Analysis: Minnesota United’s strikers are important, but for coach Eric Ramsay, it all comes back to defense

MINNESOTA UNITED | ANALYSIS

Striker is soccer’s glamour position. It’s the forwards who score the goals and sell the jerseys, and it takes something pretty special for players at any other position to break through to that level of fan popularity.

Minnesota United played two strikers last week against Seattle, with a three-man midfield behind them. As the Loons travel to San Jose on Saturday to take on the last-place Earthquakes, it’s easy to focus on the glamour up front. It’s just not where the Loons themselves are necessarily focused.

New signing Kelvin Yeboah scored twice against Seattle. Breakout star and leading goal-scorer Tani Oluwaseyi will return from injury. The Loons still have veteran star Teemu Pukki, ready and willing to bang in a few more goals. It’s natural to ask: If they play more often with two forwards, which striker partnership might look the best, score the most and provide the most star power?

It’s instructive, though, that when you ask coach Eric Ramsay about playing with two strikers, he can’t help but end up talking about defense.

“The difficulty sometimes with playing with the two forwards is how you defend, and we’ve made a really big point about making sure that we get real aggression from how the wingbacks defend,” Ramsay said. “We don’t want the wingbacks defending as if they’re fullbacks in a flat back five, and we certainly don’t want them attacking in that way.”

Having three midfielders instead of two seems like it should be more defensive, not less. The positioning of the players, though, means the problem becomes the width of the field.

When the Loons play with three up front, the two widest forwards — Ramsay refers to them as “number 10s,” the designation usually used for attacking midfielders — can naturally drop back on either side to defend on the outside, across the midfield area. This means the wingbacks, whose natural spot on defense would be in a back line of five players, don’t have as much responsibility to bolt out of the back five and defend the opposition’s wide players in midfield.