HFX Wanderers were defeated 1-0 by Pacific F.C. in the Canadian Premier League playoffs. The Wanderers dominated possession but struggled to break Pacific down and were ultimately undone by a Zachary Fernandez own goal.
Tiago Coimbra
- Nationality: Canadian
- Age: 19
- Date of Birth: 17/01/2004
- Current club: HFX Wanderers
- Career: Juazeiro-CE (Y), Palmeiras (Y)
- Position: Striker
- Preferred foot: Right
Tiago Coimbra was chosen to play the centre-forward role for the Wanderers in this match. He is an extremely raw talent but, nevertheless, has some potential. The main things to like about Coimbra are his physicality and his intensity. Coimbra is 6’1 and uses his body very effectively. He’s fantastic in the air, winning many battles, though his teammates did not do the best job of getting to second balls and he was not able to generate many shots this way. He was also good at shouldering other players off the ball in ground duels.
Coimbra is also very active defensively. He worked hard to close players down and was also able to track back with his relatively high speed. His strength was also an asset in defensive physical battles. But Coimbra also has some significant downsides. Mainly in the scoring goals part of being a striker (which is kind of important). Coimbra just doesn’t get enough shots from high-danger areas. He was credited with one in this game (there was also a strike across goal that I probably would have given to him but it was from a very sharp angle). According to Wyscout Coimbra averaged 1.43 shots per 90 this season, which just isn’t enough for a striker. In this match, it was pretty clear why. His off-the-ball movement is very mediocre. Coimbra always seems to want a lofted ball to the back post. I suspect this is because, until this year, he had only played age-group football in Brazil. There he was probably bigger and stronger than most of his opponents and thus could win a contested header easily. But here, against men, he becomes very static and easy to track. He wasn’t terribly involved in build-up up but his passing and dribbling also left a lot to be desired.
Rating – A2
I want to be clear, this is a very speculative A2. Coimbra has a lot of work to do in order to reach his potential. But I do see a path for him as a hard-working, physically dominant, low-touch goal-poacher. He would just need to get a lot better at the goal-poaching part. That said, he’s only 19 so he still has a ton of room to grow.
Daniel Nimick
- Nationality: Canadian
- Age: 23
- Date of birth: 22/09/2000
- Current club: HFX Wanderers
- Career: Western Michigan University Broncos
- Position: Centre Back
- Preferred foot: Right
Dan Nimick played on the right side of the Wanderer’s back three. He had a lot of freedom to stray a little further forward, often occupying slightly more advanced positions on the right and often carrying the ball out of the back. Now, Nimick was not always able to achieve penetration with his dribbling. There were a lot of times when he started to able forward only to turn back or retain possession. But he did have a few moments where he had Pacific on the back foot and was able to gain a lot of ground.
Nimick is a good passer. Particularly noteworthy was his ability to play diagonal passes into the Pacific box from deeper areas. The Wanderers dominated possession so Nimick was not under a huge amount of pressure defensively. However, I did see a few things that caused me to raise an eyebrow. Nimick seemed to struggle a lot with the physical side of things. He played a lot against Easton Ongaro, who is tall but not necessarily a pillar of strength, and was the victim of pick plays a couple of times.
There were also a couple of times where he looked really slow when chasing a player or was not able to push a player off of the ball. Nimick was also beaten rather easily by dribblers on a couple of occasions. Kekuta Manneh and Ayman Sellouf both left him on the floor when isolated 1v1 against him. This is not to say that he was a total disaster defensively. His positioning was generally quite good and he was generally quite good at picking out when to be aggressive.
Rating – B1
Nimick has gotten a lot of hype for a step up, in a way that frankly felt a little astroturfed. He certainly has some strong positives but based on what I saw in this match I wouldn’t be terribly confident about his ability to make the jump to MLS or a similar level.
Target Scouting 