Throughout the 2017 season, Orlando City’s captain, Kaká, has played just about everywhere in the midfield. He started the season on the wing, moved more centrally later on in the year and now after Wednesday's match against New England, has moved all the way up the pitch, playing as a true striker alongside Dom Dwyer. This wasn’t the first time Kaka had played as a striker, but it was the first time in Orlando that he played up top with another forward alongside him, and after six goals scored in the match, it seemed to have paid off for Head Coach Jason Kreis to make the tactical adjustment.
“Obviously what he can do in the opponent’s defensive third, our attacking third, is where he’s at his best,” Kreis said after the match, “We’ve seen where we play him in other positions where he tends to drop and drop and drop in an effort, in a very honest effort, to help us build up and build through the midfield. But that gets him away from where he does his best work. So we wanted to look at it tonight, really just to see what it would look like.”
Having Kaká stay up top to spend his energy pressing the back line and helping work off of Dom Dwyer in tandem seemed to play more to the captain’s strengths. Rather than having to come back to get the ball in the midfield, the Lions relied on Yoshi Yotun, Antonio Nocerino and Giles Barnes to initiate the offense and Kaká was able to take the ball and put himself into scoring spaces.
His two goals on the evening, one of them an absolute stunner from outside the box, marked his first multi-goal game this season and his first since September of last season.
“It was very good. An amazing goal, one of my signatures, I can say that. I’m very happy that I could score a goal like that and help the team to win like this. Tonight, we really played for pride and for our supporters because we’ve been facing a difficult period but tonight I think we showed how bad we want to give some happiness and fun for the supporters.”
Having shown the productivity and success that the captain has produced up top, Head Coach Jason Kreis will have some things to mull over before the team’s next match, coming up on Saturday against FC Dallas.
