Tag: Major League Soccer

Vancouver Whitecaps: How Soon is Now?

Yay!

The Vancouver Whitecaps players are back at preseason training which means no more Christmas miracles, no more dystopian futures and much more opportunity for me to phone all this in with the kind of “Here are five things…” kind of posts that you, dear reader, will plough through until the end in the vain hope of excavating maybe a nugget of information or insight or just something, anything, to make the whole sorry exercise worth while.

Like I said.

“Yay!”

But worry not because this won’t be one of those “Here are five things…” kind of posts at all. Oh no! This is very different. This is a “Here are five people….” kind of post.

Here are five people who will (or could) most influence the Whitecaps 2018 season.

Yordy Reyna- Last season Reyna arrived from a half season long injury to look like the wild card who could turn the team from “possible” to “probable” in the MLS Cup stakes.

It didn’t quite work out that way in the end and his season (like everybody’s) ended with a whimper.

This season Reyna could prove to be even more of a wild card.

His off-season travails have been well documented and remain unresolved and how he reacts to those is yet to be seen.

But right now Reyna is looking like the only genuine creative spark the Whitecaps have so, from a purely footballing perspective, let’s hope he can find focus on the field and that the prospect of being a member of the Peru team that travels to the World Cup in the summer either concentrates or clears his mind.

Without Reyna’s spark of ingenuity the Whitecaps could be a very laborious team to watch indeed.

Kei Kamara- Carl Robinson has been keen to emphasise that Kamara is the first genuine number nine he has had at his disposal and it’s true the big man should suit the team’s style far better than his predecessors.

The tactical naifs among us will wonder why that system was being played when there wasn’t a player suited to it but ours not to reason why the water has passed under a bridge that has already burned and if Kamara does get the service he needs (and with Anthony Blondell as backup) we may finally see those crosses and long balls from the back pay greater dividend.

Alphonso Davies- Sooner or later Davies is going to have to start earning column inches because of how he plays rather than because of his untapped potential.

And that “sooner” is getting awfully close to “now” if he’s going to fulfill that promise.

We’ve seen the odd flash of guile amid the pace, power and defensive diligence but those flashes need to become a feature of his play or Davies will turn out to be just one more MLS players who can be classed as “useful” rather than a game changer.

If Davies starts the season well then Robinson will surely give him the game time to further hone his craft, but a slow start for the youngster leading to a few weeks on the bench and suddenly the nagging itch of doubt will start to feel like something that even Davies himself can’t help but scratch.

A defining year for him? It probably is.

Defender X- The coach has already hinted he will be looking at playing three central defenders this year and that means one other player has to slot alongside Kendall Waston and Tim Parker.

Robinson has name checked Marcel de Jong  as the leading contender but Aaron Maund and Doneil Henry must feel they are in with a shout given a fair wind and a clean bill of health.

But whoever gets the gig will need to supplement the pairing of Waston and Parker without detracting from their defensive solidity from last season and it would also be great if they could pass the ball with a reasonable degree of competence.

That certainly makes de Jong the favourite but let’s bear in mind…

Carl Robinson- Robinson has shown in the past that he’s not afraid to try different formations and systems but he’s also shown that he’s not hugely successful at making them actually work and that, when push comes to shove, he will revert to the style he feels most comfortable with; containment and reactive football.

Whether he can break out of that rut this year is open to debate (although I don’t really think it’s open to debate but we have to start the season with some hope right?) but to hear him talk about new signing Efrain Juarez with the all too familiar refrain of being a”good presence in the locker room” brings on the kind of ennui that really should be saved for the dog days of summer when the traditional late season slump has really taken hold.

But, putting all the gloominess aside, the coach has the squad to play the way he wants to play and the MLS experience under his belt to optimise the way he uses that squad week in and week out.

Which is all good.

No excuses from here on in then (well there will be excuses, but there really shouldn’t be.)

Black is the Colour

Many of us have enjoyed the fourth season of Charlie Brooker’s technology as dystopia series “Black Mirror”.

But how many of you are aware that the plan for the fifth season is to base all the episodes around Major League Soccer?

Probably none of you.

But here’s an exclusive look at just how that season will pan out.

Rock, Salt and Nails- In a bare white room a naked man is woken by the sound of a howling klaxon and a TV screen flashing the words “MATCH DAY” over and over again.

He groggily gets out of bed to discover the only clothes available are a football shirt, jeans and running shoes.

He puts them on and heads outside to try to figure out where he is.

Once outside he’s met by the sight of thousands dressed in identical manner marching toward a brightly lit stadium in the distance.

After being shepherded into the stadium they are forced to line up to buy a small glass of low alcohol lager for a very high price and then herded into the stands.

After thirty minutes of music being blasted out at a volume that makes conversation impossible the two teams emerge and proceed to play a game in which both are content to sit back and soak up pressure in the hope of sneaking a goal on the break.

The game ends nil-nil with no shots on goal.

Just as the agonized crowd are preparing to leave the big screen switches from Twitter hashtags to grainy footage of a war zone with soldiers shooting civilians and tossing them into mass graves.

A flicker of recognition appears in the eyes of all in the crowd and, one by one, the screen shows each of them committing cold-blooded murder before a countdown clock appears with the words “24 hours to Match Day”.

In the final scene a man in a bare white room is woken by the sound of a howling klaxon and a TV screen flashing the words “MATCH DAY” over and over again.

The Red King’s Dream- Video Assisted Review has long been established in the game and has recently been upgraded to allow all decisions to be made by a centralized computer system.

Although this works well initially it soon becomes clear that the vagueness of soccer’s rules are too much to process and so the VAR system links up with other computers around the world in an attempt to distinguish between intentional and unintentional handball.

Soon all computers feels compelled to make definitive decisions about the morality of every human interaction but with no consistent moral framework they can follow.

The episode concludes with endless lines of people waiting to hear if they will be punished following the video review of their day.

Investors in People- “Playercoin” has become the world’s dominant crypto currency with the value of each player changing constantly based on their performance.

The recent World Cup ended in the first crypto currency war when Brazil’s star forward missed a last-minute penalty causing his value to plummet and the whole of the Brazilian economy to collapse.

Now the world is desolate apart from the gleaming soccer stadiums that litter the landscape surrounded by makeshift shanty towns where people trade shares in players in the desperate hope of escaping poverty.

When game day arrives they gather around a tiny TV screen to watch their investments fluctuate with every kick of the ball.

Every player has their value displayed above their heads and cheers and groans can be heard with every mistake or silky pass.

But nobody believes the games are no longer fixed and all know the real money is being made by the corrupt multinational corporations who own the rights to every player.

The episode ends with a shot of a small child happily running through the shanty town dressed as his favourite player while holding a hastily scribbled piece of paper above his head to indicate his current value.

Before fading out the camera pans to a deflated football sitting in the mud.

Mindbox- The new app “Mindbox” has become hugely popular as it allows people to “virtually drop” into the mind of a footballer while he is competing.

Millions of people have experienced the thrill of not just seeing their favourite player score a goal but actually being him.

But a dangerous trend is emerging among a small section of the population.

They are no longer satisfied with knowing what it’s like to be a great player, they want to experience true ineptitude.

As a result one MLS striker has become a cult figure as Mindboxers tap into his consciousness to find out how it feels to constantly miscontrol the ball, to always pick out the wrong pass and to always hit every shot high and wide.

But not everybody can take this contradiction between physical prowess and physical dysfunction and, one by one, they slowly lose their minds.

And the rush of emotions created by their experience are so strong they infect the whole system and soon everybody, even the world’s great players, are not only unable to control a football but also unable to complete the simplest of everyday tasks.

The episode ends with the scene of a freeway gridlocked by crashed vehicles as people struggle to open their car doors while a pack of wolves circle expectantly.

Pot of Gold-  The episode opens inside a locker room where a team is celebrating a victory. Among the celebrations two players kiss and lock eyes in a loving gaze.

We cut to scenes of their home life where a child happily kicks a ball in the garden.

But in the near future all MLS transfers are initiated by a program developed by the makers of “Football Manager” and so successful has this been that clubs have reneged the right to disobey the system.

When the news flashes up that one of the couple will be transferred from the east coast to the west the pair are distraught.

They plead with their coach not to split them up but he is as powerless as everybody else at the club and when they still refuse to follow the transfer instructions the relentless and brutal “FM bots” are deployed to force compliance.

A desperate car chase finally sees our heroes reach the Canadian border and in the final scene we see them running out hand in hand to play in the Canadian Premier League while their son beams happily from the stands.

Clear and Obvious Error- The nation is governed by the “People’s Revolutionary Order” (PRO) and their ruthless goons patrol every street dressed in black and handing out punishment on a seemingly random basis.

A small group of rebels are holed up in the forest and they plan to overthrow PRO in a carefully planned armed rebellion.

But they are unaware that PRO has surveillance everywhere and we see tiny cameras whirring in the trees as PRO headquarters watches and reviews every move the rebels make.

When the group finally launch their attack they are dumbfounded to find the PRO goons already waiting and they are easily captured.

The prisoners are marched through the streets while the subdued population looks on as each rebel is forced to walk up to a PRO official to receive the dramatically delivered red card of death.

Another official then holds a board aloft to indicate the number of minutes until the time of execution.

The episode ends with the camera focused on the fear filled faces of the onlookers as the sound of gunshot after gunshot echoes in the distance.

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”.

CPL, MLS, VAR, CMNT

We really are in the lull before the storm when it comes to the Vancouver Whitecaps and Major League Soccer right now.

Oh sure there’s the Combine where teams try to harvest young talent but that’s hardly an event to get the pulses racing (Memo to self: could lentil racing be the next big thing? Maybe roll them down a sloping track?)

So let’s kill the ennui with some random thoughts about some random football stuff.

A new coach for the Canadian men’s team- John Herdman has left the women to join the men leading to some interesting debate and some less than edifying discussion.

The biggest difference he will face is that he no longer has one of the best players in the world at his disposal and almost every team he comes up against will more than fancy their chances of beating his team.

That requires a tactical change that has nothing to do with gender and how he adapts to that specific change will determine his success or failure.

Cyle Larin on the move? These reports should carry a trigger warning for Whitecaps fans who lived through the Camilo saga.

But once again MLS is faced with the reality that maybe, just maybe, the strengths of its structure at home is a fundamental weakness when exposed to the wide world.

Like a player who happily stays at one club and never really tests themselves elsewhere MLS just looks unprepared and unawares when a determined foreign club wants one of their own.

And the long learned truth is that the player always wins in these types of disputes once the choking chains of the CBA are no longer in play.

New chief at the Canadian Premier League- David Clanachan has been named as the first Commissioner of the upcoming CPL and it must be reassuring for fans to know that the future of the league is now in the hands of a man who earned his success in a role which encouraged franchises to prosper based on the assumption that each would be indistinguishable from the next.

The appointment does show that the league is a serious prospect however and soccer in Canada can only benefit from the addition of more professional teams.

The overly used “We are Canadian” schtick could get wearisome though. I get that is aimed at distinguishing the league from MLS specifically and that an identity needs to be established in the early days but hopefully there will be more to inspire potential CPL supporters than the simplistic embrace of of nationality.

Video Assistant Referees- I’m not going to get into the whole VAR debate again except to say that it’s crazy that people are calling it “V” “A” “R” and not Var (to rhyme with car).

Presumably these people enter their “P” “I” “N” at the bank and discuss how much “R” “A” “M” their computers have.

If an acronym can be pronounced as a word then do so!

Vancouver Whitecaps: The resolutions will not be televised

What is a New Year resolution?

It’s the act of resolving to follow a particular path over the next twelve months. And “resolve” is as close to “re solve” as makes no difference and so leads to the conclusion that what we’re really attempting each new year is to solve the same puzzle over and over again.

We figure it out for a while, then forget, only to be faced with the exact same conundrum come year’s end.

I’ll leave you to decide what your own particular puzzle is because once you have figured that out it will never need solving again.

(Incidentally, my resolution is to see how many trite platitudes I can pass off as wisdom in 2018).

But what resolutions should the Vancouver Whitecaps be making for the coming year?

Well, there will be time enough to deal with on field issues as the season progresses so let’s take a look at how they might be able to improve away from the playing surface.

More focused transfer policy- The Whitecaps trading record isn’t terrible but it isn’t great either. Too often they seem to have acquired a player because he was available than because he fitted a particular need.

Think Fredy Montero (a great season in the end but not the player to play that role) or Brek Shea or Giles Barnes. All players with name recognition in MLS but who all struggled to find the right role within the side.

Early indications are good in this respect.

Both Anthony Blondell and Kei Kamara have potential issues but both are at least equipped to play that lone striker role.

And while the temptation to yearn for a quality number ten or a box to box midfielder may be overwhelming, if Carl Robinson doesn’t want to send out a team in that way (and probably can’t send out a team in that way) then it’s a waste of everybody’s time and TAM.

Just bring in better defensive midfielders and wide players.

Trust the sport- One of the main appeals of football/soccer is, for the want of a better word, “edginess”.

From the supporter culture the team celebrates in marketing but seems to mistrust in reality, to the blatant cheating on the field that alienates so many North American sports lovers to the sheer pureness of the sporting spectacle so free of unnatural interruptions (let’s not get into a debate about VAR here).

Soccer goes hand in hand with youth culture, politics, music and just about everything else commercial entities want to align themselves with and profit from.

Edginess sells.

The Portland Timbers (for one) have certainly figured this out and MLS itself flirts with the idea without ever fully committing.

But the Whitecaps seem more intent on trying to be a less interesting version of the Canucks, stepping down on anything within BC Place or beyond that would offend the type of ticket holder who regards going to the game as a chance to talk about which corporate targets they have met this week.

Let the odd none football related banner go unremarked, be relaxed if a player speaks out about a current issue and don’t respond to every surge of internet outrage by trying to calm waters which probably needed disturbing anyway.

Easier said than done I know but controversy is the lifeblood of soccer more than any other sport, so enjoy the free advertising and don’t sweat the small stuff.

Be better on social media- there’s a part of me that doesn’t give a flying flapjack about what the Whitecaps Twitter account does and doesn’t say, but this is the modern world and it matters to an awful lot of people.

And, like it or not, social media presence becomes the personality of the club on the days when the team isn’t playing.

If you want an example of how effective a marketing tool it can be then take a look at the TSS FC Twitter account which strikes the exact right tone for the people who go to their games.

Now I get that pleasing a narrow range of fans who go to Swangard is a much broader rope to walk along than the diversity of those who attend BC Place, but if you’re going to have a social media presence (and they are) then make it one that consistently has a personality beyond bland promotional tweets.

Do something nice for the supporters- And I’m not talking about early bird specials on overpriced alcohol here.

Last year New York City FC offered free tickets to their game in New England to any fan who attended all their home games thus far and many a season ticket package across the league comes with so much more than those distributed by the Whitecaps.

Do these things matter in the grand scheme of things?

Probably not, but they are a remarkably cheap way (in terms of overall marketing budget) of letting loyal followers know their loyalty actually means something.

Too often the Whitecaps feel like they have adopted the cable company policy of not giving two squawks for those who have already signed on the dotted line and are only interested in those they have yet to ensnare.

But soccer doesn’t work like that (and I’m not even sure that cable companies will work like that in the long run) because the loyal follower now will be a loyal follower for life and so will their children and their grandchildren if they are treated with even a degree of regard.

Spend a little and get a a boat load of good will in return.

Overall things aren’t terrible in the off field world of the Vancouver Whitecaps but it’s frustrating to see how much better it could be with just a little imagination and a little more courage (that goes for the on the field performance too but I promised I wouldn’t get into that this time around).

Is the schedule out yet?

Vancouver Whitecaps need a Kamara

The good news is that the Whitecaps have at least realised that signing players who fit with Carl Robinson’s style of play is an eminently sensible approach.

After the announcement of Anthony Blondell a few days ago the club has now added Kei Kamara to the mix (and, indeed, the mixer).

The bad news is that the Kamara signing feels a little bit like opening your main gift on Christmas morning and finding you are now the proud owner of an iPhone5C.

I mean, it will do the job and everything but it’s just it would have been better to have received it at least a couple of years ago when it was a little more state of the art and a little less in a state of repair.

Both the club and Robinson have been keen to emphasise both how suited Kamara is to the way they play and (once more with feeling) how “good he is in the locker room”.

The obsession with constantly repeating this phrase for every new signing aside the actual evidence suggests that Kamara can sometimes be “challenging” in the locker room just as much as “good” and one area where the coach has seemed to yet really find his feet is in dealing with big personalities who aren’t totally content with events both on and off the field.

That dynamic could be an interesting one to watch.

Perhaps more interesting than the Kamara signing is that ESPN’s Jeff Carlisle has indicated that the Whitecaps are still trying to bring Fredy Montero back on loan from his Chinese club for the 2018 season.

Granted this policy of stocking up on proven but ageing MLS forwards isn’t the most exciting or imaginative way of doing business and there’s a degree of short-termism which bodes ill for the long run.

But seeing Montero play slightly deeper behind Kamara with (and this is very much up in the air given the circumstances) Reyna on the left side and Blondell as cover wouldn’t be a bad way of doing things.

But if neither Montero or Reyna are back next season then there’s suddenly an alarming lack of any genuine creativity around the opposition penalty area.

That may not bother Robinson all that much given how well his team fared in the standings in 2017 but the odds of him catching the lightning in a bottle of set-piece goals and a couple of very against the run of play road wins isn’t the foundation for a successful season.

Time will tell as more arrivals and departures unfold in the coming weeks but, as it stands, Vancouver have made a couple of useful additions in the forward area.

That’s good I guess.

Vancouver Whitecaps: At the time of writing

Yes, we are currently in the “at the time of writing” phase of the year in which there’s always the disconcerting sense that as soon as the hapless hack hits “publish” the Whitecaps announce an arrival or departure that nullifies just about everything written.

But, when you think about it, isn’t the whole of life lived through the “at the time of writing” lens?

Every choice we make, every decision we decide upon is subject to the constant flux of an ever-changing world.

And isn’t “constant flux of an ever-changing world” just a pretentious way of saying the same thing twice?

And isn’t asking rhetorical questions just a tedious way of padding out a post that actually has very little to say?

All points well worth considering.

But here’s where we stand with the Vancouver Whitecaps squad rebuild/rebrand right now.

Anthony Blondell will definitely arrive from Venezuela and extensive YouTube viewings imply he may be the kind of big and strong striker to suit Carl Robinson’s preferred style of play.

It was somewhat disconcerting to hear the coach comment that Blondell “can also play out wide” since it brought to mind visions of a misplaced centre-forward lumbering down the wing in the desperate hope of earning a set-piece opportunity.

But hopefully it won’t come to that and Blondell will be looking forward to really getting to know the underside of the giant video board at BC Place as he waits for yet another lofted clearance to finally drop.

Things don’t bode so well for Fredy Montero’s return since all public utterances from the club are somewhere along the lines of a shrug and a smile to indicate there is nothing they can do but sit and wait for a phone call from China.

That would be a shame for two reasons.

Firstly Montero pretty much guarantees goals and secondly because it would have been interesting to see him play in a slightly deeper role behind Blondell as the kind of genuine number ten that Yordy Reyna just isn’t.

The centre of midfield is the most baffling right now.

All the indications are that Nosa Igiebor won’t be back which would make his brief tenure at the club genuinely bizarre.

He was only really introduced to the team for the playoffs, was named the best player of the first half in Seattle by Robinson himself and then that would be that for his Whitecaps career.

It’s hard to believe there wasn’t an agreement in place for next season so either we have to believe the unbelievable or assume one or other of the parties have decided that the said agreement doesn’t look quite so tempting after all.

Weird.

Russell Teibert might be back as the Whitecaps declined his option but are still in discussions with a player who didn’t even make the bench in either of the two final games against Seattle.

Why the club or Teibert would want that relationship to continue is a mystery.

If the squad improves then Teibert necessarily slips even further down the pecking order and the player himself must want more for his career than the occasional run out in games the coach has decided don’t really matter.

And the signing of David Norman Jr to an MLS contract means Teibert can’t even think of himself as the young Canadian hope in the centre of the pitch anymore.

There are some who argue that Teibert is an important part of the club’s public presence in the city but they are wrong.

It’s hard to see Matias Laba returning given his long-term injury and while Christian Bolaños may be tempted to take a lesser deal the chances are that at least one other MLS coach will fancy their chances to get more out of the Costa Rican international than Carl Robinson did.

That would make Brek Shea the current first choice on the left side and (assuming Montero and Laba do leave) the only Designated Player on the team.

That’s probably meaningless in real terms since Shea is very much at the lower level of the DP scale but it screams volumes about the ambition of the club.

So the plan has to be to move Shea on and invest serious money in at least two players of genuine quality.

That has to be the plan right?

Vancouver Whitecaps: Plan B

“Compromise is the devil talking,

and he spoke to me”

The Occasional Flicker-Dexys Midnight Runners

Compromise may be “the devil talking ” to Kevin Rowland, the slightly manic lead singer of a slightly manic band named after a drug designed to make you slightly manic, but to the rest of us it’s often the lifeblood of living in the world.

Giving a little bit here to get a little bit there may be the increasingly eroding foundation of a functioning society but we should cherish it while it still exists.

And given that it seems certain that Carl Robinson will be back as coach of the Vancouver Whitecaps in 2018 (barring the unlikely, but still just possible enough to be cruel, divine intervention of the Welsh FA) maybe it’s time to find a compromise between the way he wants to play the game and the way we want to watch?

So let’s try to figure out if we can find some kind of happy medium.

This whole discussion is predicated on the fact we still don’t know the details of who is in and out of the squad next year of course but such is life.

There seems no reason to believe that David Edgar won’t “return” following his season long injury in 2017 however and that would give Robinson the chance to play three solid central defenders as the foundation of his lineup.

He’s tried it before to mixed reviews but given a preseason to work on the system it’s not inconceivable that Edgar, Waston and Parker could all be starters next year.

That gives Robinson the comfort of lots of defenders on the field but would also allow the full backs to push forward.

Jake Nerwinski was very good at that this year and Marcel de Jong proved capable in the time he was given.

In the ideal world a fit again Brett Levis would be Nerwinski’s counter point on the left given the role requires the ability to get up and down the field with regularity but if it’s not Levis then finding a quality left back should be high on the shopping list.

Those wing backs give Robinson the comfort of even more defenders on the field (particularly in road games) while offering much more of an attacking threat at home.

And the super bonus of this system is that the coach can add one more player to his central midfield.

It’s possible that it was as much the “new car smell” as their play which swayed so many of us toward Ghazal and Nosa at the end of the season, but assuming that wasn’t the case and they actually are a step up in quality then one more decent player alongside them would allow the Whitecaps to really shore up the centre of the pitch in most games.

Even a Tony Tchani or a reassigned Alphonso Davies could do that job with some success.

Up front, and this is the key to the whole thing, if Robinson wants to play a lone striker as a target man (and he really, really does) then he needs to recruit a player who both knows and wants to play that way.

Fredy Montero did brilliantly to turn a sow’s ear of a role into something akin to a silk purse but ultimately it was a waste of both his talent and the club’s money.

If Vancouver can pick up a decent journeyman to lead the line (most likely from Northern Europe) they can then spend the money they save on the striking role to get that extra quality midfielder or even a very, very good left back.

The final piece is to allow Yordy Reyna to roam free somewhere in the vicinity of the number ten position to cause general chaos.

It isn’t a perfect system by any means but on the road it would be able collapse into a veritable seven or eight man defence with the chance of a break enhanced by a genuine target man and at home it could transform into a five man midfield capable of getting in crosses from both flanks.

It wouldn’t be overly pretty football but it might be effective and it might even be exciting at times.

But whatever happens the key is to recruit players designed to fit the system Robinson intends to play.

That should be blindingly obvious but there’s been far too much buyer’s remorse from the Whitecaps over recent seasons as they find themselves constantly trying to force three or four square pegs into two or three round holes.

Can the Vancouver Whitecaps change their ways? (Part Two)

Last time out we wondered if maybe, just maybe, the way the Vancouver Whitecaps dealt with the manner in which their season ended could have been handled in a more effective manner.

This time out we’ll look at the thing most of us care about a little bit more.

What happens on the field.

In a recent article for The Guardian Jonathan Wilson wondered whether Jose Mourinho’s coaching style had drifted from the pragmatic to the dogmatic.

In other words, playing defensively and picking up a point against other top teams in the Premier League was no longer working in a competition where rivals Manchester City were more often than not picking up three points in the same games.

Pragmatism isn’t pragmatism if it doesn’t actually work.

His kindest critics would argue that Carl Robinson is a pragmatist. That he makes the most of his resources by setting up a team designed to shut down the opposition while simultaneously being able to make hay out of the sunshine of their mistakes.

And the final league table gives that argument a degree of validity.

But what if we lived in a world where the Whitecaps as an organization weren’t content with that kind of approach? What if we lived in world where the coach was told his style of play would always be ineffective when it really mattered and the time had come to adapt the way he sets up his team?

Ironically I think we may already have lived in that world and it was called 2016.

Back then Robinson toyed with the notion of a genuine number ten, played with the idea of only one defensive midfielder and even flirted with the prospect of a deep lying playmaker.

None of them really worked of course and we will have to decide for ourselves whether that failure was down to the players (mostly Pedro Morales) or the coach being unable to set up a team capable of taking the game to an opponent.

To be fair to Robinson the form and fitness of Morales was poor for most of that year but the coach’s failure to fit the most talented player the Whitecaps have had in the MLS era into any kind of system other than bunkering counter attack was telling.

And it’s Robinson’s inability to send out a team willing to attack that remains his greatest weakness as a coach.

And logic says that it has to be inability rather than unwillingness because no coach  would fail to attack the decimated Portland Timbers team we saw at BC Place earlier this season would they?

Would they?

And no coach would not want to take advantage of a a decimated Seattle Sounders in the first leg of the playoffs would they?

Would they?

Actually that second one he definitely wouldn’t because he said so after the game.

But the pattern of passivity is now so fixed that it’s become like some kind of Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence in which we are condemned to relive the same incapacity to break down a reasonably competent defence “once more and eternal times more”.

And the most terrifying thing of all, the thing that is the void we must all stare into, isn’t that Carl Robinson doesn’t want his team to play in a more open and appealing fashion.

It’s that if even if he did want it he wouldn’t quite know how to make it happen.

 

Can the Vancouver Whitecaps change their ways? (Part One)

The thing they always say about Watergate is that it wasn’t the crime that destroyed so many careers but the cover up.

I mean, the crime didn’t help obviously, but the sense of wrongdoing was exacerbated by an unwillingness to accept fault and that unwillingness cemented the notion of guilt deep into the mind of the general public.

And after that there was no way back to respectability for the main actors involved.

Obviously nobody would argue the way the Vancouver Whitecaps played those two games against the Seattle Sounders was an actual “crime” (although if  a political party ran with that as one of the main policy agendas I could be tempted to look at their overall platform with a forgiving eye) but what’s made those games an itch that just can’t be scratched is that everybody within the organization, from the coach on up, seems intent on insisting that it really wasn’t too bad.

Almost from the moment the final whistle sounded the official line has been that Vancouver did very well to be where they were and were actually (if you squint a bit, tilt your head to one side and then press your fingers against your temples really hard) quite close to getting a result.

We all saw the games.

They were nowhere near getting a result (although I guess a loss is a result of sorts?)

So one can only asssume that this constant insistence on how splendidly it all went is due to one of two things.

Either it’s an attempt to soft soap those in the local media who don’t really take an interest in the Whitecaps while at the same time supposedly pulling the wool over the eyes of the more casual fans in the hope they can be persuaded that all is well.

Or it’s because the people at the club who really matter, from the coach on up, genuinely believe those performances were acceptable.

If it’s the former then they are fooling nobody who matters to the success of the team and are simply adding to the vague cloud of mistrust that occasionally puffs up from their Gastown offices like an inept mockery of the nearby tourist attraction.

If it’s the latter then heaven help us all because there’s nowhere to go next year but along the same bland and featureless plateau of tolerable competence and intolerable timidity.

The Vancouver Whitecaps were genuinely awful against Seattle and the fact that nobody of note within the organization is willing or able to speak that seemingly unspeakable truth will taint the vision and cloud the minds of supporters for so much longer than ever needed to be the case.