Whitecaps arriving into 2018 with a whimper?

It’s all a bit underwhelming really isn’t it?

I’m talking about life in general of course but it also applies to what we’ve seen from the Vancouver Whitecaps during the off-season so far.

An experienced MLS striker slightly beyond his best, a former Mexican international who can play midfield and can be cover at right back and a Venezuelan forward slash wide player who is one of those “hope he settles in to the vagaries of MLS okay” signings.

In the outgoing ledger we have Fredy Montero and Christian Bolaños heading back to pastures old and Nosa Igiebor departing after never really being here apart from the three most important games of the Whitecaps 2017 campaign.

Some decisions and revisions can be reversed I suppose but Carl Robinson obviously chose to play Igiebor in those games because he thought he was a better option than Tony Tchani and now the coach will have to convince Tchani that he didn’t really mean it and he definitely trusts him to do the job in midfield in 2018.

And Matias Laba is left twisting in the purgatory of everybody knowing he was going to leave the club were it not for an unfortunately timed injury while also seeing the Whitecaps stockpile defensive midfielders like they were going out of fashion (which maybe they are).

It’s all a bit of a mess really.

But not the kind of mess that makes you think “this definitely needs cleaning up immediately or somebody will catch something” but more the kind of mess that makes you think “I can probably leave that until tomorrow, it doesn’t look too bad actually”.

Like I said, it’s all a bit underwhelming.

Underwhelming doesn’t necessarily mean under performing though and indeed there will be time for players to come and go and for the picture to change.

But the over/under on “whelm’ right now is definitely leaning toward “under”.