Continuing a theme — or perhaps starting it since this game was played first Wednesday morning — throughout Orlando, coach Adrian Heath was not thrilled with his team’s performance in Wednesday’s 3-2 closed-door friendly with New York Red Bulls.
Some of it may be typical coachspeak, trying to downplay all successes or failures throughout the preseason, but Adrian Heath was not happy with his team’s effort or energy in the game. Calling out his team afterward, as Paul Tenorio of the Orlando Sentinel writes:
“Poor, very poor,” Heath said. “As pleased as I was at Jacksonville [on Saturday] I just said to the players I thought today was very poor. I thought our body language was poor from the beginning, didn’t come ready to play, I thought actually the second group was a lot better. It looked like it meant something more for the second group, and it probably did.”
Fielding largely their starting lineup, Orlando City gave up several opportunities and showed regression on their back line and defensive midfield. That led to plenty of goals and plenty of struggles for the team throughout the season that ended ultimately without a playoff berth.
Pedro Ribeiro won the game in the 85th minutes on a flick from Richie Laryea to Kevin Molino who crossed it to Ribeiro for the score. The good news on that was this was Molino’s first game situation since tearing his ACL last year. So it is a good sign to get Molino back on the pitch.
Kaka also scored on a header off a corner from Luke Boden and Adrian Winter scored off his own miss after the New York goalkeeper misjudged his jump to punch the ball over the bar.
The Lions are proving themselves capable of scoring and being dangerous around the net. But there are still consistency issues. They gave the lead up twice.
It is easy to read that and get a little bit too worked up. The important thing to note is that this was just a preseason game. It is hardly the time to overreact to much of anything. Heath’s warning is likely to keep the team alert after a preseason win rather than let them get full of themselves on on a meaningless victory.
Orlando City still has some work to do to get going though. It is clear about that.
