Continuity key for Caps: Dos Santos
Club kicks off MLS training camp at UBC with plenty of familiar faces — for a change
As the Vancouver Whitecaps training camp officially began Monday, Marc Dos Santos took a moment to savour the smell of the grass and the sounds of training punctuating the air at UBC.
It was a familiar moment. At the same time, it was also a refreshing change. Monday marked the first time the Caps practised together as a group at their training facility since last September.
“It's just great to get started. It's been a lot of months without being with the guys and without doing a training session,” said the Caps coach.
“We have a group of guys, a big group that came back, so our core is really good right now. So what we did is we remind them of what we want it to be about.
“And the objective of the training session was to create exercises where they were involved and reminded us of things that we want to do during the season. So that was our biggest objective today.”
There is also something else refreshing, and not just the tweaked Hoop jersey, which was released Tuesday.
There were familiar faces on the field. In this new Caps world, the old is new.
Continuity hasn't been part of the Major League Soccer organization's roster structure for the past five years, but just five players moved on in the off-season, and two of those were goalkeepers who weren't in the club's long-term plan.
In 2017 and 2018, the last two years under Carl Robinson, 15 and 23 players were moved. When Dos Santos arrived in Vancouver in 2019, he made wholesale roster changes, wiping the slate clean and letting go 25 players. Jake Nerwinski and Russell Teibert are the only first-team holdovers from the Robbo era.
It was a harsh lesson, one Dos Santos admitted he had gotten wrong, as the Caps finished last in the West, 14 points out of a playoff spot.
A more manageable 15 players were moved on the next year, and Vancouver again fell short of a playoff spot, but only by three points.
“(Continuity) gives you a better chance to succeed. At the end of the day, when I look at the teams that have succeeded in MLS and the teams that win in MLS, (they are) groups that have been together for a good amount of time,” Dos Santos said.
“There's a chemistry between guys, there's a core that's important that comes back year after year, and that's where we have to get us as a club. So from last year to this year, it's been a big jump in our organization.”
The Whitecaps come into 2021 with a core of players Dos Santos and Sporting Director/CEO Axel Schuster feel can be the base of a competitive — and playoff-qualifying — squad.
“That's a very different scenario from the last two years that I was here. We felt that in every pre-season, there was a lot of rebuilding and a lot of new faces and new information to give,” Dos Santos said.
“And right now, we felt that we're starting with a core that knows each other very well, and we're very happy with the core that we have.
“The objective now is to add the right quality to this group, and that's what we're doing.
“We're doing with players that have been announced, and we're doing with players that haven't been announced yet, but we're working hard to finish some deals and get them across the line. So I think that we're in a very different spot from the last two years.”
The Whitecaps have made five off-season acquisitions: Sporting CP right back Bruno Gaspar, who has yet to be announced officially, Colombian forward Déiber Caicedo, USL goalkeeper Evan Newton and two SuperDraft picks in right back Javain Brown and striker David Egbo.
It's an underwhelming number, considering the Caps have averaged 12 new players by this date over the past four off-seasons, but Vancouver is hardly alone in this pandemic-challenged market if you look across the MLS.
Caicedo and Gaspar are two impact signings, but the most critical position — the Designated Player-level attacking midfielder the team has lacked for years — remains unfilled.
“What we have to make sure is that the additions and the players who we're trying to bring here, not only have the right mentality to go through what the season might be about, but also come from a culture that is able to adapt very quickly to the type of group that we have,” said Dos Santos.
“We just have to make sure that the additions are not only additions to make our group and our team better, that at the same time are additions that could adapt very quick to the culture of our locker-room.
“We're in a different position from last year and we're also recruiting in a different way,” he added, admitting there is even more pressure to make the post-season in 2021.
“So we're going in another direction. We have to elevate our standards. We were three points away from a playoff spot.
“We have to go get those three points to start, and then continue building on that bit by bit.”