BEAVERTON, Ore. – Portland’s USL team, T2, heads into Sunday’s game at Providence Park against Orange County Blues FC (6pm PT, TICKETS, Webstream) having jumped out to a quick start in their inaugural season with a 3-2-1 record that puts them in second place in the Western Conference.
Forward Kharlton Belmar is tied for the league lead in goals with five and leads an offense that creates attacking width, fast runs into the box, and puts pressure on opposing defenses via an active 4-3-3 formation.
So far this season, T2 has created many of its best attacking opportunities through the combination play of those three front-three attacking players. This, says T2 head coach Jay Vidovich, comes down to a couple of factors.
"We're able to punish teams with the athleticism of Rundell Winchester and Kharlton Belmar and a Fatawu [Safiu] or Schillo [Tshuma]," said Vidovich.
"The other thing that we've been quite good at in bits and pieces is overloads on the flank," he added. "With our outside backs [Andy Thoma and Taylor Peay] going forward, which is a trait of the first team as well, we've created those overloads and service in the box."
Nowhere was the effectiveness of that wide play more evident than in T2's home opener against Real Salt Lake Monarchs, a 3-1 win at Merlo Field.
T2's third goal of that match began when Winchester played a simple pass to midfielder Blair Gavin in the center circle. Gavin sent the ball forward to Tshuma who quickly played the ball out wide to left back Thoma. Thoma beat his man, crossed into the box, and picked out Winchester, who scored off a diving header after sprinting into the box from midfield.
Over the first month of the 2015 USL regular season, T2's main attacking players—Winchester, Belmar, Tshuma, and Fatawu—have developed a chemistry that's resulted in seven of T2's nine goals.
"We've all gotten on the same page to where we understand each other," said Belmar. "If Rundell is coming across me, I know he's going to beat whoever he's running with, so I just need to go a place where I can support him.”
Belmar noted that goals like his first one that was scored against Arizona United in a 2-0 win, come straight from the training ground.
"We open up almost every practice with a passing activity that stresses opening up space and if you go back and look at that goal, that's exactly how it started," he noted. "That's something that we do almost every day. We just all understand our roles and what we have to do. It was straight from training."
But the speed and physicality of the T2 attackers also has a major impact on the other side of the ball.
"[The attackers have] been able to put teams under pressure defensively as well as stretch them," said Vidovich.
That sort of constant pressure hurries opposing defenders and leads to critical turnovers that the T2 attackers have been able to capitalize on. Against the Monarchs, Belmar rushed the goalkeeper, took the ball right off of his foot, and finished into an empty net.
As the season wears on, the attacking core of T2 will continue to gel and this, says Belmar, means trouble for opposing defenses.
"There's not too many teams in the league who are to be able to match all three of us up top for pace," he said. "If they can match one of us, they're not going to be able to match the other two.
"It's going to be really difficult for teams to defend against and, if we're all on the same page, it's going to be really hard to stop."
