There are now just two games left in the season for the Legion before the long cold winter until the 2026 season. The final home game is upon us this weekend and it pits the two bottom teams in the East.
The Legion and The™ Miami FC are split by 3 points, the difference being the Legion’s 2-1 win at Pitbull Stadium back in May. The Legion can still finish as high as 9th; Miami can only make it to 11th. Obviously, there is some pride still to be had for both teams in closing out the season in good form.
As to that, Miami and the Legion are both coming off 2 good games. Miami lost 0-1 in Louisville last week, but it was an extremely close affair and they held Lou City off until very late and nearly equalized in second-half stoppage time. Before that they looked very good beating the Pittsburgh Riverhounds 3-1. The Legion’s last 2 games you should already know about. Sundays’ game (4:00pm, ESPN+) could well be an entertaining contest.
The win over Pittsburgh was Miami’s first since mid-June, a run of 16 games in all competitions. That’s even worse than the 10-game run (11 in league play) the Three Sparks just broke. They also scored just 10 goals in that run and their 25 goals in the Championship are barely better than Las Vegas’ paltry 21. And yet, they have a player in the running for the Golden Boot. Francisco Bonfiglio is just 3 goals off current leader Cal Jennings’ 16. However, he has turned stone cold of late and hasn’t scored since August, a run of 6 games without finding the net. The team as a whole has only scored in that win over Pittsburgh in that same stretch as well. None of that is good, obviously.
The team is managed by Argentinian Gaston Maddoni. He has, to say the least, modeled the team after his own style. To that end he has 11 Argentinians on the roster; there are just 11 Americans in the squad. I did ask Mark Briggs if he was planning to have as many Spanish speakers on the field as possible; he just laughed.
Beyond that, Miami is a difficult team to pin down stylistically. Against the Three Sparks back in May they played a 4-4-2. They also used that in last week’s game with Louisville, but leading up to that they used a 3-4-2-1, a 4-2-3-1 twice and a 5-3-2. 4 different formations in the past 5 games. I aksed Mark Briggs how that affects the Legion’s preparation: “We do like individual line meetings. So we’ve tried to [tell the] guys ‘You may see this, you may see this, you may see this.’ We tried to, you know, as best describe them as we possibly can, so the payers are comfortable with whatever they face. But there’s a lot of rotations, there’s a lot of movements, there’s a lot of different systems. We’ve just got to prepare the guys for what they might see but also focus on who we want to be Sunday.”
As far as who the guys will actually be there are a few players with injuries. Tyler Pasher’s hamstring has apparently been acting up again, Sebastian Tregarthen in fact broke his arm badly against North Carolina and Sam Shashoua is dealing with a heel issue still. Sebastian Saucedo could be back (he looked fine in training Friday). Kameron Lacey will likely be out, as will Moses Mensah. Nothing really new on that front.
(Excerpted from the Football Forge)