As much as I want to, I can’t just write nothing and pretend that this game didn’t happen. I’m not going to bother with player ratings. It’s a bad use of my time, and certainly of yours. Nobody looked good for Rhode Island FC after Frank Nodarse’s straight red card in the 6th minute of the match.

You may wonder would Nodarse have received the lowest rating in Tide Talk’s Rhode Island FC Player Ratings history?

By definition, a 1/10 means “you might as well have me on the pitch”, so, unfortunately for Frank… I don’t see how I could give any score other than that. 

Do I think Frank deserved a red? There’s no replay that perfectly captures the moment, but you can see Frank’s hand (or hands) making contact above the DCFC players neck – so whether or not it was deserving, it puts the referee in a position where he has to make a judgement call based on what he saw.

Was there anything meaningful at all that Rhode Island FC can still take away from this game?

Not really. Matt Hands already wrote a post match blog with some thoughts. 

Good job by Matt Hands, because my three main takeaways would’ve been 1.) Trains are cool, 2.) Having Faygo as a sponsor is hilarious, and 3.) That was dumb.

The only thing that I would add is that I felt really optimistic about this match with how we lined up and how we started the match. Rhode Island FC returned to the 3-4-3 formation that led us to our first win of the season in Oakland, and then used again (to a less dominant result) in our Open Cup win over Portland Hearts of Pine.

Most significantly, it was the first start of the season for Herivaux and our first time deploying Kwizera in the right wing / right-sided forward role where he plays for Rwanda. Of course, we only got to see five minutes with either of those two players in those positions.

After the red card, when we went down to 10 men, we dropped Herivaux in to the back line to replace Frank, and moved Kwizera in to the right wing back position. This then pushed Maxi to play as the defensive holding midfielder, with Holstad and Fuson playing the more progressive midfield positions and JJ Williams alone up top. 

Honestly, the formation after the red card felt a bit disjointed, and it’s where the game unsurprisingly went wrong. Of course, we conceded twice before the 20 minute mark and the game was pretty much dead after that.

I do like the look we came out with after half time… We brought on Rio Hope-Gund for Maxi and switched to a back four with Sanchez and LB and Hope-Gund at RB (where he also made a good cameo against Portland). This shift saw Herivaux move back in to the midfield, and JJ once again with some support from Fuson and Kwizera up top. 

We actually put together some nice sequences after switching to the back four, but obviously it was too little and too late. 

If you’d told me leading in to the season that we’ve have four points from our first five league matches, I’d have said you were crazy. We all knew the road trip would be tough, but this has been exceptionally bad for a team that brought back the majority of a core that made it to the USL Championship Finals just five months ago. 

Rhode Island FC have been shut out in three out of their five matches played so far. We’re 21st in the league in Goals Per Match, and 16th in the league in Goals Conceded Per Match. At least at this point in the season in 2024, some of the underlying numbers were telling us that we were a good team getting bad results… I can’t say the same for this season.

There’s not much to do now besides hope that we build some momentum with a convincing win at Westchester this coming weekend, and turn Tidewater in to a fortress starting on May 3 against San Antonio FC – who started the season hot, but have now lost three in a row. 

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Rating Scale:

• 1/10 – Abysmal. You might as well have me on the pitch.
• 2/10 – Very bad
• 3/10 – Bad
• 4/10 – Below Average
• 5/10 – Average. The player did their job.
• 6/10 – Good
• 7/10 – Very good
• 8/10 – Great
• 9/10 – Outstanding
• 10/10 – Transcendent performance. Watch out, because Real Madrid may come knocking.