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New York City FC is on the outside looking in after its latest loss — a 2-0 road defeat at the hands of Lionel Messi-led Inter Miami — but it doesn’t appear that the club plans on changing its approach to game planning with the season down to its final five matches.
The club already had been coming off one of its ugliest losses of the season on Saturday in Chicago when Wednesday’s loss in South Florida dropped them below the cut line for Major League Soccer’s postseason.
But when asked by The Post when Pascal Jansen and his staff may resort to shaking things up to try to spark NYCFC, the head coach suggested that was something the coaching staff does before every match.
“That is assuming we don’t do this as a staff going into every game,” Jansen said. “We do that when we make our plans and try to put a winning team out there every game. So that makes no difference going into the stretch of five that is that remains to be played.”
NYCFC have not won a match since mid-September, which was a 2-0 win over Real Salt Lake — which stands as their only regular-season win since the Leagues Cup break in August, and has seen countless leads slip away in the second half.
Inter Miami built their lead in the first half, first with Germán Berterame on the finishing end of impressive ball movement by Miami and then Rodrigo De Paul blasted a shot by NYCFC goalkeeper Matt Freese in stoppage time in the first half.
Summing up NYCFC’s recent luck, Nicolás Fernández Mercau was turned away on a penalty kick in stoppage time in the second half that would have broken the shutout.
“It remains a very bad stretch and you can see the confidence in the team is a little weaker at the moment, which is something that is explainable given the stretch we’re in,” Jansen said. “But [our] strengths and weaknesses, I don’t think they have either been more exposed or become different throughout the stretch, that is something I don’t believe.”