Sockers Taking Breather : Soccer: Team gets a day off after earning a 3-1 advantage over the Blast. Players are ready to get back to work.
Ron Newman must be going soft. The Socker coach decided to prepare for Game 5 of the MSL semifinal series against Baltimore by giving his players a day off Friday.
Today’s game (4:05 p.m.) could be the series’ last. The Sockers lead, 3-1, and have won the past two on the Blast’s home turf.
Winning a third in a row would be fine with Socker forward Thompson Usiyan, a seven-year MSL veteran who has never played in a championship series.
“All my career I’ve been a big goal scorer,” Usiyan said. “But I have nothing to show for it. This year, hopefully, there will be some satisfaction at the end of it.”
If there is, Usiyan will be a big reason why.
His regular-season goal total (29) is way down from the 64 he scored as a member of the St. Louis Storm in 1990-91. So are his assists (28). He had 38 a year earlier. But Usiyan is only now finding his niche on a team that for most of the season found his style of play to be backward.
While the Sockers have spent the past several years honing a straight-ahead offense of sprinting and passing, more often than not Usiyan plays offense with his back to his goal. He’ll slow the Sockers’ relentless pace, he’ll survey the defense, then he’ll wheel and deal.
He does most of his play-making from along the corner boards, which in itself is a drastic change in the Sockers’ scheme of things.
“Where Tomo differs from former players is that Tomo likes to go to the side,” said midfielder Jacque Ladouceur, who has played his entire seven-year indoor career with the Sockers. “Someone like Juli Veee didn’t like to go into the corners at all. Everything would go through the middle.”
Although Usiyan is receiving many more passes in the corners lately and although his teammates are starting to make runs to open areas when they see him with his back to them, Usiyan has not had a dramatic rise in his point production. But he has been consistent this season.
Still, there is some statistical evidence that suggests Usiyan is having more of an impact of late.
In the last month of the regular season, Usiyan put together a streak of nine consecutive games in which he passed for at least one assist. What’s more, Usiyan was held scoreless six times in the Sockers’ first 16 games, but has been held without a point only twice in the past 28 games (regular season and playoffs combined).
“It’s taken us the whole season to adjust to him, really,” Ladouceur said. “But I think we’re at the point now that we’ve got things cooking pretty well.”
It is somewhat odd that it has taken one of the league’s premier scorers an entire season to mesh into the Sockers’ offense. In the past, the offense has accommodated any style.
It has been a malleable system that at one point allowed Veee, Steve Zungul, Branko Segota, Hugo Perez and Jean Willrich--five of the league’s most prolific scorers--to flourish together. Other teams, like this season’s St. Louis Storm, have tried to pack that many superstars on the same offense but found one ball wasn’t enough to go around.
But maybe “the system” gets too much credit.
“I don’t think there is a system,” Usiyan said. “Other than getting good athletes together and letting them do their thing. A system might work in a sport like basketball where you can have one player bring the ball down the court every time. But soccer is such a dynamic sport, anything can happen and so much does happen at every moment that players have to adjust.”
One problem Usiyan has had all season is coming off the field for the defensive runner. He complains that doing so takes him out of his rhythm. But in the past two games defensive runner Was Wade has been playing a forward position, which has allowed Usiyan to take full shifts.
He has responded with a goal and three assists.
But Usiyan doesn’t want to talk about numbers.
“I didn’t come here to be a leader in goals or assists,” he said. “I came here to have an opportunity to win a championship.”
