Fury playoff hopes fade away

BATTERY 2, FURY FC 0

Too cold. Too hot. Too much travel. Too many games.

For good measure throw in too few days off in between games. Too many crossbars and goal posts.

The Ottawa Fury FC had all the excuses in a less than successful 2018 season.

In the end, however, it all amounted to too little which translated into too few goals, too little sustained excitement and way too few wins.

Put it all together and the Fury FC didn’t have to spend Saturday night watching ESPN hoping Nashville would lose to save their season. And they won’t be huddled Sunday afternoon either hoping Bethlehem will lose and do for the Fury what they couldn’t do for themselves.

No, mercifully, the playoffbound and fourth-place Charleston Battery put an end to the Fury hopes for extending their season when there was really no reason to, scoring the only goal they needed 14 minutes in, then coasting to a relatively easy 2-0 win before a season-ending crowd of 5,385 at TD Place Saturday afternoon.

The playoffs now seem like an almost unattainable dream to the Fury franchise with just one postseason berth over the last five seasons, as they finish out the year no better than ninth in the 16-team Eastern Conference.

“We should never have been in this position,” said veteran Eddie Edward. “We shouldn’t have needed a win here.

“Like any sport, there’s teams with bigger budgets. But what I see when I look around our locker room is players with more experience and we know that as a collective unit we have to be better.

“For whatever reason, we were not that this year.”

With the Fury needing nothing less than a win and three points to remain alive until the final day of the schedule, Gordon Wild basically ended the playoff hopes with an early goal on a lob kick over Maxime Crepeau, the Fury ’s MVP from Week Two until the final whistle.

One early goal should not necessarily decide a match but then this is the Fury, a team held without a goal in each of its last four home games.

So Wild’s goal really was the time to turn out the lights and say the party was over as the Fury played like it the rest of the way, seldom challenging offensively, and seemingly content to get on with the off-season.

And 60 minutes in, Charleston’s Ian Svasntesson erased any hopes for a magical comeback with a goal right after a brilliant save by Crepeau when no defender came to Crepeau’s aid.

“It’s difficult to find words right now,” said Crepeau, who set a league and franchise record with 15 clean sheets, an incredible number in a 34-game season. It’s mind-boggling that 15 shutouts wasn’t enough to get a team into the playoffs.

“My role is to not let goals in but our lack of a goal was the story of our year, our lack of finishing,” said Crepeau. “We came up short.”

The Fury can complain all they want about their frigid conditions for training camp way back in the spring, or their schedule, or even their travel and connecting flights all over the eastern U.S.

What they have no answer for is their home record at TD Place where they won just seven of 16 games and earned another four draws. That amounts to only 25 of a potential 48 points and simply, that’s not good enough in any league.

To make matters worse, the Fury end the season having not scored a single goal on their home pitch since Aug. 15.

“First of all, our pre-season was a disaster,” said head coach Nikola Popovic, of a team that went seven games deep into the regular season before registering their first win.

“Our first five or six games, we were not ready to play and that would have accounted for maybe three or four points.”