MINNEAPOLIS – If matches were decided based on the balance of play the New England Revolution would’ve picked up six points in the past five days and stretched their unbeaten run to nine games.
But matches aren’t decided based on the balance of play, so instead the Revs have suffered their first back-to-back losses of the season following Wednesday night’s 2-1 defeat at Minnesota United FC.
Despite outshooting, out-possessing, and out-passing their hosts, New England were once again left ruing several missed opportunities and lamenting a pair of defensive miscues that led to both Minnesota goals in a first half that the Revs would just as soon prefer to forget.
“You can’t concede goals like we’ve been conceding the last two games,” said Revolution head coach Brad Friedel. “In the last two games, we’ve made five individual errors that have cost us games.
“I can never fault the players’ work rate – work rate is superb. I think in the first half, they were in our box maybe three times and they scored twice off our mistakes … If you keep putting yourself in these holes, sometimes you can crawl out of them, sometimes not, but we’ve got to be far more resilient mentally.”
Trailing 2-0 at halftime to a Christian Ramirez lob and a Darwin Quintero finish after slaloming through the backline, the Revs did so nearly crawl out of the hole. Diego Fagundez calmly finished off a penalty in the 52nd minute to cut the deficit in half, and from there New England peppered Minnesota relentlessly.
Fagundez, Scott Caldwell and Krisztián Németh all had quality bids denied by Loons goalkeeper Bobby Shuttleworth, who made six saves to keep his former team at bay.
“We always thought we could get back into it, and obviously with the (Fagundez) goal it kind of pushed us up a little bit more,” said Kelyn Rowe. “But we just couldn’t find the final pass and the final finish.”
The loss was another missed opportunity for the Revs to climb into fourth place in the Eastern Conference standings, but they’ll get yet another chance on Saturday night as they’ll wrap up their two-game road trip against the New York Red Bulls, currently seven points ahead of New England.
“The good thing is, we have another game right around the corner,” said Friedel. “We’ll have our suspended players back and we’ll be ready to go. It’s going to be another battle, and hopefully we can get the three points.”
