Coach Colin Clarke
After playing on Tuesday night in Bayamon and flying to Minnesota to face the Thunder on Thursday, the Islanders couldn’t put up a fight and fell 5-2 to a team with one of the poorest records this season.
Without a doubt, the match against Minnesota was lost at the tactical level. The question is whether or not coach Clarke approached the match with the proper attitude. With just 2 more matches left in the season, it was still important for the Islanders to earn a victory on the road.
Clarke threw together several players who haven’t been playing regular minutes into an unfamiliar formation. One motivation here seems to have been to rest most starters due to the grueling schedule the team is going through. But more importantly, it looks as if Clarke has his mind set on the crucial match next Tuesday against Cruz Azul in the CONCACAF Champions League (CCL).
Going into the Cruz Azul match, the team will have come from playing 4 matches in one week and in 3 different cities. With players already showing signs of fatigue, Clarke surely wanted to give his starters some rest.
The problem for the match against Minnesota is that Clarke fielded a formation that was better suited to experiment rather than to win. The team wasn’t given the tools it needed to put up a fight against Minnesota, a team that has surprised some of the top teams in the league several times this season.
The way Clarke approached the match makes it abundantly clear that he was more interested in the commitments the team has in the next few weeks, rather than the game his team was actually playing. Moving players around into unfamiliar positions and circumstances, as well as switching goalkeepers at the half-time mark makes it hard not to look at it as Clarke experimenting on the field.
Clarke’s attempt to try out new positions and formations is not entirely unreasonable. The problem is that he could have done this in a way that still allowed the team to come out with a positive result. Case in point, Andres Cabrero as a starter. Cabrero played almost the full 90 minutes on Tuesday’s match against Carolina – a game in which he received several hard fouls. After not playing Cabrero for most of the season, Clarke made him play on Thursday a starter, with little to no rest after Tuesday’s match and then traveling to Minnesota.
The Islanders have several crucial matches in the weeks ahead, from the games against Cruz Azul and Saprissa in the CCL to the USL-1 playoffs. It might have been smart to rest starters and use a match like the one in Minnesota to test new game propositions but Clarke could have also executed it in such a way where the team performed well on the field and came out with a positive result.
Other than the embarrassing 5-2 result, there’s not much else to take away from this match. Several players need to continue being included into the rotation in order to successfully get through all the matches that remain on the Islanders’ schedule.
