MLS squad to host friendly with Crystal Palace
The last time the Whitecaps played an international friendly in Vancouver, club president Bob Lenarduzzi was running around town buying up squeegees so the show would go on against Manchester City at soggy Empire Field.
No such worries for July 19.
The Whitecaps will play Premier League side Crystal Palace on the undrenchable B.C. Place Stadium turf.
“No, we’ll need water,” Lenarduzzi said with a smile during a Thursday news conference to announce the game, which is part of the Vancouver-Guangzhou Friendship Cities Cup.
The only questions, then, are: Why are they playing this game? And, what the heck is the Vancouver-Guangzhou Friendship Cities Cup?
Since that Manchester City friendly in 2011 — the Caps’ inaugural Major League Soccer season — the Caps have been clear in saying they wouldn’t host another friendly until the opportunity to face a top team presented itself.
They came close to scheduling a game against Bayern Munich in 2014.
“It’s either club X, Y, or Z, and if it’s not X, Y, or Z, with everything else going on, we’ve passed,” Caps co-owner Jeff Mallett said at a roundtable event last season.
Presumably, Crystal Palace isn’t X, Y, or Z, although they are in Saturday’s FA Cup final against Manchester United, and, according to their manager, Alan Pardew, fans in North America don’t really see the difference anyway.
That poorly worded interview was posted, briefly, then pulled from Palace’s website and reposted in a more appropriate tone Thursday.
The Caps, meanwhile, have carefully positioned the game as one they’ve been “invited” to play in, which seems a bit like being invited over to dinner at your own house.
ProEvents Group, a leading soccer promoter in Asia, has co-organized the event and is apparently footing the bill, which would make this a financial win for the Caps.
A friendly between a Select XI from the Vancouver Chinese Soccer Association and the Guangzhou Super Football Club follows the Caps-Palace game at 9 p.m.
Vancouver and Guangzhou have been sister cities for 31 years and this is the sixth such friendly between the VCSA and Guangzhou Super Football Club.
Lenarduzzi said the Caps weighed the positives and negatives carefully and decided it was too good a night to pass up.
“It provides a neat opportunity from a number of different perspectives for us, the most obvious one is we get a chance to play against a Premier League side, who are playing in the FA Cup this weekend,” he said. “And the idea of being able to excite the Chinese community. They’ve got six ex-national Chinese team players playing in the (second) game that takes place, and, ideally, when they come out to watch us, they’ll go away feeling like they need to come back again for an MLS match.”
The MLS schedule is jammed like a sardine tin, especially when you work in Canadian championship games and CONCACAF Champions League matches.
There’s no such thing as a good time to play these friendlies, hence the skepticism of supporters’ groups leaguewide, although there always seems to be enough
fans with an appetite for a Premier League opponent. For the Caps, the Palace friendly falls between a July 16 home game against Orlando City and a July 23 game against the Dynamo in Houston. Caps coach Carl Robinson wisely didn’t overpromise on the lineup.
“It’ll be a mixed bag,” he said. “I’ll try to play as many senior players as I can, but there’ll be young players playing. They’ll get experience. What you’ll find is the senior players will want to play against a Premier League team, so that’s a good thing, but it comes between two MLS games. We’ll take the game seriously and enjoy the occasion.”
Any right-minded Caps supporter will prefer to see the Canadian kids test themselves against Palace anyway. That’s what this game should be about — a big stage for the likes of Marco Bustos, Sam Adekugbe, Kianz Froese, Kadin Chung, Brett Levis and others.
What’s critical, though, is that six potential points against Orlando and Houston aren’t compromised. The league standings are way too tight for that.