Chicago Fire Midweek Training: 3 takeaways from Week 9
The Chicago Fire have been sitting in failure for too long. Something needs to change. Here are three takeaways, or failures, from Week 9.
Hello and welcome again to the Chicago Fire’s midweek training, where I try to pick apart what the Fire should be working on going into the next game.
Let’s just get real for a second: The Chicago Fire are slipping. Hard. This is something that’s been a sort of theme for this publication between Adnan Basic and I, but there needs to be some sort of change. I’ve talked about this club as a team that has the players to win a championship but just can’t get there. Somewhere in this process, something has failed. There are ways to fix it with smaller measures, but when the people who are supposed to take those smaller measures aren’t taking those measures, then larger measures are needed. We’ll start small and get big.
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Here are three failures from the last week for the Chicago Fire.
3. Personnel failure
When you put together a team, you should have a general idea of what your starting XI is. Yes, competition is a good thing and, if someone proves that they deserve to play, they’ve earned the right to play. Moreover, if and when someone isn’t performing well enough, you bench them and play someone else. But the Chicago Fire line-up against the Montreal Impact tells a different story.
I have nothing against Jorge Corrales, but when you have several options at a position, you use the player who has shown the best on the pitch, not the worst. Jeremiah Gutjahr is not a defender. That is not his position. But he has nonetheless played well in that position. Corrales is coming back from an injury after multiple games in which a mistake of his led to a goal. There’s something to be said about playing someone in their natural position, but when that player isn’t playing as well as the out-of-position player, it doesn’t matter. Once again, a mistake from Corrales directly led to a goal, the winning goal.
On the attacking end, Przemysław Frankowski has been injured for the past few weeks. During the games he played in, he was an amazing spark in the attack and his speed brought back something that the Fire had been missing since trading David Accam. From what I’ve heard, he probably wasn’t completely ready to come back from injury yet. But he was on the bench. And the Fire needed someone to score goals, or at the very least lead the team to a goal. And yet, he was not turned to until the 75th minute, which is far too late for him to make a genuine impact on the match.