Columbus Crew rally past Charlotte FC for a resounding 3-1 win

Columbus Crew kept piling up shots like someone skipping stones across a lake: time and again the ball drifted close but wouldn't go in. It finished 3-1 over Charlotte FC at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field, but before getting there the home side had to come from behind and, more than anything, had to wait for the goals to start falling on the other end of the pitch.

The match opened with a cold shock for the Crew. In the 16th minute, Idan Toklomati finished with his right foot from the center of the box, low and tight to the left post, to put Charlotte FC ahead. It felt almost like an unfair twist given how the game had been unfolding, since Columbus had already给出 warning signs with attempts from Anass Zaroury and Josef Martinez. The response came eleven minutes later: Brais Mendez, with his left foot from outside the box, leveled the score in the 27th minute with a shot that slipped in by the right side of the net, assisted by Santiago Rodriguez. That's how the first half ended, with the home side already controlling play even though the scoreline didn't reflect it.

The second half was a different story. In barely two minutes, Columbus flipped the result completely. In the 62nd minute, Anass Zaroury struck with his right foot from the center of the box, through the middle of the goal, off a cross from Mohamed Farsi, making it 2-1. Two minutes later, in the 64th minute, Taha Habroune finished, also with his right foot from the center of the box, for the final 3-1. Two goals in almost back-to-back fashion broke open a match that had been tight up to that point.

A gap the numbers don't hide

If there was any justice in the final score, the numbers back it up. Columbus Crew finished with 33 shots to Charlotte FC's 9, and 14 shots on target against just 2 for the visitors. Possession was closer (52.9 percent to 47.1 percent), but in the final third the home side's dominance was total.

The post-match expected goals figure, calculated from shot locations, backs up that superiority: 4.44 for Columbus Crew against just 0.55 for Charlotte FC. It's a number that measures what happened on the field rather than a prediction, but it makes clear the home side deserved far more than a tight scoreline, and that Toklomati's early goal was, in large part, a deviation from the script being played out on the pitch.

That gap stands in contrast to what was projected before kickoff: our preview gave Columbus Crew a 37 percent chance of winning, 28 percent for a draw and 35 percent for Charlotte FC, with expected goals nearly identical for both sides, 1.46 for the home team and 1.45 for the visitors. What actually played out strayed far from that balance: the Crew didn't just win, they did it while generating several times more chances than their opponent.

What the result means in the standings

In the Eastern Conference, Charlotte FC came into this match in fifth place with 46 points, while Columbus Crew sat in 13th with 32, a 14-point gap between the two sides. The result doesn't change the overall arc of either team's season, but it does give Columbus a win that, given the volume of play on display, was more emphatic than the final score suggests. For Charlotte FC, meanwhile, there's the lingering sense of a match in which they did little with the little they had, and in which Toklomati's opening goal ended up being just a brief interruption within the visiting... sorry, home side's dominance.