FRISCO - After its two most successful weeks of the year, the FC Dallas offense couldn’t connect in the final third as the team suffered its first MLS loss to San Jose on Saturday night.
“We were not clear in the final third,” Oscar Pareja said after the match. “We didn’t have many ideas of how to break down that line of four and two that San Jose had out there. We didn’t turn the lights on in any moment of the game.”
Dallas would dominate possession with a season-best 62 percent and take 16 shots over the match, but could only manage three on target in the loss. It was the lowest percentage of shots on target for the team this year.
Full credit goes to the Quakes’ defense, though, with six blocked shots in the game, five coming in the opening half.
“We weren’t really too creative going forward and we weren’t really much of a threat as we wanted to be,” Kellyn Acosta said. “We were kind of lackadaisical. Previous games, the forwards, defenders were kind of in tune and in sync and today we kind of lacked that and it definitely showed.”
After two straight matches starting in a 4-4-2 look, Pareja opted to move back to the 4-2-3-1 formation with Javier Morales getting his first minutes in almost a month. It was a move that helped Dallas control the ball and be more creative in the middle, according to the coach, but one that couldn’t solve the stingy San Jose defense.
“We possessed the ball a lot, maybe more than any other game, but we could not find the final pass,” Morales said. “We couldn’t find spaces or room in the final third. We couldn’t create chances there. If you make a pass and score a goal, but we couldn’t.”
There’s not much time for Pareja and the staff to tinker with the offense, however, as FCD heads to Chicago to face the Fire on Thursday night (7:30 p.m.; FCDallas.com) before returning home to face the Houston Dynamo on Sunday (7 p.m.; FS1).