The Uruguayan striker is heading to Chile to join club side Colo Colo to bring to an end a strangely dissatisfying spell with the Vancouver Whitecaps.
Rivero began his time in Vancouver like a house on fire but then continued by being more like a house in which the central heating is governed by a frustratingly capricious thermostat; cold when you don’t want it to be but offering enough spells of warmth to make a disgruntled homeowner believe that a replacement isn’t really needed.
But it was and ever since the mooted Kei Kamara move of earlier in the season it’s probably the case that both parties were willing to take any move that fitted.
After all why would Rivero stick around if there was the possibility of him being shipped somewhere against his will?
Better to head to Chile and control his own fate than to wake up one morning to find he’s booked on a flight to DC or Salt Lake City.
But how will we judge his time in Vancouver?
The biggest issue is that he just isn’t a natural finisher (and certainly not a clinical one) as he almost always looked to simply steer the ball on target rather than to make the save as difficult as possible for the goalkeeper and the proof of that is implied by the number of headed chances he has had saved this season.
Good for him for getting into the right positions to create the chance but truthfully he could have had three or four more goals if those headers had been aimed at the corner of the net rather than the safe centre.
His hold up play was generally very good but his first and second touches aren’t always so assured and too often he lost possession for the team a little too easily and was reduced to appealing forlornly for a foul that was never going to be given.
And yet for all those faults it’s hard to dislike Rivero as a player; he worked tirelessly whenever he was on the field and never once gave up on his role as the first line of defence.
It may even be the case that in a team of better players (or in a team of players of a similar ability to his own) he becomes an incredibly useful striker, but in MLS if you’re a Designated Player then you have to be one of the better players and you have to make those around you look good.
Without that DP tag then perhaps Rivero would have eased through his troubles with greater ease and there would certainly have been less pressure on him to produce goals on a regular basis and probably less pressure on Robinson to select him even when he was clearly out of form.
In retrospect what the Whitecaps got with Rivero was exactly what he was when he signed with them; an intermittent scorer of goals who could do a job on the field even when he wasn’t scoring but his failure to progress beyond that level eventually meant his stay had to be limited.
Now the interest turns to who Carl Robinson brings in as his replacement.
Signing a young DP has a potentially enormous upside because if you snag a rising star at a fairly early age the subsequent transfer fee alone could fund a solid rebuild of the team but the downside is the risk that youthful promise fails to transcend into anything more and that’s particularly true once you take the risk of moving a player into a new league.
Time will tell if this experience has made the coach more inclined to sign experience (be it in terms of age or from within the League) in the Designated Player slot but Rivero’s time in Vancouver can probably be defined as “a worthwhile experiment which ultimately failed”.
Best of luck to him in the next phase of his career.
Soccer Shorts (The Director's Cut) 