Patience remains an elusive virtue for Legacy FC attack

As Boston Legacy FC continue to chase a first regular season NWSL win in club history, Friday night’s 1-0 loss against the first place San Diego Wave represented — if you’re willing to take a long-term view, as expansion teams must — another small step in the right direction.

Facing San Diego’s array of capable attackers, Boston stood tall for the entirety of the night, save one moment. It was a fairly impressive defensive effort, achieved through a relentless commitment to pressing and tackling, a style that’s already been established as a clear characteristic of Portuguese head coach Filipa Patão.

It was at the other end of the field that fledgling Legacy looked out of sorts. With only one goal scored now in four games, the team’s greatest issue is becoming conspicuous.

Patão, focused as ever on building the club from scratch, remains patient. In her postgame remarks, the former Benfica manager spoke thoughtfully about how climbing a mountain takes time and intense effort, but the drive to reach the top motivates players and staff on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, an honest assessment of her side’s current struggles is that each shot (let alone shot on goal, of which Boston registered none) feels like it requires more effort than summiting Mount Washington.

She admitted her team’s performance in the final third of the field — the space closest to the opponent’s goal — was too rushed against San Diego.

“I think our team [played] a good game,” Patão said. “We just need to find ourselves in the last third, because we [have] a lot of emotion when we arrive in the last third. We want to rush everything, and we just need to do exactly what we do in the buildup.

“Keep the ball, find the space, the free players, the free space, switch the game as much as we need, and don’t rush. If we rush, we are giving opportunities to the opponent to recover the ball and we’re going to make mistakes. I think in the last third we need to keep working and keep improving.”

Legacy passing was measurably less accurate than the Wave (78 percent passing vs. San Diego’s 86 percent accuracy). More specifically, Boston’s two starting forwards (Aissata Traoré and Amanda Gutierres) struggled to connect.

Gutierres, the club’s 25-year-old Brazilian Ballon d’Or nominee, was certainly involved in Boston’s buildup. She finished the night with 40 touches, more than any of the other center forwards on the field. But the powerful forward completed just 11 of 21 passes and was unable to recreate her assist to Traoré in last week’s 2-1 loss against Utah.

Patão credited her star for trying to drop into space between the lines of San Diego’s defense to help add a “fourth midfielder” for Boston to utilize.

“For me, Amanda needs to be like the joker inside the game. She has to have the freedom to be the fourth midfielder inside,” said the Boston coach, alluding to Gutierres’s capacity to move around the field.

Still, there is the elephant in the room: Gutierres also needs to provide more of a threat toward goal. Having netted 41 times in 42 appearances for Brazilian side Palmeiras in three seasons prior to arriving in Boston, she has yet to find her first goal in four appearances for Legacy FC.

“The only thing we need to improve and she needs to understand is when we move to the creation phase, we don’t need Amanda so [deep],” Patão told MassLive’s Peyton Doyle. “We need Amanda [closer] to the box, closer to the goal, because she’s good in that moment. But I understand she wants to help, she wants to have a little more time on the ball.

“Sometimes the best help you can give is stay [up there], stay between the lines, but closer to the last line.”

Boston’s coach remains patient in her analysis and approach. Now, her team just needs to adopt the same mindset in front of goal.