Minnesota Thunder – A Tale of 2 Seasons

The 2009 season has been a frustrating one for the Minnesota Thunder players, their front office staff and for the fans themselves. Inside Minnesota Soccer has broken down some numbers on the season and found some interesting patterns and facts.

With 2 games left to play, the Thunder have an overall record of 7 wins, 12 losses and 9 draws for 30 points. The team currently sit in 8th place out of 11 teams.

From the opening game on April 11th until July 9th the Minnesota Thunder had only 1 win. They also accumulated 8 losses and 5 draws in that 14 game span and earned only 6 points. In the process of the poor 1st half of the season the team were outscored 25 to 9.

Since the 2nd half of the season starting with the July 11th game against the Montreal Impact until last night’s game against the Puerto Rico Islanders, the team has 6 wins, 4 losses and 4 draws in 14 games and have earned 22 points, 16 more than the first half of the season. During that second half period of time, Minnesota outscored their opponents 25 to 17.

Since returning home from the team’s extended road trip in August, the Thunder are 3-1-1 with 13 goals scored to the opponents 7.

Against the 3 lowest teams in the league: Miami, Austin and Cleveland, the team is 3-3-3.

The Thunder have 12 losses this year but the team was beaten by only 1 goal 9 of those 12 losses. However, symbolic of a fairly young and inexperienced team, the other three losses all came on the road and the Thunder were embarrassingly blown out by a cumulative score of 12-2. Those losses were at Portland on June 19 (5-1), at Vancouver on July, 9 (4-0) and at Puerto Rico on August 27 (3-1).

“We have to beat the teams we’re supposed to beat,” said Thunder veteran Kevin Friedland after the 5-2 defeat of the Puerto Rico Islanders on Thursday evening. “Early on in the season, we were the team that everyone thought was the easy game. We’re better than that. We’re better than the Clevelands the Austins or the Miamis. At the same time we need to prove that and beat those teams. Cleveland beat us twice and we needed those points. We beat Montreal, we beat Puerto Rico, Rochester and Charleston the other night. Unfortunately this is too little too late, but it’s still good to get the result.”