Successful year washes away letdown of ’16 season
A little less than a year removed from its 2016 season ending mercifully with a loss at New York City FC, Crew SC has finally done enough to show it has moved on.
A win last Saturday over D.C. United clinched the Crew a playoff spot, providing another rinse for the sour taste left by an 8-1412 season in 2016. It was a change that coach Gregg Berhalter openly discussed after the 2-0 win over D.C.
“Well, I think ... ” he paused, then corrected himself. “I it’s closing the door on the great
disappointment of last year. No one was satisfied with last year and the tone (this year) was set early on in preseason of how hard we’re going to work and what we were going to do to get back to this point.”
The eight-game unbeaten streak that lifted the Crew from a sub-.500 record to a playoff spot wasn’t born of any one factor.
Personnel — the addition of Pedro Santos and Federico Higuain’s return from injury — as well as team chemistry and a concentration of home games played a role in helping the Crew turn the page. So did improved fitness and the return of a hunger that might have been missing in the weeks leading up to the 2016 season.
A failed 2016 was a season each Crew player internalized differently, Berhalter said, and one that required some form of success — a playoff appearance — to properly put away.
“Everything that could have gone wrong last year did go wrong, with our injuries, with our internal issues that we had, with the results of the games in general,” Berhalter said. “Everything went against us and we created a lot of that ourselves. It’s just being able to process that, learn from it and then move on.”
Part of moving on started before a grueling preseason in Brazil. With more time away — the Crew’s 2016 season ended on Oct. 23 — players had more time to process the season and start the preseason in better shape.
Midfielder Wil Trapp, who participated in the U.S. national team training camp in January, supplemented his Crew training this season by working with an outside trainer in Clintonville.
The results are clear. With two games remaining, Trapp already has a career high in minutes by more than 300, but said the Crew’s preparedness for the season went beyond physical fitness.
Time, as the Crew learned during the offseason, is a luxury, and one it didn’t have after losing to the Portland Timbers in the 2015 MLS Cup final. Less than two months after taking an emotional
loss at the end of a long season, the Crew was back in training camp.
“I think after the final it’s so hard to be thinking about recovery and preparation for the next season because it just ended,” Trapp said. “You’re back with the team really quickly and there’s all the emotions wrapped up in the finals, so you don’t really have the time to really recover quickly and then get back to where you need to be like we did this year.”
Paired with the quick turnaround was the Crew’s knowledge that it had a talented nucleus returning after a deep playoff run in 2015, allowing complacency to seep in.
“Even though we had lost, we knew were good. It was just a laid-back preseason, there wasn’t that rah-rah-rah bite that we had in 2014 and 2015,” defender Hector Jimenez said. “Honestly, this preseason was the toughest I’ve been a part of and I think that got everyone thinking, ‘You know what? We’re not going to go through what we went through last year.’”