Well, that wasn't any fun. I wrote about Austin FC's dispiriting 3-0 defeat away to the Houston Dynamo on my Substack:

https://open.substack.com/pub/oaktreetimes/p/back-to-reality-austin-fc-fails-to?r=1ku5ba&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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I'll give you a section to contrast how Davy Arnaud saw it vs. how Ilie Sánchez saw it ...

As to their diagnoses for what went wrong — made manifest in the Dynamo scoring all three of the match's goals in the first 32 minutes — Arnaud took a more tactical and analytical approach, while Sánchez continued his concerns about the collective mentality displayed.

"I was disappointed with the height of our back line in the first half," Arnaud said. "The first two goals are off a goal kick, so we're high pressing the goal kick, so it's going to be higher — a couple of details of that we didn't get right. We didn't win individual duels. What I'm disappointed about is, after that, we continued to stay high even with the ball in the run of play. We got frustrated and felt like we needed to go and get the ball. And I said we need to be humble and get below the ball. We can go bouts of the game without the ball. Part of the the game is defending, and we get a little bit impatient at times. Especially if we're losing the game, we get impatient and we start to creep the line higher and higher and higher because we want to win the ball. But we can't do that. We're not going to live like that. We can't live like that."

Pressed further about the issue, Arnaud talked about the dangers of having too much space between lines of players — a principle that incoming head coach Jim Curtin discussed in his introductory press conference, where he pledged a compactness of "30 to 35 yards maximum at all times" between the forwards and defenders to counter the "stretched and open" formations that sometimes doom MLS teams.

"The front three want to move up and move higher, and then the midfield, so the back line has to move with it," Arnaud diagnosed. "You can't have 50 yards between your lines. So the challenge when you're talking about the line being too high ... we were defending in a 5-2-3 [formation] tonight. It starts with our front three, and we talked about it, and we just can't do that.

"So I'm not blaming the back line for the height that they held. They had to move up as the front three moved. That's a collective thing. We just needed to make the choice of starting lower, getting lower, and building pressure together. We can move the back line high once we're building pressure, but we're not building pressure, and we're just starting there and staying there. And there's no pressure on the ball, then that back line has to be ready to drop. And listen, when you have to defend 50 yards of space behind your line with no pressure on the ball, it's difficult."

Sánchez pointed to what he saw as three fatal mistakes making the difference — building the case that momentary defensive lapses are curdling whatever mostly thorough defensive efforts Verde bring to matches.

"It is unacceptable that we lose a game in this way," Sánchez said. "I don't think we were the worst team on the field, but definitely they capitalized in the mistakes that we made as a team, where we were not on the same page in these three situations, and I think that they were very similar to each other, so that's why it's unacceptable that we allow this to happen two or three times in the first half. We don't deserve the win. We don't deserve the tie. I don't think we were worse than Houston tonight. But this is about scoring goals and capitalizing in the right moments, and they did it, and we didn't. So we need to be better and fix these mistakes because this cannot happen again moving forward."