The Daily Wave: Tactical Mindset Separates Pablo Mastroeni’s First Year From Oscar Pareja’s

The amount of time that constitutes a 'small sample size' seems to change depending on how many games are played in your particular sport. In baseball, the granddaddy of all small sample size sports, you need to play 100+ games before people start to take statistics without a grain of salt. With schedules shrunk a bit in hockey and basketball, it takes 40 or 50 games to get that consistent opinion. In games with even shorter schedules, like football and soccer, the number shrinks even more significantly.

Now that we've seen five full matches with Pablo at the helm, we can start to take away an observation or two. One easy one to spot has been that Pablo's tactical mindset, when compared to Pareja's in his first season with the team, has been mature and fitting for the game situations that the team has been in.

Pareja's Rapids in 2012 often got bright starts to matches only to collapse down the stretch and lose far more often than they won. Pablo's Rapids have started slow at times, but have, so far, gotten into games in the second half and won them more often than not. That's at least somewhat down to tactics: both have an attacking mindset to them, but Pablo's is much more nuanced and he is willing to let his team work its way into a game.

In the end, we chalked it up to tactical naivety by a young coach with too much of his focus on playing the type of flashy soccer that he once told me was "in his blood". We turned out to be right, as his second year brought a much smarter system that possessed less, but in smarter areas, and played an attacking style that, while still featuring a numbers advantage at its best in the final third, didn't flood it quite as much as his 4-3-3 did.

Pablo Mastroeni appears to have entered the league with a tactical mindset much closer to that of Pareja's in his second season. He's asked his team to attack just like Oscar did, but he's been much smarter about how he's gone about it. His teams haven't featured the outright onslaught of attacking options that Pareja's old 4-3-3 had; Pablo has trusted his defense to get the job done while his offense works its way into games. That has led to a 0-0 draw at the half every match for the Rapids this season. Ideal? Not at all. But a system that allows you to get a 0-0 draw at halftime to push your way into a win with attack-minded substitutions and adjustments in the second half is far more conducive to winning than a plan that gets you into that half at 1-0 sometimes, but ends nearly every time in a second half collapse that everyone saw coming.

There is still work to do tactically for Mastroeni, and there is always a chance that his somewhat bold roster moves that seem to come every game will eventually backfire and knock the Rapids out of post-season contention as the season rolls along. Even if that happens, though, the folks who said that Pablo just wouldn't be tactically ready for Major League Soccer have gotten at least a small taste of what he knew as a player and carried into his being a head coach.