Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Silva, Impact send Union staggering back to uncertainty
It was last year that the Philadelphia Union’s season bottomed out with the Montreal Impact in town, a three-goal lead squandered in a draw that for all the world felt like a loss.
That mentality, recent signs on the field and edicts from on high said, was gone. In its stead was a more resilient, more skilled team, less reliant on smoke and mirrors in its ascent in the Eastern Conference standings.
Saturday, that rise and those narratives hit a big speed bump. And a Union team that has done so much proving in the last two months that it is different from past iterations got the reminder that in that department, too, they haven’t accomplished anything yet.
The Union were ripped up time and again in their worst performance in months, with Alejandro Silva scoring twice to lead the Impact to a 4-1 win at Talen Energy Stadium Saturday night in a matchup of the fifth- and sixth-place teams in the East.
Saphir Taider and Quincy Amarikwa also scored for the Impact (12-14-3, 39 points), who move within one point of the Union, though the Union (12-12-4, 40 points) have a game in hand.
The loss snaps the Union’s five-game unbeaten streak. It marks the second straight game in which they relinquished points from a leading position, compounding the 2-2 draw with Orlando City two weeks ago. The Union have dropped just eight points from leading positions this season.
“Bad night all around,” manager Jim Curtin said. “A lot of the things that we did positive in the last six matches, we did not do tonight. Credit to Montreal, they made us uncomfortable. We gave a team with quality too much time, too much space, and they punished us.”
Both of Silva’s goals came off Union set pieces that quickly morphed into devastatingly executed Montreal counters. It’s the kind of no-no that an in-form Union squad would’ve thought a relic banished to the straggling past, but it reared its ugly head Saturday.
“That’s a disappointing one,” center back Jack Elliott said. “Credit to them for breaking quickly and getting on to them, but for us it just needs to be stopped in any way – a foul, put the ball out of play, in any way that needs to be stopped. And that killed us.”
The result ruins Auston Trusty’s first professional goal, the Media native skying to head home a Borek Dockal corner kick in the 11th minute. Trusty is just the third Homegrown player to score for the Union in MLS, joining Zach Pfeffer and Anthony Fontana.
“I was near the front post and kind of, I did my job on the play and kind of just saw the ball coming towards me and it’s the natural defender in me to head the ball and go to the ball,” Trusty said. “I’m obviously happy to get my first goal, but not really happy with the performance for everyone in the team. It’s bittersweet.”
The assist is Dockal’s 15th, tying Cristian Maidana’s franchise record. Dockal is only the fifth Union player in history to account for 20 or more combined goals and assists in a season (five goals, 15 assists) and is tied for the MLS lead in assists.
Dockal, who left the Union’s last game with a sprained ankle but passed a late fitness test, went 72 minutes, withdrawn for what Curtin termed a precautionary move to save him for the workload ahead. Trusty’s goal was the outlier in a first half where the Impact thoroughly deserved its 2-1 edge, outshooting the sluggish Union 11-3. Silva cashed in in the 28th when the Union had an uncharacteristic breakdown. Ignacio Piatti played in Silva, and Andre Blake came rushing off his line to cut down Silva’s angle, but it was a mistake, allowing the Uruguayan to dink into a yawning cage.
The Union defense switched off again in the 39th, and Taider pounced, the only player to react when Blake produced a fine save on Amarikwa. Germantown Academy grad Daniel Lovitz set up the third goal, with a cross from the left wing bundled home by Amarikwa past several unawares Union defenders falling over each other. And a Union corner resulted in an Impact goal when Piatti and Silva went 2-v-1 with Ray Gaddis, which didn’t end well for the Union, Silva bashing home his fourth goal of the year.
The sanguine view, which Curtin and others drew upon, was that the Montreal letdown can yet be proven as the outlier in the Union’s recent performance. It is one game, stacked against a slew of much more auspicious performances. But the clock is ticking ahead of the Sept. 26 Open Cup final in Houston and the playoff race.
The power to sculpt that narrative is in the Union’s hands, even if their grasp on it slackened Saturday.
“You see how tight the table is in the Eastern Conference,” Curtin said. “You see how quickly things can change, how quickly a road win can do that. We were the team that was doing that a couple of weeks back, and now we have points taken from us. It doesn’t feel good right now. It doesn’t throw out the quality that the players have had over that stretch, but we do have to find a way to get it back quickly.”
“We were on a winning streak,” Trusty said. “It’s kind of how it happens. You kind of see it pretty often with a lot of teams. They go into a streak and get a wakeup call like this. And usually it’s a bad game. Usually it’s not just a 1-0 game; usually, it’s they get smacked. In a sense, we’ll build off that game and we have to react to it and we have to react to it in a positive way.”