In almost every one of his interviews the new Rowdies Head Coach Thomas Rongen mentions, “the spine of the team,” as being his top priority. For a team that has conceded 50 goals in the combined 2014 season, one can see why.

While the Rowdies retained Tamika Mkandawire, Blake Wagner, and captain Frankie Sanfilippo, the new General Manager Farrukh Quraishi with Coach Rongen added Brad Rusin, Gale Agbossoumonde, Stefan Antonijevic, and Darnell King to their back line. Like many fans throughout the Tampa Bay area, I am excited by what appears to be improvement.

Rusin was selected to the USL second XI, Agbossoumonde has played both abroad and in the US youth system, and was a highly regarded up and comer. In November Antonijevic and King went to the Soccer Bowl with the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, the same season that King was selected for the NASL best XI. The big question then becomes, do the numbers match up with the hope of a better defense?

I took a look at the statistics and crunched some numbers on the new boys to see what they would say. This undertaking turned out to be a much more difficult task than I originally imagined. For one, there is no data on Rusin’s season down I-4, and Gale has not played any minutes. That leaves the numbers to just King and Antonijevic. With this in mind I decided upon a flat comparison between them and their respective counterparts from the last season. Here was yet another road block, in the last season the Rowdies had 5 different right backs and 6 different left center backs. For brevity, this article will concern itself only with the combined position percentages of accurate passes and tackles.

First, let us look at the right back position. Last season Sanfilippo started, was then switched out for Hunt, who was switched back for Sanfilippo, then back to Hunt, Jordan Gafa, JP Rodrigues, Gafa, and ended with Sanfilippo. Individually, Frankie seems to be the standout on the right, a small reassurance considering he is the only one of the group remaining.

As a group the right backs attempted a combined 354 tackles. They were successful in 199 of them, a success rate of 56%. Darnell King, this years addition, in his best XI run down south attempted a total of 360 tackles and succeeded 193 times, a 54% success rate. There isn’t a great difference here, for defensive statistics it’s a wash.

Success Rate Attempted Won