Caps must raise their game in second half
Home field results ‘not good enough’ for playoff contender, midfielder says
The mythos of the B.C. Place Stadium fortress was first punctured by a rapier strike from LAFC, whose 2-0 victory in mid-April ended the Vancouver Whitecaps’ 11-game home unbeaten streak.
The reputation was further ventilated by the recent spate of draws, and while the Caps still have just one home loss in their last 15 home games, daylight is peeking through cracks in the once-formidable walls, with visiting teams seeing the Dome as a place where they can score — and win.
For perspective, the Caps have three road victories this Major League Soccer season. They have two wins at home.
“You can spin it two ways. You can say, ‘Oh wow, what a great away team we are,’ or you could say ‘we need to be better at home,’ ” said midfielder Russell Teibert.
“But in 15 games, two wins at home? The stats speak for themselves. I’m a realist. I’m not going to sugar-coat anything. That’s the truth. It’s just not good enough.”
Just two games shy of the season’s halfway point, the Whitecaps (5-5-5) are on pace to fall short of the 50 points that usually denotes the cutoff line to qualify for a post-season berth. But it’s not Chicken Little time just yet — the team’s numbers are on an upwards trajectory. The Caps are unbeaten in five games heading into Saturday ’s date with Orlando City SC and coming off a month when they clicked offensively, scoring the second-most goals across the league in a five-game span.
Playing the Lions (6-6-1) is a chance for Vancouver to gain some momentum and claw back some dropped points heading into the two-week World Cup break. Orlando won six consecutive games between March and May, but have dropped four in a row as injuries have decimated the lineup to the point where they couldn’t train 11 vs. 11 in practice because they didn’t have enough bodies.
The difference between the Lions’ two streaks — three of the four losses were by a single goal — is a “fine line,” says Caps’ coach Carl Robinson.
“When I say the game is about small margins and indifferent moments and individual moments and mistakes, I think some people think that managers use it as an excuse or a deflection.
“The reality is, in this league, it is so tight,” he said. “Orlando went on a six-game run, and if you listen to their manager, he says they didn’t deserve to win some of the games that they did, but they were getting the breaks.
“I’m sure it’s the same now that they’ve lost a couple of games in a row — they’re not getting the breaks.”
The same could be said about the Caps. They were dead and buried with eight minutes left against Dallas three weeks ago before some hustle from striker Anthony Blondell and Lady Luck allowed them to salvage a 2-2 tie.
They showed the same kind of energy in two other late draws.
Much like a favourable schedule contributed to Orlando’s early success, the same is lining up for Vancouver. The next seven games are against teams with records currently worse than theirs.
“This is the time to do it,” said Teibert. “We’ve given up a lot of points this year, for reasons that we can’t explain or don’t understand. If we took points from the games that we should have won, we could be close to or at the top of the table, but we’ve just thrown away points. You could say it’s a learning lesson, you could say this is what we need to learn from moving forward in the later stages of the season, but the reality is, we’ve given up those points and you can’t get them back. You have to focus on the next half of the season.”
There were plenty of observers who scoffed at Bob Lenarduzzi when the Caps’ president asserted the opinion earlier this year that, once you make the playoffs, anything could happen.
A grumbling fan base would concede there are recent precedents for his point. Portland and Seattle both won MLS titles after stumbling, sodden season starts.
In 2015, the Timbers had three wins in their first 15 games, and were 6-5-4 at this point of the season.
They were out of the playoff picture in the late stages of the season, but won three straight to finish in fifth place in the Western Conference, then stormed through the playoffs to win it all.
It was a similar story the next year with Seattle. The Sounders started 5-9-1, with just four wins in their first 17 games, but rebounded to go 5-1-2 down the stretch to nab the sixth and final playoff berth, and went on to hoist the 2016 MLS Cup.
But for the Caps to duplicate the late-season surge, it will take a serious run. Of their final six games, five come against Western opponents, all but one of which is currently above Vancouver in the standings. The one outlier is the big-budget and five-time league champion L.A. Galaxy.
“Our last six or seven games are very, very difficult,” said Teibert. “You have some big guns, some heavy hitters, at the end of the season.
“I think this (current) stretch of games, we need to pick up as many points as possible. There are some powerhouse teams that we have to play, but hopefully teams will be looking at us and not wanting to play us toward the end of the season.”