Early advantage secures Caps a win
Team banishes Canadian Championship ghosts with victory over Valour FC in preliminary round
With 45 minutes to kickoff, Vancouver Whitecaps head coach Vanni Sartini strolled around the perimeter of the B.C. Place field, chatting with security guards, hosts, opposing coaches, and the few fans dotting the stands. He was relaxed, carefree, and casual, not looking like a coach fighting for his job with Jeff Mallett studiously watching from the owners' suite.
The guillotine dropped on the last coach who failed the Canadian Championship challenge, but Sartini's head will stay firmly attached to his neck — and to his job — after the Whitecaps cruised past Valour FC 2-0 on Wednesday night.
Two early first-half goals in a four-minute span were enough for the Caps to crater the visitors' hopes faster than cryptocurrency, as they'd hoped to accomplish what Vancouver's two previous Canadian Premier League opponents had done: beat an MLS side.
Here's what we learned ...
CAPTAIN CANADA
It was none other than the ageless and maligned Russell Teibert who poked a hole in the Valour balloon 19 minutes into the game, depositing a rebound of a Ryan Raposo shot.
It was, surprisingly, the first Canadian Championship goal for the club's all-time CC games-played leader (26).
Four minutes later, Deiber Caicedo gifted Raposo a goal with a perfect square ball to the wide-open Canadian winger, and he blasted it into an open net for his second career CC goal.
He's now the club's leading scorer in 2022, with two goals. Seven other players have scored once.
The Caps started five Canadians — Lucas Cavallini, Marcus Godinho, Michael Baldisimo, Teibert and Raposo — while Valour had nine.
BY THE NUMBERS
Four: For the second straight game, the Caps went with four at the back, with Jake Nerwinski and Godinho bracketing Flo Jungwirth and Ranko Veselinovic. The formation gave the Caps much more defensive stability, holding Valour to two shots on target.
25: As in May 25, when the Whitecaps will travel to Calgary to take on Cavalry FC in a rematch of 2019 for the quarterfinal round. The Cavs beat Edmonton FC 2-1 on Tuesday to advance. The winner of the game will move on to face the victor of the Pacific FC-York United game on June 21-23.
Three: The number of days the Caps have to rest up before their next league game, Saturday night against the San Jose Earthquakes. Vancouver is currently 28th out of 28 MLS teams, but could jump past the Quakes — 11th in the West with nine points — with a win. With that in mind, Sartini used all five substitutes; the only one he hadn't planned was a 35th-minute swap of Sebastian Berhalter for an injured Michael Baldisimo.
7,803: The official announced attendance for Wednesday's game at B.C. Place.
LESSONS LEARNED
After a decade as an assistant, Phil Dos Santos was ready to take centre stage.
He was the No. 2 to brother Marc in Ottawa and San Francisco, to Martin Rennie with Indy Eleven, and to Caio Zanardi on the Fort Lauderdale Strikers. He's now the coach/GM of Valour FC.
He could have stayed on garden duty through the end of 2021, but elected to take the job in Winnipeg, jumping right back into the coaching ranks.
And he took with him the lessons he'd learned over the last 10 years and, more importantly, the lessons he learned the last two. The disastrous 2019 campaign with the Whitecaps came after they blew up the entire roster and tried to do a complete overhaul in a short period of time.
“It's important, yes, to better the team, but it needs to be progressive. You can't think that you're going to change 15 guys and you'll have 80 or 90 per cent success rate or even a 50 per cent success rate,” he said of taking over Valour. “These guys, when they come into a new environment, they need a bit of time, they need to settle, they need to understand the league. Some will be automatic, but a lot of them will need that season to get out of the way.
“That's why we tried to identify very quickly the profiles that fit where we wanted to build and how we wanted to play here, and then make the changes where we really felt changes needed to be.
“If we were going to change a quarter for four quarters for a buck, it was better to stay with people that were familiar with the house, how the club works, and then progressively better the team as we go.”