Tag: Erik Hurtado

Ain’t no doubt the Whitecaps are in the playoffs

The Vancouver Whitecaps played the first forty-five minutes of the game against Sporting Kansas City like a team who had been routinely scythed open in their last outing which, funnily enough, they had been.

Their was very little “counter” and almost no “attack” to their play.

It was simply a case of defending for their lives and hoping for the best which, funnily enough, is exactly what happened.

They survived a penalty kick after a moment of madness from Kendall Waston and numerous other forays into their box before the half time whistle finally blew leaving those of us watching wondering how much longer they could survive playing in a manner that treated the ball as some kind of invasive species that needed to be removed from their possession as quickly and as desperately as possible.

Fortunately we never found that out because the Whitecaps seemed to take sustenance from their good fortune and produced a far more cohesive performance in the second half.

They were still mostly defending of course, that’s the default setting for this team, but this time around there was at least some sense of danger when the ball went into the Kansas half.

So when Erik Hurtado flicked home a Jordan Harvey long ball with a trademark outside of the boot finish we could express surprise, but not astonishment, at what we had just seen.

And from that moment on Vancouver looked at least as likely to score as Kansas did and the introduction of Jordy Reyna gave them exactly the burst of pace they needed for the final thirty minutes.

In the end they didn’t need another goal and, despite a ludicrously harsh red card for Christian Bolaños, ended the game with a degree of comfort that seemed inconceivable during the first period.

What can we take from the game?

Well, we may have reached the point where trying to take anything remotely rational from any Whitecaps game is a forlorn dream but let’s at least try. You have to try!

Stefan Marinovic won’t be available for the trip to New York next week because of international duty but, given his impressive outing, David Ousted may now be one error away from losing his starting spot.

(Memo to self: stick something in here about a New Zealander thriving in the land of Oz).

That would be a huge decision for Carl Robinson to make, but it could well be season defining one way or another.

Jordan Harvey did enough to lock down the left back spot for now and Marcel de Jong did enough to suggest that he is a much better option as the stand in central midfielder than almost anybody else (particularly away from home).

Hurtado and Mezquida fully justified Robinson’s decision to give them the start, but whatever Shea and Davies offered defensively was nullified by their ineffectiveness going forward.

And no need to mention that Jake Nerwinski was once again solid (and yet I do mention it).

A top two finish now seems as good as wrapped up for the Whitecaps and their constant ability to defy both our expectations and their own limitations is a thing of wonder.

Just three more regular season games to go before we get to the point where bouncing back from a bad defeat is no longer an option.

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings.

Marinovic-6.5*, Nerwisnki-6, Harvey-6, Waston-5.5, Parker-6, de Jong-6, Ghazal-6, Shea-5, Davies-5, Mezquida-6, Hurtado-6

 

 

 

 

Whitecaps soar before falling in San Jose

Ken Loach isn’t a great movie director but he has directed some great movies.

True, there’s a certain Cinéma vérité about his style but, primarily, he’s concerned with substance over style and that substance is mostly about the heartbreaking futility of working class people trying to negotiate a system that is explicitly set up to thwart their dreams.

A generation of British schoolchildren grew up watching Loach’s film “Kes” in which a boy escapes the trials of his mining village upbringing by finding, nurturing and training a young kestrel.

In those moments in which he watches the bird soar he glimpses a kind of redemption for himself; the possibility that a frail and injured thing can somehow live magnificently in the world.

Then one day he comes home and finds that his elder brother has snapped the kestrel’s neck and left it dead in a trash can.

Cheers Ken! Life lesson learned!

Anybody who has seen the new “Rise Up Rain City” segment that’s played on the big screen before the Whitecaps home games this season will have noticed the Loachian influence.

The dreariness of the city, the players miserable and clearly pining for warmer climes they will never attain and a bedraggled pigeon standing sadly in a dirty puddle.

It doesn’t quite end with Alphonso Davies finding the pigeon in a trash can with a snapped neck but that’s the general tenure.

The system, it seems to say, will always thwart your dreams.

And that feels apt for the team this season because they are still battling to find a way to get the best out of themselves.

In San Jose on Saturday evening they raced into a two goal lead over the Earthquakes before a defensive mix up between Kendall Waston and Christian Dean enticed David Ousted to rush out of his penalty area and leave a trailing leg to bring down Chris Wondolowski and earn a red card.

At that time nobody thought that the player to bring off was Nicolas Mezquida. After all the Uruguayan is one of the hardest working players in the team and often proves to be a very effective first line of defence.

Much better to remove one of the more defensively limited forwards such as Techera  or Manneh.

I say “nobody” thought that but it’s actually not true because one person did think exactly that and, unfortunately for the Whitecaps, that person happened to be Carl Robinson and his reputaion for not being able to make effective in game decisions took yet another hit.

There was a sense of inevitability about the subsequent three goals with Manneh failing to track back for the second and Russell Teibert failing to close down for the third and a bright start was left amounting to nothing.

Robinson does get some credit for fielding a weakened starting eleven that was able to make such an impressive start but he was as complicit in undoing that good start just as much as his players were.

And right now it feels as though he’s forcing those players into a system that seems explicitly designed to thwart their strengths.

In the post game interview Robinson went on at some length about how important it was for the officials to make the correct call on the big decisions.

Right back at you Carl.

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings!

Ousted-4, Nerwinski-5.5, Waston-5, Dean-5, Harvey-5.5- Teibert-5, McKendry-5.5, Manneh-4, Techera-4.5, Mezquida-6, Hurtado-6* (Tornaghi-5)

 

 

Darkness before noon for the Whitecaps?

In one of his surprisingly numerous interviews Bob Dylan once referred to great songs as being “like the shadow of a church”.

Now what he meant by that was either “I’m just going to say something randomly enigmatic and hope I get away with it” or he meant that songs don’t create the concrete (in both the literal and metaphorical sense) emotions that an actual church, with all its history and implications, does but rather that the shadow of a church is both more ephemeral and less imposing.

More open to individual interpretation and changing moods.

The same can probably be said of preseason games and they are often barely even a shadow of a football match and they can certainly never be considered great art but the Whitecaps’ 1-1 tie with Minnesota United in Portland on Thursday evening could at least be described as the kind of biting satire the world so desperately needs right now.

Unfortunately, the satire was aimed firmly at the Whitecaps themselves as the game almost perfectly encapsulated all that was wrong with the team last year.

A very bright start failed to produce a goal and after about twenty-five minutes Vancouver suddenly seemed to run out of ideas.

That was mostly due to the lack of link play between the midfield and the forward line and a continued over-reliance on pace over guile.

They then began the second-half with the old familiar torpour of last year until Erik Hurtado produced a startling header.

It was largely startling because he was actually defending a corner and somehow managed, with literally no Minnesota player with six yards of him, to glance the ball perfectly passed a startled David Ousted (See, I told you it was startling).

At least that sparked the Whitecaps back to life and a Russell Teibert laser levelled the score to earn his team a share of the spoils that don’t really exist.

Despite all that negativity though there were still a number of reasons to be a little more positive about the prospects for 2017.

Yordy Reyna looked to be a bright prospect going forward and Matias Laba already looks way ahead of where he was this time last year (Which was actually still in Argentina now that I think about it).

There was also the absences of Nicolas Mezquida and Christian Bolaños to consider with the latter being the only current player capable of providing the guile to make all that pace effective.

We’ll know more as the preseason unfolds with each game becoming more significant than this one.

But nothing means nothing and the main something we can take away from a rain-sodden Portland is that things haven’t yet changed all that much from 2016.

Whitecaps find a ray of hope!

Well we all needed that!

The long dark midnight of the soul that has haunted the Whitecaps in recent weeks was split asunder by three blinding shafts of light in the form of two goals from Christian Techera and one from Erik Hurtado as Vancouver took full control of their CCL group by beating Sporting Kansas City 3-0 at BC Place.

Maybe that’s a smidgeon of dramatic overkill but it’s been weeks (months?) since the Whitecaps played with this much verve and purpose in any competition.

Carl Robinson rang the changes, most notably by switching to a 4-4-2 with Kudo and Hurtado up front and while the Japanese striker was lively it was Hurtado who stole the show with his breakaway goal and a scintillating display of the full range of his tricks and flicks throughout the game (Wait? What did I just write?).

It’s genuinely hard to find anybody who played badly but special mentions go to Techera who looked more like his lively goal scoring self again, Brett Levis who displayed a remarkable degree of comfort on the ball in his first game since signing an MLS contract and Jordan Smith who spent half the evening breaking up attacks with his sliding challenges and the other half causing havoc with his rampaging runs down the wing (Wait? What did I just write?).

Shout out too to Matias Laba who responded to being left out of the MLS squad with arguably his best performance of the season.

From the first minute it was clear that Laba was up for this game and this was a timely reminder of not just how useful his defensive qualities are but also how valuable his interceptions can be in launching the Whitecaps on the counterattack.

And let’s not forget Carl Robinson who has certainly been under scrutiny of late but responded by getting the best out of the eleven players he fielded and his biggest headache now is just who he selects for the upcoming game in LA.

He’s certainly indicated that if players put in a performance then he will reward them and on this showing the whole back four, Laba, Techera and Hurtado (at the very least) deserve to start.

That probably won’t happen but at least this game should be a reminder to a few senior players that taking a game by the scruff of the neck and all working together is a better recipe for success than whatever it is they have been trying of late.

Those speculations are for another day though because, for now, let’s just enjoy a Whitecaps performance that was not only fun to watch but also looked like fun to play in.

It’s something to build on at least.

Time for the Soccer Shorts Player Ratings

Tornaghi-7, Smith-8, Levis-8, Parker-7, Waston-7, Laba-8*, Teibert-7, Techera-8, Aird-7, Kudo-7, Hurtado-8