Medunjanin scales Colorado wall for winner
CHESTER » The streak is alive. Well, at least one of them.
A pair of second-half goals staked the Philadelphia Union to a 2-1 comeback victory Saturday night over the Colorado Rapids. A penalty kick from C.J. Sapong and a free kick by Haris Medunjanin, scored only eight minutes apart, extended the Union’s winning streak to a franchise-record four games.
It wasn’t a shutout, but the Union (4-4-4, 16 points) will take it.
They had blanked their four previous opponents, dating back to an April 29 scoreless draw against LA Galaxy. And though that streak came to a close, at 378 consecutive goalfree minutes, the Union have kept their season turnaround on course.
“Confidence is a heck of a thing,” said Union manager Jim Curtin. “If you could bottle it up and sell it, you’d make a heck of a lot of money.
“You’re seeing a group now that, previously, if we gave up a goal, we might lay down and maybe panicked. I don’t think we handled it perfectly, but we did push the game in the second half.”
Curtin’s club was undoubtedly happy to play the role of beneficiary to some second-half magic.
First came the Union’s equalizer, with Sapong burying a shot from the penalty spot in the 67th minute. A handball by Colorado’s Kortne Ford enabled Sapong’s eighth goal of the season, moving him to one shy of his career-best total.
“We stayed true to what we were capable of,” Sapong said, of how the Union kept it together despite the early deficit.
Then a series of successive yellow cards for Colorado’s Caleb Calvert tipped the direction of the game fully in the Union’s favor. Calvert earned one for his delayed exit from the field following an injury, and then another for improperly returning to the field of play. Those miscues signaled that the Rapids would have to play a man down for the final 21 minutes.
The man-down advantage culminated with the Union’s second goal.
Medunjanin’s left-footed free kick from about 22 yards out curved past Colorado goalkeeper Tim Howard, who looked frozen in place as the Union moved ahead for good in the 75th minute.
“The club name is Union. We are together,” Medunjanin said. “We don’t have any star players. We work hard with each other, and got three points with each other.”
And when he and his teammates do just that?
“We are tough to beat,” the midfielder added.
Early on, it seemed as though the Union’s winning streak was in serious jeopardy. They spent the last two weeks building up goodwill among the fanbase; assembling clean sheet after clean sheet, emerging from the Eastern Conference’s basement, and recharting the course of a lost season.
And then they almost spoiled all of it in 15 minutes.
Numbers weren’t in the Union’s favor when Calvert pushed forward, found space between three Union defenders and uncorked a shot from just outside the box. His rightfooted strike curled past Union keeper Andre Blake and into the right-side netting to spur Colorado in the first half.
Calvert nabbed a highlightreel moment for the Rapids’ youth-movement lineup. They fielded a starting 11 with three guys who were making the first start of their respective MLS careers. Though Calvert didn’t exactly qualify, he certainly wasn’t far off the mark. His tally, the first of his career, came in only his third start.
Curtin spoke of centering his players during an introspective halftime session in the team’s locker room. He called the Union’s play “unprofessional” and “unacceptable.” He reflected on how a comeback win of this caliber would have seemed improbable a few weeks ago, when the club was mired in a 16-game winless streak dating back to last season.
“Overall, the psyche of the team…when you talk about the word ‘culture,’ and it gets thrown around a lot now in sports, you don’t learn a lot about a team and its culture when you’re on a winning streak,” Curtin said. “When you go to work and you’re successful and everything is going great, you don’t learn anything new. We learned a lot in the hardest time.
“Earnie (Stewart, the team’s sporting director) kept us together. The players stayed together. That’s really what culture is all about. In the hardest times, who are the guys that bail out? And no one did.”