Union of lousy and great is pitching for playoffs
CHESTER >> So you think you’ve got a handle on MLS, do you? You think you can make sense, week to week, of what the standings indicate will happen, when any two teams collide?
Well, you don’t. But that’s OK, because the people who get paid to work within MLS’s logical serpentine don’t either.
That’s how two weeks ago, the prevailing conception of the Philadelphia Union could be almost simultaneously proven right and wrong. That’s how the league goes from figuring out what the Union are, then the Union proving the diametric opposite Saturday, somehow clawing victory from the jaws of a dull defeat.
If you’re dizzy, that’s normal. And it’s the only lens through which Saturday’s proceedings at Talen Energy Stadium make any sense.
The Union went from winless in 16 games (including the first eight of this year) to winners of three straight, to looking terrible in the first half Saturday to claiming that fourth straight win, 2-1, over the Colorado Rapids.
For those of you keeping score at home, that’s zero wins in 252 days followed by four in 15. Get all that? In three days, the Union (4-4-4, 16 points) voyaged from beating a full-strength side from Western Conference leaders Houston to being outplayed for 45 minutes by the last-place team in the West trotting out a lineup with three firsttime MLS starters, appearing to be done in by the first career goal by a journeyman who emerged from the dying corpse of Chivas USA.
Instead, ripostes by CJ Sapong on a penalty kick and Haris Medunjanin on a sublime free kick, along with a puzzling red card to goalscorer Caleb Calvert, turned things around in a 90-minute microcosm of what the Union have grappled with all season.
“Confidence is a heck of a thing,” manager Jim Curtin said. “If you could bottle it up and sell it, you could make a heck of a lot of money.
“You see a group now that previously when we gave up a goal, we might lay down. We might panic. I don’t think we handled it perfectly, but we did push the game in the second half.”
Curtin’s team just as easily could’ve laid down after an 0-4-4 start to the season. They could’ve pointed to stars playing merely mediocre, to a defense hemorrhaging goals and a coach on the supposed hot seat and wallowed in a season of striving for mediocrity. Instead, they’ve collectively raised their level.
No longer rooted to the bottom of the Eastern Conference, the Union have risen to within a hair of playoff position with a third of the season elapsed. They’ve erased an abysmal start and are in the thick of the hunt, perhaps not ideally so, but if you asked Curtin if 4-4-4 would suffice in February, chances are he’d say yes.
“I think we played the first half like we played the first games,” Medunjanin said. “We had problems when the spaces get big for us. And when we keep the spaces compact and everybody does their job, we’re hard to beat, especially at home with these fans and we showed that in the second half. We stick together, we fight for every ball.”
The Union aren’t exactly a Jekyll and Hyde team; in fact, it’s the constancy of process under Curtin and Earnie Stewart that has piloted them out of the tailspin. Curtin didn’t enact massive changes when his team went without a win over the season’s two months, and the reward is six games in a row sans a setback. There were no major personnel changes, save for restoring certain players (Chris Pontius to the right wing, Alejandro Bedoya to the No. 8) to more comfortable positions.
That’s what makes the evaluation so difficult: The six-game-unbeaten Union are the same as the eight-game-winless Union. But the results are so drastically different that this weaponized confidence is the only explanation for the poise behind a four-game win streak that is the longest in the franchise’s sevenplus seasons.
“You learn a lot in the hardest time, and when people do talk about culture, I would point to the fact that Earnie kept us together, the players stayed together and that’s really what culture is about,” Curtin said. “In the hardest times, who are the guys that bail out? Nobody did. So here we are.”
Saturday shaped up as being difficult. Calvert scored in the 15th minute, thoroughly against the run of play, on a shot that left Andre Blake more befuddled than it should’ve, ending 378 minutes of shutout soccer. The Union played “very unprofessionally” and “as individuals” that half, Curtin said, hardly the team soccer that had backstopped the resurgence.
But they adjusted, won a penalty on Kortne Ford’s handball. Calvert was shown his marching orders in the 69th after milking a phantom injury, drawing a yellow for dissent on the way off the field and a second for prematurely re-entering play 40 seconds later.
Medunjanin cashed in a wonder goal that summoned ghosts of Tranquillo Barnetta and Kleberson – the latter in the building as part of his foray into coaching – that kept the roll alive. And just as the Union could’ve get off the mark a month ago, the inertia of their winning streak keeps propelling them forward, even in difficult circumstances.
“Pretty darn bad first half, but they stuck together because they have a belief now,” Curtin said. “They have a little more confidence and then you get a break, you get a PK call maybe in your favor and Haris makes a special play and we walk out 2-1 and nobody will talk about how ugly this win is in three months, but it’s three points.”