-4-4 over its last 12 games; they’ve been figured out. How now does Curtin and Ernst Tanner adjust to get games on more favorable terms?

Part of that is Jamiro Monteiro’s pending return from injury and seeing what it looks like when he, Marco Fabian and Andrew Wooten all play together. But all the synergy in the world isn’t worth four goals on a night like Saturday.

Tanner was brought in to change the equation, and his counterattacking press did that for several months. But with teams all too eager to grant the Union the ball, how do they adjust to everyone’s adjustments?

Saturday, they were ineffectual and half-hearted in attempts to press. Combined with too many turnovers and the inability to pry open Montreal’s lines, it was a recipe for a frustrating night, even had Piatti and company not carved the Union open with such ease.

Curtin urged perspective in the aftermath in Montreal. Inhouse answers exist, from veterans at right and center back to jolt the group to the lingering possibility of Mark McKenzie getting back into the rotation. The Union remain in first place as the league breaks for the All-Star Game this week, and not since the first two weeks of the season have the Union lost twice in a row.

Those facts provide a light in an indifferent stretch by the club. But these recent results are taxing such positive feelings.

“Big-picture perspective-wise, this group is in first place at the All-Star break, which no one expected,” Curtin said. “So we do have to stay a little bit positive, as hard as it is tonight and the way we lost hurts because it wasn’t us. I know we’ll have a good response against D.C.”