Houston’s the Solution to Austin FC’s Attacking Problem: Verde Blast Three Goals Past Dynamo in Open Cup Win

The 3-1 victory advances Nico Estevez’s team to the quarterfinals.

Cup competitions have been a regular source of embarrassment for Austin FC. Looking back on the team’s past forays in knockout tournaments is like flipping through old yearbooks: you cringe to keep from crying.

In 2022, in Austin FC's first (very brief) US Open Cup adventure, the Verde and Black suffered the indignity of losing to its I-35 neighbors, San Antonio FC from the USL, in its first match. The following season brought a Round of 16 exit to the Chicago Fire in the only decent game Xherdan Shaqiri ever played in MLS. Continental opposition hasn’t been any kinder. Try uttering "Violette" in the supporters section at Q2 Stadium and see what happens. Ditto for "Mazatlan" and "FC Juarez."

Austin FC’s US Open Cup Round of 32 match against the El Paso Locomotive this season was nearly the equivalent of turning up to a job interview with a bright yellow mustard stain on your shirt. But a second-half flurry of goals meant Verde avoided humiliation and won 3-2, setting up Wednesday night’s Round of 16 home match with the Houston Dynamo.

Chaotic would be the best way to describe Austin FC’s eventual 3-1 victory. There were positives. Any match involving two Verde Designated Players (DPs) finding the back of the net is cause for unrestrained celebratory shouting - it’s only happened one other time this season, the El Paso win.

Brandon Vazquez opened the scoring in the 29th minute with a sublime individual effort to keep a Jon Gallagher cross alive, swivel, and fire the ball by Houston goalkeeper Jimmy Maurer. Osman Bukari made it 2-0 for Austin FC by converting a 56th-minute penalty, and he followed that up by assisting Ilie Sanchez’s goal four minutes later. DPs performing like DPs - it's a novel but not unwelcome concept in the Texas capital.

Sanchez’s goal was only the second goal scored by an Austin FC midfielder in 2025. While expecting Sanchez to put his name on the scoresheet consistently would be overly optimistic - he’s only scored more than one league goal in a campaign twice in his career - other Verde non-forwards delivering goal contributions would help ease some of the scoring burden off the team’s heavily-scrutinized front three.

“Good teams (have) multiple players that score goals,” Verde head coach Nico Estevez said in his post-match press conference. “We only focus on the forwards, and it’s not fair…I think the best teams are the ones that have more than two, three players that score goals,” he added.

And now the negatives: Julio Cascante picking up a 94th-minute red card for an apparent denial of a goal-scoring opportunity was a late buzzkill (two stoppage time red cards, the other being shown to Houston’s talented young midfielder Brooklyn Raines three minutes prior, added to the surreal feel of the match).

Also suboptimal from an Austin perspective was getting outshot 20-10 at home against a team that began the match with several key starters on the bench - Houston’s DP attackers Ondrej Lingr and Ezequiel Ponce didn’t start, and neither did midfield metronome Jack McGlynn or high-flying right-back Griffin Dorsey, but all came on as second-half substitutes. The game state certainly played a role in that lopsided shot total, with Austin FC going up a goal relatively early in the match, but the momentum chart from the contest showed Verde failed to control proceedings for the majority of the night.

Image via SofaScore.com

Houston accrued double the penalty box touches to Austin - 30 to 15 in favor of the Dynamo (all stats per FBRef.com or FotMob.com unless otherwise noted) - and completed 239 passes in the opposition’s half to Austin’s 84. Frustratingly, this scattershot performance comes after perhaps the most comprehensively controlling display of Estevez’s fledgling Austin FC tenure.

Last Saturday against the vaunted Vancouver Whitecaps, Austin FC had 34 penalty box touches to Vancouver’s 15. And Verde won the expected goals (xG) battle by a margin of one - it was the second-highest positive xG differential in a match for Austin FC this season. The highest came against the flatlining Los Angeles Galaxy, so take that one with more salt than an order of McDonald’s fries.

To praise Austin FC’s performance after a 0-0 draw and grouse after a 3-1 win may seem odd. But if you take one kernel of wisdom from your Oak Tree Times subscription, I hope it’s this: soccer is a bizarre and funny sport, and the final score often fails to illuminate what the heck actually happened. And you don’t have to take my word for it.

“Sometimes this sport is a little bit of a lie,” Estevez mused post-match. “I think we’ve played better matches than the one that we had today, and today we scored three goals…today we won the boxes, and the opponent won the control of the game,” he continued.

But to fret too much over the details when Austin FC advanced to its first Open Cup quarterfinal in team history is probably missing the point of an entertaining, helter-skelter cup match. The win-or-go-home nature of knockout soccer inherently makes a crazy sport even crazier.

And while the format of this season’s Open Cup does lend the competition a distinctly Europa League quality - to manage the number of matches MLS teams play in a season, the majority of 2024 playoff teams aren’t participating in Open Cup and are instead featuring in Leagues Cup - a quarterfinal is a quarterfinal. When abject mortification has been the baseline in cup competitions, any success, however modest, shouldn’t be taken for granted.