The ‘Yotes played their neighbors to the north in Toronto FC to a scoreless draw Saturday night, as the two teams could not break the deadlock and finished 0-0.
Below are our player ratings.
Below are our player ratings.
Each member of the Speedway Soccer crew gives each player that saw the pitch a rating based on their match performance. Below is a quick guideline for our evaluation process.
- A rating of 6 denotes an average performance. Each player starts out with a 6 and their performance either adds or subtracts from that rating.
- Scores are determined after re-watching the match and looking at the stats, and are the averaged total of each Speedway member’s ratings.
Joe Willis – 8.5: You had to figure Willis was in contention for Man of the Match considering the few chances that were created and him being able to stop any sort of threat that did occur on the night. Nevertheless, make that two clean sheets in a row for Nashville’s man between the posts.
Dan Lovitz – 7.3: Of all Nashville’s outfield players, it was Lovitz who created the most chances for Nashville with three, including seven passes into the final third. Also had four tackles.
Jack Maher – 7.5: Won four aerial duels and completed 94% of his passes from the back, including two-thirds of his long-ball attempts.
Walker Zimmerman – 7.5: Won half of his ground and aerial duels, and certainly gave the Toronto front line no real way past him on a number of occasions with his stellar positioning.
Shaq Moore – 8: Followed up his excellent efforts in Orlando with another stellar performance on the flanks, winning two tackles and logging eight recoveries.
Jacob Shaffelburg – 5.8: Not the most inspiring performance from Shaffelburg against his former club, winning 29% of his duels and only completing 33% of his dribble attempts, but you have to figure better days are ahead for the electric winger.
Anibal Godoy – 6.5: Godoy was dispossessed on a couple of occasions and only won 33% of his ground duels. His passing was solid though at 90% and 77% on long ball efforts.
Sean Davis – 6: Davis actually had a couple of shots, including a long-range effort that was on target. He wasn’t involved much on the ball, however, and lost all three ground duels.
Fafà Picault – 6.3: Fafà continued his solid play as well coming off of his first goal of the season the other night. The fact that he was the most fouled player in the match shows that he was continuously frustrating Toronto’s defense. However, he did not record a shot, which is a bit dissapointing.
Hany Mukhtar – 6.3: Mukhtar had the most shots for Nashville with four, with two on target. However, it was tough for him to create any additional attempts for his teammates.
CJ Sapong – 5: Another underwhelming performance by Sapong, with only one shot on 27 touches. The more alarming stat is his poor performance winning balls in the air, winning only 33% of his aerial duels. If Nashville is going to trust Sapong as it’s holdup No. 9, he must do better at winning those long balls and crosses.
Substitutes
Dax McCarty – 6.3: McCarty’s distribution was wonderful after his introduction, completing 90% of his attempts and all three of his long ball efforts.
Teal Bunbury – 5.5: Bunbury’s limited touches on saw his have one shot which was off target.
Alex Muyl – 4.8: Only won one tackle, but that was about it as far as his contributions go.
Manager
Gary Smith – 5.5: Let’s just call this game what it is: it was bowling shoe ugly. Neither side created any sort of convincing efforts during the 90 minutes of play, and it’s woefully apparent that Smith has no sort of game-changing substitute on his bench to flip the script in times like these. Sure, the defense was strong and limited Toronto, but the lack of offensive production in a match where Nashville could’ve capitalized on a solid defensive plan has to be a bit annoying. Regardless, Nashville come away with a point and now look ahead to a trip to the Empire State to face NYCFC.
