Shift to 4-2-1-3 provides good, bad moments, but flexibility encouraging

Jason Kreis's experimentation with formation continued in earnest last night, and with a 1-0 victory the result, there are certainly some positives to be gleaned from the match. As a one-off formation, there were both positives and negatives to take from the rolling out of a 4-2-1-3, with Kyle Beckerman, Ned Grabavoy and Javier Morales in the midfield.

Ned Grabavoy on the 4-2-1-3"Obviously going back to a more natural position where the workload is shared a little bit between Kyle and I, which is easier on your legs maybe; a little bit for both of us who've been playing a lot of games lately. But in saying that, obviously when Javier is healthy he's going to be in that attacking role and that's when we're at our best, so I think transitioning to the new shape was pretty good for the most part. It didn't seem like we were that sloppy. It seemed like we were pretty clean for the most part."

Good: Morales, Grabavoy, and Beckerman have been involved in a great many matches in the last few weeks, and they all played in the set of three matches in eight days. It's not intuitive from an unadulterated look at a squad chart, but the three-forward approach — which perhaps was less about three forwards and more about two wingers — mitigated the need for the midfielders to take up wide positions. As such, they were making fewer long, sprinting runs to either flank.

Bad: Getting those three moving into wide positions is part of our constitutional makeup at this point. We see the evidence week-in, week-out — when Kyle Beckerman gets into a wide position in the attacking third, play become so radically stretched that scoring a goal isn't the most difficult of propositions. When Morales is in wide positions, we look dangerous too — and both players taking up different spots opens up gobs of space for Ned Grabavoy.

Tony Beltran on the formation shift"I thought it was great. You know Ned and Becks in there do such a great job at keeping the ball, then you get Javier a little more feed from side to side then show up at dangerous spots. And having Plata and Garcia out wide, it's just such a threat on both sides. With speed and precision with the ball we're able to get them in our deepest areas. I like that formation. I like that we're able to, based on our opponents, have options."

Good: We got Olmes Garcia and Joao Plata on to the pitch, and we had a natural width about us as a result. We typically lack that natural width, so seeing that — and having both of those players available to track back and help out in defense — was interesting indeed. Natural defensive width is something we sometimes really miss.

Bad: I'm not sure it worked, having those two tracking back. We were generally less effective in transition, and while we defended nobly, I don't know that we defended better than we normally would with the diamond. We typically would have a wide midfielder tracking runs alongside the full back, so in that sense, it allowed us a greater opportunity to keep play in wide areas — there were fewer spaces centrally to exploit — and it gave us a less lopsided defensive stance.

Good: We were able to provide natural attacking width — as Tony points out — and that could have provided more dangerous moments. Interestingly, I'd wager that the formation was essentially the right half of our typical diamond made symmetrical — typically, Robbie Findley is not in a totally different spot than where Garcia was; the big difference was having Joao Plata higher than a left-sided midfielder would be.

Bad: We didn't capitalize on that. We needed those players to make more effective runs on the flank — they were a bit too static. I'll let Jason Kreis do the talking: "The other thing that I think if we're going to continue forward looking at that we've got to get those players moving more, I don't like them standing on their outside backs and getting themselves marked."

Finally, good: We need flexibility moving forward. Too many times in the past we shoehorned players into a system they weren't comfortable with — see Jean Alexandre as a forward, who did some good things but surely wasn't a forward. Playing to the strengths of our squad is incredibly important, and while I doubt Jason Kreis didn't accept that in the past, seeing him truly embrace that is encouraging.