Dream start, dream ends
81st in falling to D.C.’s pro team, 4-1. Büscher added his second goal in the 90th minute, and Ian Harkes scored in the closing minute of extra time to secure the win before an announced 5,286.
In the losing effort, Christos, which was looking to become the first amateur team to advance past the fourth round since MLS teams began competing in the tournament in 1996, made Baltimore proud with a tireless and gutsy effort.
Having played for Christos and also coached many of the current players at the youth level, coach Bryan Bugarin was impressed and not surprised by the team’s spirited run. He said that in the end, conditioning came into play in the latter stages, with his team showing tired legs.
“Honestly, coming in just like everybody said, we don’t really have the pressure. It’s pressure on them — they are the MLS team. As far as soccer-wise, we’ve never gone into a game saying we can’t play with anybody,” he said.
“I couldn’t ask for anything more from those guys. It’s a culmination of two [youth] age groups I got to coach that all came together to play. So I watched these guys play their whole lives — since they were teenagers. I knew what they could do, and it was great for everybody else to see what they could do.”
United, which is last in the Eastern Conference of MLS with a 4-7-3 mark, has won three U.S. Open Cup titles — its most recent coming in 2013 — in addition to four MLS championships. United, whose starting lineup mostly consisted of younger reserve players, with three league games coming up in the next 10 days, advanced to the tournament’s round of 16, set for