If you haven’t had a chance to watch the Manchester City edition of “All or Nothing” on Amazon Prime yet, I highly recommend you do it. It’s a great, if curated, look into the inner workings of the City Blues over the course of last season and, more particularly, Pep Guardiola’s mania. The reason I bring that docuseries up is because there’s a scene in Episode Six, “The Beautiful Game” where Pep’s talking to his team about that day’s match against Chelsea. The gist of it is this:

We want the ball. They don’t. They’ll spend eighty nine minutes sitting with ten men behind the ball and let us pass it around all day. They’re waiting for us to make a mistake so they can jump on it and score. That’s how they won the title last season. We. Can’t. Let. That. Happen. Be smart, keep the ball, be ruthless when you attack because there won’t be many chances, and we’ll win the game.

And they did, 1-0.

In our situation, I’d argue Louisville City is kind of like Man City and the Riverhounds are kind of like Chelsea in terms of the way they approach the game. Interestingly enough, this game didn’t play out the way the numbers suggested it might. Pittsburgh had over 60% of the ball, 15 corners, and close to 500 passes in the game. Louisville registered their lowest pass attempt figure of the season, 290, and barely completed 50% of those. City had 99 long passes, to boot, which amounts to more than a third of their attempts. What that tells you is City was trying a very different tactic than they usually do against Pittsburgh: Let the Hounds have the ball and see what they can do with it.

It almost worked. Pittsburgh took twenty shots, but only got four on target. City had eight blocks on sixteen shots inside the box. I’m uncomfortable with that number of attempts, but when you’ve limited a team with over an hour in possession to just four shots on goal, you’re doing alright. Granted, two of those four were goals, and the other two required some herculean defending from Greg Ranjitsingh and Paco Craig, but still. I’d say it worked, until it didn’t.

It didn’t because of an own goal and a penalty, not because Pittsburgh’s offense was effective. Don’t commit the stupid penalty, and we get three points and call this a success. I really would have called it that, too.

For themselves, Louisville City only took three shots, all three were on target, and two went in. That’s called efficiency, folks. 100% shooting accuracy.

I’m just as disappointed in this result as anyone. Morados haven’t been able to kill off games all season, for whatever reason. I’d point to mental mistakes as the culprit, but I don’t sit in the locker room after games or talk to players to get their point of view. But it’s been a problem. LouCity had a 2-0 lead with just five minutes to play in this game and blew it. Earlier this season, City blew a 3-0 lead at home against Penn FC, gave up a late penalty away against ATLUTD2 to drop points, gave up a late penalty against Indy Eleven to lose outright, and gave up a late goal to Daniel Rios in North Carolina for a draw. This is not a new problem, and it’s not a Hackworth-specific problem. I can’t recall giving up so many late penalties in one season before this one. Either way, it needs to be repaired. Whether that’s done by way of giving players more time to rest or bringing that Kevin Chapman guy back in, I don’t care. But it’s costing Morados points, and now it’s costing them playoff seeding position. Let’s hope it doesn’t lead to a premature end to the post-season, as well.

Anyway. On to Penn FC. Let’s put six on ’em.