After 35 days lost at sea, Crew finds island of victory
A professional soccer goal is 24 feet x 8 feet. It is 192 square feet. Friday night, the Columbus Crew found the goal in the way Columbus found San Salvador in 1492. Land ho! Where are we?
The Crew won the latest installment of the “Hell is Real” rivalry with a 3-2 come-from-behind victory over lowly
FC Cincinnati Friday night. It was the first meeting of the Ohio Derby — it’s not a true rivalry in soccer unless it has at least two names, at least one of them must include the word “darby” — at the Crew’s new stadium, Lower.com Field.
Calling FCC “lowly” is not a cheap shot. The lads from Queen City extended their winless streak to 11 games (04-7). They are in 13th place, or next-tolast, in the Eastern Conference. Like Cincinnatus, they are known for peacefully ceding power.
That said, this is a derby-darby, which is a mercurial thing. FCC was in the second-tier USL when they first met the Crew and beat them in a U.S. Open Cup match in Cincinnati in 2017. Since the rivalry was joined in the MLS in 2019, the Crew have vaporized FCC a few times, scratched for a point a couple of times and lost once. The Crew’s record in the series is 4-2-3.
That said, nobody has been lower at the Lower, or most anywhere else, than the Crew have been of late. Friday night marked their second home victory since they opened the e-ticket gates here July 3.
What is more, it’s not like the Crew has been in peak form. Friday night, they snapped a six-game losing streak, which is a brutal stretch for any team that plays in a league that counts ties. Or draws. It was particularly brutal on the defending MLS Cup champions.
Only three times have the Crew lost six in a row in one season, and the other two times were in the previous century — when MLS had shootouts.
In sum, the Crew managed to snap what had to be their worst losing streak, ever. They did it against their intrastate rival before a crowd of 19,949 (official capacity at the LDC is 20,371). They did it in front of a national television audience watching on
ESPN.
No one in Columbus — not ownership, management, players, Megatailgaters, patrons at Betty’s, assorted microbrewers, scarf weavers, tifo painters and so on, and on — wanted to contemplate the Hell that would have been Real had the Crew lost to their archrivals, and lost for the seventh time in a row.
The Crew’s slim shot at making the playoffs and getting a chance to defend their title would have been charred beyond recognition. A loss would have dropped them into 10th place (or lower, depending how the weekend goes) and pushed the playoffs over the horizon. But they won and reinjected life into their late-season push. The atmosphere was electric.
Credit where due: coach Caleb Porter may have extraordinary difficulty in navigating his way to the interview room in the new stadium, but he had a good plan for Cincinnati. There was extraordinary pressure on him and his players, who had to dig way down to dredge up three points for the first time in 35 days. They overcame.
The Crew have been one of the lowest-scoring teams in the league. They had a goal differential of minus-9 (six goals for, 15 against) during their sixgame losing streak. They were coming off a terrible home loss, a late-game meltdown against Seattle, the team they beat for the Cup in December. It was their third loss in five games in their new stadium, and it wasn’t good for marketing, not unless Brioschi is a sponsor.
When Luis Diaz missed a gaping net and hit the right post in the 9th minute against Cincinnati, it was “here we go again.”
In the 45th minute, Lucas Zelarayan worked his magic by curling a free kick over the wall and inside the left post. It was Zelarayan’s fifth free-kick goal of the season — a team record, and one off Sebastian Giovinco’s league-record six.
Then, Cincinnati scored off a deep rebound to tie the game in the last seconds of the first half to tie the game, 1-1. Here we go again.
Zelarayan, who played 30 minutes in the MLS All-star game Wednesday night, was terrific. So were captain Jonathan Mensah and fullback/winger Pedro Santos, among others. But this was truly a win for the collective. The Crew was down 2-1 late in the second half — at which point the FCC fans in the south end of the stadium were chanting, “We can’t hear you” at Crew fans — but the home team didn’t fold.
Striker Miguel Berry came off the Crew bench and scored twice in a span of about a minute to give the Crew a 3-2 lead that was not relinquished. Miguel Berry! He did nothing fancy. The Crew had maintained a forward momentum for most of the game, and then Berry was there, right place, right time.
The Crew has a lot of problems, including a raft of injuries. After Friday night, they also have hope.