{"id":44738,"date":"2017-03-25T17:27:38","date_gmt":"2017-03-25T21:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/?p=44738"},"modified":"2017-03-25T17:36:36","modified_gmt":"2017-03-25T21:36:36","slug":"fagundez-i-think-juans-really-a-number-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/?p=44738","title":{"rendered":"Fagundez: \u201cI think Juan\u2019s really a number 9\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo credit: Chris Aduama\/aduamaphotography.com<\/p><\/div>\n

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. \u2013 It took less than four minutes into Saturday afternoon\u2019s match to tell it was going to be a different day for the New England Revolution offense. After two road losses to open the season, in which the Revolution scored a combined one goal\u2014and that coming from the penalty spot\u2014it didn’t take long into their home opener against struggling expansion side Minnesota United FC to net their first goal from the run of play.<\/p>\n

Head coach Jay Heaps had opted to play Lee Nguyen up top in the first two games with Juan Agudelo playing as the attacking midfielder, but swapped the two back to their more natural positions on Saturday. The move paid almost immediate dividends as Agudelo got forward into the box to head home a cross from Chris Tierney inside of four minutes for his first goal of the season.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Juan\u2019s really a number 9 and not a number 10 and then when you have Lee in there we can find more movement and the attack flows a little bit better,\u201d said Diego Fagundez.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Nguyen and I] alternate multiple times, maybe a little bit less today\u2014I stayed a little bit higher,\u201d said Agudelo. \u201cMore possession of the ball, a little bit less defensive work. I thought it worked out well for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The change was one Heaps said was made to take advantage of what they saw out of Minnesota.<\/p>\n

“We did that by design just to get a little bit more for Lee underneath and we felt like there were going to be gaps in the midfield and I thought we had a really good first half,” said Heaps. “It put Juan in a really good position to score a couple goals.”<\/p>\n

After a brief scare from a 15th<\/sup> minute Collen Warner long rang equalizer, Nguyen, in his midfield role, and Fagundez combined to set up Kei Kamara in the 21st<\/sup> minute for an easy tap-in. It was the star Designated Player\u2019s first time finding the back of the net in the 2017 season.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re playing at home, we\u2019re comfortable,\u201d said Nguyen. \u201cIt\u2019s just one of those things where anytime we\u2019re at home we just want to be on the attack and try to put teams on the back foot. That helps, but at the same time this was our third game, so we\u2019re eventually going to start clicking. It was a good outing for our team offensively and I think we put a good shift in defensively as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nguyen then made it three for New England in the 32nd<\/sup> minute after Agudelo was tripped up making a run into the box earning a penalty kick, which Nguyen would convert. At that point, the rout was one.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first one that went in felt really good confidence-wise as a player, that\u2019s the type of game you want to play when you\u2019ve already scored a goal and you have more time to score another one, it gave me a lot of confidence going on,\u201d said Agudelo.<\/p>\n

Nine minutes later Fagundez would find Agudelo open on the left flank and the striker would cut inside the box around a defender before beating former Revolution goalkeeper Bobby Shuttleworth inside the near post to make it 4-1.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just trying to get open as much as possible, get the ball and make sure that our forwards are getting rewarded,\u201d said Fagundez. \u201cI told Juan that if he\u2019s going to make a hard run I\u2019m going to reward him. That\u2019s what we should do. When you have good players like that that are always moving and want the ball then you just have to give them the ball and they just score goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

New England would then recover from a sloppy goal given up in the 49th<\/sup> minute to finish off the match with another penalty kick after Fagundez was tripped up making a run into the box. Chris Tierney would convert to make it 5-2 in the 53rd<\/sup> minute and finish off the convincing victory and strong performance by the offense. The Revolution never scored more than three goals in a match in 2016 and hadn’t score five since they did so in back-to-back games in May 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew we weren\u2019t going to lose this game,\u201d said Fagundez. \u201cWe had it in our minds that we were going to leave here with three points and I think it showed. Everybody worked hard, everybody was not selfish and when we had our chances we finished them. We probably could\u2019ve had a couple more, but we have to get the positives and move on to the next one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Position swap between Juan Agudelo and Lee Nguyen helps spark Revolution offense to five goals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44736,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[142,891,1304,558,107,49,888,892],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nesoccertoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Agudelo-17.png?fit=600%2C415","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44738"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44738"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44744,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44738\/revisions\/44744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nesoccertoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}