Tag: Major League Soccer

Fans of the Vancouver Whitecaps probably feel more like joining a support group than supporter’s group right now.

There feels such a disconnect between the way the club and the team is perceived from the outside and the inside of the tent.

But Friday’s 6-0 shellacking at the hands of Sporting Kansas City feels like a turning point. The moment when even those who were granting the coach and the Front Office leeway decided enough is enough.

That the excuses and the hand wringing about how tough things are for them and how fans should really just be grateful for every morsel of comfort tossed their way need to stop.

That the tired clichés about “bouncing back” and “being stronger” no longer wash.

So what happens now?

Well, the smart money is on nobody at the club doing anything. Sitting on their hands in the hope the upcoming run of four home games from the next six will see the team eke out enough points to keep the wolves of discontent at bay and allow the Whitecaps to float there or thereabouts when it comes to playoff contention.

It’s not an inspiring vision but it will mean the players won’t really be challenged by the coach and the coach won’t really be challenged by the Front Office and the Front office won’t really be challenged by the ownership group.

And while no alarms and no surprises might make for a pleasant working environment for all concerned it’s a long drawn out death sentence when it comes to success on the field.

But what if they don’t eke out those points?

Real Salt Lake bunkered when they were at home against Vancouver so expect the same and more next Friday and then expect the same again from Houston, San Jose and New England.

It’s a weird infinite loop of tedium Carl Robinson has created in which his particularly unadventurous style of play is best combatted by an even more unadventurous style of play.

Would four more games at BC Place similar to the two LA contests drive somebody into action?

Maybe so, maybe not.

But the Whitecaps need to ensure something changes before all the current anger turns into permanent disinterest.

For the last two years (maybe a little longer) there’s been a plastic shopping bag hanging from the tree that sits directly outside the window from which this very blog is written.

And for all that time it’s taunted me.

During the Fall and Winter it’s dangled there as a constant reminder of the folly of humanity. A damp and dirty piece of plastic wrapping itself around one of nature’s finest creations.

And in the Spring and Summer when the tree is in full bloom it remains visible. Peaking through the blossoms like the spectre of death at Prom Night. A constant reminder that the only permanent and inevitable aspects of our lives are the ones we prefer not to contemplate.

But then, last week, it was gone.

Perhaps somebody else had grown tired of it’s presence and had finally taken action? But the more likely explanation is that two years (maybe a little longer) of Vancouver rainfall had filled it to bursting point and it had splashed to the ground in the night, unnoticed and unmourned.

Except, to my surprise, it’s not completely unmourned because now that it’s no longer there my contempt has been replaced by a kind of melancholy.

After all, if I can project so much feeling onto an inanimate object when it’s there then why not do the same in it’s absence?

If that scrap of plastic can represent the folly of humanity when I can see it, then why can’t it represent our transience when I can’t?

This is all incredibly (and mundanely) human of me of course. It’s what we do. We make up stories about just about everybody and everything in a desperate attempt to somehow explain the inexplicable.

And that’s very much what we do with sports and the players who play them. Turn them into characters in our personal fictionalized version of the world.

But every now and then one of those players does the exact same thing to themselves.

So say “hello” to the new Russell Teibert.

The Canadian is almost the very definition of a limited player. He’s not especially fast, not exceptionally skillful and his range of passing mostly falls within an arc of about twenty metres behind and beside him.

But this season, the season when it seemed the overall calibre of the squad would finally see him eased out of the picture altogether, Teibert has stepped his game up a notch.

It’s a small sample size to be sure but he has at least thought about playing the ball forward this year. And not in the “I’ll hit this in the general direction of Kei Kamara” kind of a way but in the “I’ve seen a breaking player in space and I’m going to find him” kind of a way.

Maybe that change is a reaction to the increased competition, maybe it’s a reaction to instructions from the coach or maybe having better players around him makes Teibert a better player?

But it could just be that he took a good look at where his career was heading during the post-season and decided the narrative needed to change before it petered out in a banal series of increasingly low level moves.

So right now seeing Teibert’s name in the starting eleven isn’t quite the sigh inducing news it used to be because, at the very least, he will offer just a little bit more than safety first, second and third.

It’s still a long shot to suggest he will become a regular starter as the season progresses and as the higher quality players begin to find their feet and their groove, but that’s no longer an impossibility.

Teibert has had the presence of mind to bring his own bags with him and he’s been rewarded by not having to try and explain to a computer screen that he can’t remove the item because the item isn’t even there! (sorry, the whole metaphor got a bit lost at the end) .

It might be an exaggeration to say that Carl Robinson has been laying out his footballing philosophy in recent days.

But he’s certainly been far more specific about how he believes the game should be played.

Maybe that specificity comes from the confidence of a few good wins or maybe it comes from the sting of criticism in the face of those good wins?

Whatever the motivation it’s refreshing to hear him speak openly about tactics rather than the more traditional post game platitudes and obfuscation.

So kudos to him for that.

Following the scoreless game at BC Place against the LA Galaxy the coach said that his team needed to work on “crosses and shots”.

That’s a fairly simplistic way of solving the problems apparent in that game but he could quite rightly point out that the following match in Columbus was won by those exact skills.

Then, in an even more revealing question and answer session this week, Robinson said “the major factor on where goals are scored is on crosses, so we’re focusing on that”.

Now in a general sense that isn’t true.

Feel free to dive down the rabbit hole of statistical analysis of how and where goals are scored in football in your own time but there’s nothing to indicate that crosses are the “major” factor.

They perhaps become more important if you take into account the effects of the “secondary ball” resulting from the cross but they’re still just one club available in the bag for selection rather than the only game in town.

And don’t go thinking that mixed metaphor was just sloppy writing because that metaphor is a metaphor for how to make the most of crosses.

Because putting it “in the mixer” should be mixed with other approaches if it is going to reap the most rewards.

Against LA the Whitecaps fell victim to the exact plan they use themselves; force teams to constantly put balls into a crowded penalty area where the attacker is outnumbered by two to one at least.

There was no Plan B.

That’s fine on the road because Vancouver rely on the counter which means the crosses are being hit into a much more sparsely attended penalty area. I’d fancy Kei Kamara’s chances of getting decent contact on a ball if the defenders around him aren’t set and are mostly backtracking.

But ask him to do the same thing when four or five opponents are in position and comfortably facing play and the odds change dramatically.

But perhaps when Robinson said “the major factor on where goals are scored is on crosses, so we’re focusing on that” he wasn’t speaking in a general sense but relating it specifically to his own team?

Well in that case he’s probably right, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy which tells us nothing of interest other than that the team will continue to be one trick ponies.

He is perhaps justified in feeling some of the criticism aimed at his style of play is unfair given the results he’s achieved, but much of that criticism stems from the very philosophy he’s outlined this week and the experience of recent seasons.

It’s a singular vision on how things should be done that will easily be nullified when the playoff train trundles into town.

Well at least we know one thing for sure after the Vancouver Whitecaps scoreless draw with the LA Galaxy on Saturday evening.

Carl Robinson hasn’t changed.

Give him an opposition decimated by injuries, suspensions and international call ups, throw in the most abundant collection of attacking talent he’s had at his disposal since he became coach of the club and he will still send out a team whose only chance of scoring a goal is from a set-piece or an opponent error.

But maybe in a world of increasing unpredictability we should all be grateful that the Whitecaps have a man in charge who steadfastly refuses to learn from the lessons of the past and continues to make the same mistakes over and over again?

It’s reassuring in a way.

Robinson can’t have been surprised that LA would sit deep and try to stifle the game and yet he still sent out a team designed to feed off the scraps of Kei Kamara knock downs.

The only problem with that approach (apart from the obvious one that it was never going to work) is that Kamara was operating in less than splendid isolation and any balls he did win in the air tended to result in Cristian Techera desperately scrambling to get beyond two or three Galaxy defenders.

Felipe’s role was a bit of a mystery too.

He was sitting deep, presumably with the intention of acting as the deep-lying play maker, but given his only option was almost always the long ball to Kamara it’s hard to imagine exactly how that plan was going to come to any kind of fruition.

Or it could just be that he was asked to sit deep because he looks a little bit like Russell Teibert? And that reason probably makes just as much sense.

Elsewhere Yordy Reyna looks bereft of confidence, Efrain Juarez continues to be great entertainment in his ongoing battle to reeducate MLS referees on the finer points of the game and José Aja showed glimpses of his capability to bring the ball out from the back.

But it’s dispiriting to leave BC Place and hear so many people remark on how little they enjoyed the game and while it may not be in Carl Robinson’s remit to make entertainment his primary concern it should be in his remit to get his side to play with more imagination and wit than anything we saw from them in this game.

There must have been at least one or two Whitecaps players walking back to the locker room at the final whistle and thinking “Footballing brain the size of a planet and I’m asked to play hopeful long balls to an isolated forward”.

We interrupt this blog for  bonus thoughts from the day after.

Was moving Davies to left back the right call? Well, it kind of worked in Atlanta since he provided an attacking threat even from deep.

But the Galaxy weren’t playing the same way as Atlanta and, given that Brek Shea is a player who thrives when given space to run in to, his introduction was odd in a game in which there was no space to run in to.

And let’s hope that just “moving Alphonso to a different position” doesn’t become the default replacement for any actual tactical acuity.

Hard to know what it was about that performance to make the coaching staff think no changes were warranted until the seventy-fifth minute but even when the changes came they merited something more innovative than just putting another big man up front.

Switch to three at the back and use Davies and Nerwinski as attacking wing backs? Get Felipe to play as an actual number ten? Pass and move?

Speaking of coaching, Saturday’s game between New England and NYCFC featured a genuinely interesting tactical battle between one team who wanted to play out from the back and another who were employing the high press.

One more sign that MLS is moving on when it comes to coaching.

That’s something we’ve yet to see from Robinson in any meaningul way and Sigi Schmid must have relished getting bonus sessions at the gym simply because he was able to dust off his 2015 game plan on how to stop the Whitecaps at home.

And back to your regular blog.

Time for the Soccer Shorts Player Ratings!

Marinovic-5, Nerwinski-5*, de Jong-5, Maund-5, Aja-5, Felipe-4.5, Juarez-5, Techera-5, Davies-5, Reyna-4.5 Kamara-5

If you’re the kind of Whitecaps fan who sees that the LA Galaxy will be decimated by injuries and suspensions for their upcoming visit to BC Place and thinks ‘Uh, uh that means Carl Robinson is going to think the whole thing is a dastardly ruse and so he’ll get his team to bunker down and happily settle for a point” then give your head a shake.

Seriously, just give your head a shake as it may help to dislodge that fragment of déjà vu that’s been stuck there since the last time the exact same thing happened.

It’s become a bizarre trope of the Whitecaps under Robinson that they seem incapable (almost reluctant) to kill off a wounded opponent.

Part of the reticence to really go for the throat is down to the style of play the coach prefers; reactive rather than proactive, creating chances from opposition mistakes rather than their own creativity.

But this season that creativity is more readily available than ever.

Reyna, Davies, Techera, Felipe et al are all capable of doing something with the ball beyond the simple constraints of trying to find the big man up front.

So will the Galaxy game be the one to see Robinson give the more free-flowing talent in his team free rein?

Well that depends on the Galaxy.

If they decide to take the cautious approach then Vancouver will mirror that.

If the Galaxy go Gung-ho then the Whitecaps will mirror that.

Robinson got some props for his (short-lived) experiment of three at the back in Atlanta last weekend but, once again, he was simply reflecting the formation he saw in front of him.

And, in principle, there’s nothing wrong with setting up a team to cancel out an opponent with symmetry of form and function but there are times when it just becomes the unnecessary application of a brake when stepping on the gas is what’s really needed.

This Saturday feels like exactly one of those occasions.

The first twenty minutes should see the Whitecaps take the game to LA and use the home crowd as fuel to the fire on an opponent that’s been reduced to the status of kindling.

But what should happen isn’t always what does happen, so don’t be surprised if the Whitecaps play a waiting game that ultimately sucks the life out of the whole occasion and ends with a desperate search for an elusive set-piece winner in the final ten minute flourish of attacking substitutions.

Just something to reflect on.