Nashville SC missed a golden opportunity to widen the 2nd-place points gap between itself and the pack behind it with a 2-2 draw against Orlando City SC Wednesday night.
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 – 6.3: Willis played well and commanded his box, but was in an awkward spot with both the questionable penalty and own-goal in the dying minutes.
Dave Romney – 6.8: Had three clearances, but lost all of his aerial duels.
Walker Zimmerman – 7:  Pocketed Darryl Dike in every sense of the word, including a potentially goal-saving tackle on Orlando’s target man.
Jack Maher – 5.8: Was called for the foul that led to Dike’s penalty in a pretty questionable fashion if one reviews the replay.
Alistar Johnston – 6.3:  A quiet day from Johnston on his flank on the offensive side, but he did have solid tracking of Orlando’s wingers.
Dan Lovitz – 6.8:  Put in some great switches of play from his flank in addition to his defensive work.
Dax McCarty – 8.3: McCarty completed an astonishing 97% of his passes and created four chances for his side. An outstanding performance from the captain.
Anibal Godoy – 6.3: Won the majority of his duels and had several recoveries to keep the Orlando midfield honest.
Hany Mukhtar – 8.5: Not a great penalty from Mukhtar, but he followed his shot well and still finished to put Nashville up 1-0 early. His darkhorse MVP campaign is starting to become a reality.
Randall Leal – 8: Scored Nashville’s second goal when Orlando sat back and didn’t put enough pressure on him as he closed in on the box.
CJ Sapong – 6.3:  No shots this go-around for Nashville’s target man, which he’ll have to improve on if he wants to recapture his previous run of form.
SUBS
Alex Muyl – 5.8:  Misplaced a few shots and crosses when he was brought on.
Jhonder Cadiz – 4: Invisible for the duration of his time in the match. Made little effort to offer himself as a target man.
Brian Anunga – 5: Anunga had a good run or two with the ball from, but was really unfortunate to be the own-goal for the Orlando equalizer.
Ake Loba – 5.5:  Only came on for a few minutes, with not enough time to impact the match.
MANAGER
Gary Smith – 5.3:  A pretty disappointing result all things considered since Nashville looked like the clearly superior side throughout the course of the match. Unfortunate to concede the own goal and get the penalty call against them, but they still had their chances to kill the match off up 2-0. If this team has aspirations at a deep playoff run or silverware, there must be a killer instinct formed.
What say you? Do you agree or disagree with our match ratings? Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter and let us know your thoughts.
