Two-man deficit too much for Orlando City

ORLANDO — It was always going to be hard when Nani was sent off in the 35th minute and Orlando ended up finishing with nine men which saw Montreal take a 4-2 win over the Lions. So apart from the obvious what went wrong? Ultimately everything that led to the Montreal win came because of the red card.

Nani’s red card was certainly a big mistake from such a veteran player. Getting one yellow card so early is bad enough but then committing an obvious foul while on the yellow is unforgivable and will surely generate a fine from the club as well as from the league. The second yellow card was also clear cut, blatantly pulling back an attacking player to prevent an attack is obviously deliberately obstructing a goal-scoring opportunity.

Having been a man down for almost an hour made it easy for Montreal to do what they wanted and have plenty of space. All that space allowed Impact to have a phenomenal passing accuracy of 92.6 percent, routinely passing it around the back to wait for the opportunity to pounce. It wasn’t just that CF Montreal was more accurate they also made far more passes, managing over 150 more passes than the hosts.

When a team has a man disadvantage there are a few things that a team can do to try and stop attacks coming through and one of those is playing a strong offside trap. That is an option Orlando chose not to take, only catching Montreal offside once in the match, a missed opportunity.

Obviously, fouls were a big part of the story and with two red cards, it would be easy to think the Lions were just giving away too many fouls. That wasn’t the case, Orlando only gave away 10 fouls in the match, just one more than Montreal. That meant that 20 percent of the fouls resulted in a red card, 40 percent resulting in a yellow.

It wasn’t all bad news for Orlando. Despite being a man down so early OCSC managed to create some clear chances and scored twice. The Lions finished with an xG of 0.7 just 1.8 behind the winners. That was a good sign going forward that despite the adversity the chances were there.