FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – Brad Friedel harped on a few key points during his introductory press conference back in mid-November, including what he perceived as a lack of balance in the New England Revolution’s attack last season.
Kei Kamara (12) and Lee Nguyen (11) combined to account for 43 percent of the club’s goals in 2017, while Juan Agudelo (8), Diego Fagundez (7) and Teal Bunbury (7) combined for another 42 percent. Beyond those five, New England didn’t have any other player score more than a single goal.
“It was one or two players who were goal-heavy – which is great, you don’t want the goal tallies to go down in that regard,” Friedel said on Tuesday morning. “But we wanted to add some more goals from different areas of the field.”
It’s a relatively small sample size at just seven games, but the Revolution’s recently-completed preseason schedule seems to indicate that Friedel may have found that desired balance.
Newcomer Cristian Penilla scored a pair of goals from the left wing, Rowe and Bunbury also had a pair of goals from central midfield and forward, respectively, while Fagundez, Brian Wright, Brandon Bye, Femi, Krisztián Németh, and Antonio Delamea all found the back of the net, as well.
All told, New England’s 13 preseason goals were scored by nine different players, including forwards, wingers, central midfielders and defenders.
“We’ve got guys scoring all over the place,” said Rowe. “There are obviously one or two that are above the rest – we hope those are the forwards in every case – but we’ve got a lot of attacking prowess here.”
Friedel was particularly happy to see Bye and Delamea find the scoresheet; Bye with a barnstorming run down the right wing and Delamea with a powerful header from a Fagundez cross.
“You always want your defenders, if possible, to pop up with a few goals on set pieces, which is nice that we’ve seen that in preseason,” said Friedel. “You just never know how the season’s going to pan out, but if we can get an accumulation of goals from many different people, that would be outstanding.”
