In one of the first talks I had with Bob Bradley during LAFC’s preseason, he told me that success is never linear. At training this week, he invoked that lesson once again.
“You have to be tested as a team. At the 240-minute mark of our first season, we were looking pretty good. We’d scored nine goals, giving up just the one penalty against Real Salt Lake. Now as we are trying to control the game we lose the ball. It happens in football,” Bradley said after training referring to LAFC’s 4-3 loss to the Galaxy.
“When you try to play from the back, and the other team is stepping up, there’s going to be times where a decision to touch or whatever. But in the moment, your ability to deal with 3-1 knowing that the other team is now going to come back into the game, and keep trying to find the right ways to play football, get a fourth goal. And when you don’t do that, it just means that now the little details that we work on over and over and over to become a good team just need more attention.”
On the pitch of the Club’s new training facility, Bradley hammered home his point. Players were put in a variety of hyper-focused exercises throughout the week meant to sharpen their speed of thought and decisions in pressure situations.
The intense training sessions were not an indictment of the team following a loss, so much as a reminder of the core ideas Bradley has instilled. As he rightly pointed out, the team had passed with flying colors through two road matches prior to playing the Galaxy.
And even against the Galaxy, there were great moments reinforcing Bradley’s philosophy. As he points out, the high press to win the ball back for Carlos Vela’s first goal is the culmination of countless training sessions and not something to be forgotten.
“You grow as a team from each moment in a season,” Bradley said. “So if it didn’t happen on ‘Ibra Day’ then it was going to happen at some point. From our standpoint, yeah, it feels lousy that it happens in that way, on that day, against the Galaxy.”
“But, c’mon, it’s football. So we’re ready to move on.”
News & Notes
- Asked if he say any similarities between his side this week's opponent Atlanta United, Bradley had the following to say: "I think there’s some similarities. Obviously, they started last year with some exciting attacking players. They had some games early on where they scored goals and created excitement. I think all of those are positives. Then as they moved through the season, they looked for all the other ways to improve as a team. So we start with some excitement, but we still know that there’s a lot of things that need to happen to be more complete. To manage games better, to connect passes better, to have more possession, all this kind of stuff. Look, we’re not the complete deal by any means."
- Omar Gaber trained alone this week as he recovers from an LCL sprain of the right knee. While not in full training with the team, Gaber was running and doing drills with the ball on his own.
