Training Ground Notebook: Public Knowledge
- Jason Longshore
- 3 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Atlanta United is heading to Orlando with belief in the work and a problem it keeps struggling to solve. Can they figure out how to do that?
Atlanta United spent the last week sounding like a team that understands its own habits well enough to name them clearly. The problem is that naming a habit and breaking it are two different things.
The Five Stripes head to Orlando for a doubleheader: MLS match 13 on Saturday and the US Open Cup quarterfinal Tuesday. Tomás Jacób and Luke Brennan spoke to the media Tuesday. Gerardo "Tata" Martino and Manu Latte Lath spoke Thursday. All four circled the same questions. What happens after the 70th minute? Where is the team's level of belief after the Galaxy loss? And what does it take for a designated player to find his footing when the whole league is discussing his salary?
The Seventy-Minute Problem
Nobody inside the building is pretending this one away.
Atlanta has delivered strong soccer for large stretches of matches and then let opponents back in during the final twenty minutes. The Galaxy game was the sharpest example. Atlanta played well, took the lead, and then watched Marco Reus come off the bench and tilt the game.
Tomás put it directly, and there was no hedging in it: "It happens to us in most games. When we get to the 70th minute, I don't know if it's something about us or what, but we lose concentration and start getting caught out of position." The goals in those moments, he said, come from inattention, from not being in the right positions, especially when the team is winning.
He went further: "If you think about it, we played seventy very good minutes, and then four minutes of inattention and you throw it all away."
Atlanta has conceded seven times after the 75th minute this season, and Orlando has shown an ability to find late goals as they have scored four in the same interval. Jacob knows it is an issue:
"It's something we talk about, something we have to correct, and we're all aware it's happening to us. But I don't think it's alarming. It's small details we need to fix that end up costing us."
They know. They talk about it. Now they have to fix it.
Martino Protects Muyumba, But The Diagnosis Goes Deeper
Tata Martino had the most layered comments of the week, and the most revealing ones came when he was asked about Tristan Muyumba after the error that led to Los Angeles' first goal.
He did not flinch: "Tristan has been our most consistent player" across the first twelve matches. He said when he reviews individual errors, he does not even consider making a change because of them. What concerns him more are collective mistakes, and that is the frame he applied to the Galaxy goal.
"When we show that play specifically, it's hard to show that it wasn't a specific individual player's mistake," he said. "But what I try to explain to them and show them is that there was a concept of the collective that wasn't correct that ultimately leads to the player making an individual mistake (being exposed)."
He was almost wry about the public perception: "If Tristan is playing in Argentina, for example, and he's walking in the street, it's very probable everyone's gonna point and say that's the player who made the mistake on the goal. But we try to show them that there's something wrong conceptually as a collective that ultimately leads to that."
The detail that made this argument land was the distance. This was not a mistake ten meters from Atlanta's goal. Martino said it happened seventy meters away. That is why the error is conceptual rather than simply individual. "It's very rare that a team makes a mistake 70 meters from their own goal and every one of those mistakes ends up as a goal," he said. Something else has to go wrong between the error and the ball crossing the line. In this case, the something else was collective.
He did not want to name what that collective error was. "That's for inside," he said, with a small smile.
A Doubleheader Nobody Has Done Before
Jacob said something that landed with a quiet surprise. In his career, he has never faced the same opponent in back-to-back matches. "Never, first time. I think it's a challenge, to see how we prepare during the week, how they prepare. I'm very eager for those games to arrive, because it's never happened to me and I don't know what it'll feel like."
He has never felt it before. He is curious to find out what it is like.
Martino is less preoccupied by the novelty. He noted it has happened before in his career, against Orlando in 2017 when they played in Orlando on a Friday night and then the final match at Bobby Dodd Stadium eight days later. For him, the back-to-back is more of a logistical reality than a tactical puzzle. The team will stay in Orlando between the two matches rather than travel back to Atlanta, which he said is the main practical advantage. "It's planned much more around the fact that we're playing two games in the same city than around doing something different," he said. The decision to stay is driven by logistics and recovery, not by any special plan to build chemistry.
What will change is the roster. "For sure, it will be a different team," he said. How different will depend on how players recover from Saturday before Tuesday's cup match.
Luke Brennan, who spoke earlier in the week, described the approach in training as consistent regardless of competition. "I think we train the same. I think maybe getting closer to the game, we do a little different, just tactical stuff, but I think we always have the same approach. And every day is a day to get better and be the best version of yourself."
The Open Cup Is Not A Consolation Prize
Jacob was emphatic about what the US Open Cup means to this group, and his reasoning was practical and direct.
"It's a tournament of six, seven matches, and after those games you can be champions. So you have to get your mind right and go game by game." Six or seven matches and you can win a trophy. That is not a rationalization. That is a genuinely short tournament that a team can set its mind to winning.
He said Atlanta has already built real confidence in the competition after stringing together three consecutive wins. The objectives are layered but honest: "Our goal is also to win the US Open Cup. It's a tournament we can win, and we're convinced of what we can do. And then get to the playoffs." Win the cup. Make the playoffs. And once you are in the playoffs, you play with a winner's mentality.
On the league table, he acknowledged the margin of error is shrinking but said the team's goal of finishing in the top four of the Eastern Conference remains fixed. "We know very clearly there are still a lot of games left. This is a long season, and fortunately, because it's so long, you have some margin for error. But that margin keeps getting smaller."
Latte Lath And The Weight Of The List
The MLS Players Association released its annual salary figures this week. Latte Lath's name was on it near the top, the second highest-paid player in this team. Martino addressed the dynamic without being asked to, because it is the dynamic that defines how designated players are seen in this league regardless of what is actually happening on the field.
"It's very hard to take the responsibility off of designated players in MLS," he said. "When the player salaries come out like they did yesterday, everyone looks at the list. And then when you see that, it's like he has to take the ball out of the net, dribble ten players, and score a goal." He referenced a James Harden headline he had seen that morning, someone asking what more the player has to do to justify what he makes. The same logic applies to Latte Lath. Salary becomes the lens through which every touch is judged.
Martino's comments about the striker in the Thursday session were the most candid he has been about Latte Lath's situation. He said the forward has not been able to replicate what he did in the Championship, and that beyond the tactical adjustments being asked of him, there is a mental component he cannot ignore.
"He hasn't been able to replicate his Championship form, and that definitely has to do with things on the field, but I don't know if there might also be things off it. What's clear is that he's never quite felt comfortable." He said when he speaks with Latte Lath directly, he does not see any clear reason for the struggles. But he believes the player is very aware of his own distance from the version of himself that earned the move to Atlanta, and that awareness has weight. "For a player, it's something that gnaws at you, something that worries you and keeps you from feeling whole when you can't find that form again."
Latte Lath himself was honest without being dramatic. He acknowledged the frustration directly: "When a striker hasn't scored in a long time, you feel a bit of frustration." But he pushed back against the idea of it consuming him. "Don't think of it as something you have to kill. It just means you have to find more strength to keep going every day and keep attacking."
When asked what Martino tells him when he does not start, he said he does not enjoy it, that no player does. But: "I try to accept what he gives me. If he gives me five or ten minutes, I give everything in those minutes, without thinking about scoring, because playing with scoring on your mind does damage to me and to the team. So I take what they give me."
The salary list made Latte Lath's situation more public than any of them would prefer. Martino's answer to that was simple: "There's no reason not to think he can find that form again." He is young. He has shown the quality. The staff believes it.
The Pressing Argument
Luke Brennan, 21 years old, gave the week its most forward-looking thread.
He started with the Galaxy lesson: "We just need to finish out games. Continue to work on it." Short, direct, no excuses. On the Galaxy's turnaround once Reus entered: "I think it was just the counter. They had us on the counter a couple of times."
On the attacking third ahead of Orlando: "I think just winning the ball in their half. We're a very pressing team, so I think the more we can win in their half, the more goals we can score."
There is a direct line between what Brennan described and what Jacob and Martino said about what the team have been building toward: a team that is the protagonist, that presses high, that wins the ball in dangerous areas and uses it. The players and the coach speak the same language about what this team is supposed to be.
Now comes the part where Orlando is another opportunity to show they can be that. Twice. Once in a regular season match where points are needed to climb the table into the playoff positions and then three days later in a US Open Cup quarterfinal. It's a vital 72 hours for Atlanta United in 2026.