Tag: Russell Berrisford

Vancouver Whitecaps: The Season So Far (The Forwards)

The female mosquito has six separate needles with which to extract our blood.

Two that are used to saw through the skin, two to hold that skin apart, one to drip saliva into the blood to keep it flowing and finally one to act as both a straw and a filtration system that separates the water from our blood and immediately excrete it; thus allowing as much top quality red blood cells as possible to be ingested.

We can say two thing about this.

Firstly, since it is sucking our blood while urinating on us the mosquito is a perfect metaphor for modern capitalism.

Secondly, we can only wish the Vancouver Whitecaps had such an efficient system for cutting through any kind of defence.

At least things haven’t been quite as bad this season and so we can conclude our ratings of the players so far with a cursory glance at the forwards.

Fredy Montero- 6.5 There must have been time earlier in the season when Montero felt as though the three attacking players consisted solely of Him, Himself and He.

Things have improved as the year has developed with both the wings and even the central midfield offering support on an almost regular basis.

The most positive thing about Montero has been the amount of work he puts in to every game. After all, the highest paid player could well have fallen into an extended sulk at not having the whole game plan revolve around him but Montero has never let his frustration show for more than a fleeting moment.

There have even been times when he’s effectively been playing both the number ten and the number nine role and that probably explains his slightly disappointing return in terms of goals scored but it’s inconceivable to imagine Vancouver being anywhere near as effective if Montero was absent for any length of time.

Brek Shea-6.5 Shea is a bit of an odd duck. There are times when he displays the qualities of the Premier League player he was for a few years and then there are times when he reacts to being given the ball with the same sense of alarm and despair I display when handed the bill at the end of a hearty meal with friends.

Shea hasn’t been helped by being played out of position in the central attacking role and nor has he been helped by injuries, suspensions and the good form of those currently ahead of him in the pecking order.

The optimistic view (And probably the right one) is that there is still much more to come from a player who should display fewer red card inducing fits of pique as he gets nearer to peak fitness.

Nicolas Mezquida-6.5 We have enough of a sample size to know that Carl Robinson doesn’t regard Mezquida as a regular starter and the coach may just be right about that.

Mezquida certainly doesn’t fit comfortably into the current formation for example.

There are times though when it feels as though he’s the last option to be considered from the bench when a game is crying out for his input.

Mezquida excels in both defending from the front and creating chances out of nothing through the sheer persistence of his pressing of defenders.

What he offers is the opportunity to move to two central forwards without losing too much of the defensive solidity through the middle and although he doesn’t have the most exquisite of touches he at least appreciates where the ball should be played and which runs should be made (Naming no names here).

He’s out of action for a few weeks so this is moot at the moment but if there was a trophy for “Most underappreciated by the coach and most overappreciated by the fans” (Let’s call it the MUBTCAMOBTF Trophy for the sake of simplicity)  then Mezquida would win it hands down.

Kyle Greig- 6  The only other forward to get any kind of meaningful minutes of first team action is Greig who looks a little too slow and a little heavy of touch to make it at the MLS level but does at least offer the possibility of being the “big man up front” for a desperate final five minute push for an equalizer.

It’s certainly better to have him playing that role than trying to force the ill-equipped Shea to do so anyway.

So there we have it.

Like the midfield the forward line has improved in 2017 (Though maybe not quite as much).

And like the defence the midfield has improved in 2017 (Though maybe not quite as much).

Next time out I predict there will be an actual game of football to talk about.

 

Whitecaps find joy looking for Atlanta’s weakness

Atlanta United arrived in town with quite the reputation.

“They won’t just sit back and defend” people said. ‘They play a fast passing game” people said. “They will press the back line” people said.

Well, it turns out that people were right and, for the first fifteen or twenty minutes, it seemed as though all of those things would be too much for the Vancouver Whitecaps as the visitors stormed into an early lead and offered the prospect of adding more every time they moved forward.

Gradually though the tide began to change and whether that was a result of Vancouver slowly finding their feet or simply the limitations imposed by the structure of any MLS team is a moot point.

We do know that Matias Laba began to close down more effectively, that the back four finally found their shape and that Andrew Jacobson (who was excellent yet again) and Tony Tchani (who had his best game as a Whitecap) began to not only block up the centre of the field but also began to offer something going forward.

One of the benefits of the 4-1-4-1 system is that Carl Robinson has finally figured out how to get the midfield to act as a conduit between the back line and the forwards and while neither Tchani or Jacobson will ever be in the highest cohort of creative midfielders they served that function well on Saturday.

In the end it was set pieces that did for Atlanta with Kendall Waston scoring two and Fredy Montero getting a much needed end to his goal drought by doing what every good striker does and stealing a perfectly legitimate strike away from Tim Parker.

That was just one of two moments of high quality comedy that this game provided.

Parker and Waston obliviously celebrating scoring a goal while the rest of the game carried on around them was just great, but the highlight was when referee Robert Sibiga saw Fredy Montero fouled in the box and immediately awarded a penalty kick.

The only problem with that decision was that Montero was back defending a corner and the penalty kick had been given to Atlanta.

Turned out the ref had forgotten which way the Whitecaps were shooting!

He fixed the problem with alacrity however so all was good.

The Whitecaps now have a week off and they go into that break having given arguably their best performance of the season.

They dealt with the body blow of an early goal with stoicism, they played to their strengths against an opponent they would have been dismantled by last season and they dominated the second half by always looking to push forward to add to their advantage.

All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable game of football.

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings.

Ousted-6.5, Harvey-6.5, Williams-6.5, Waston-7, Parker-7, Laba-7, Tchani-6.5, Jacobson-7*, Bolaños-6.5, Techera-7, Montero-6.5 

The Vancouver Whitecaps stop making sense

So I was sitting in a Vancouver coffee shop on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago when I noticed a cop car pull up and park outside the door.

After about five minutes of waiting the uniformed policeman got out of the car, walked into the coffee shop and (Without checking or glancing at any other customer) came directly up to my table and said

“Excuse me. Are you Mister Collier by any chance?”

I said

“No” (Because I wasn’t).

And then he simply turned and walked out of the coffee shop (Again, without glancing at any other customer or table) got into his car and drove immediately away.

It made no sense.

You know what else didn’t make any sense?

The Vancouver Whitecaps 4-2 (5-4 on aggregate) defeat to the Montreal Impact in the Canadian Championship on Tuesday evening.

The Whitecaps were mostly terrible, gave away two rightly called penalty kicks, were 3-0 down at half time and yet somehow managed to make the last ten minutes tense for Montreal given the vicissitudes of the away goals rule.

Ultimately Vancouver were undone by the Impact fielding a far stronger team than the Whitecaps had done in either leg so best to avoid the pointless tactical analysis in such a situation and see if we can’t glean a few bullet points of truth from a game of scattershot passing and shooting.

Brek Shea failed to impress in his preferred wide role- If this was an audition for Shea to be moved from the bench or the central striker position then he didn’t fare well. He rarely influenced the game and posed little or no threat to the Montreal defence.

Kyle Greig could do a job for the first team- Not much of a job to be fair because he lacks the pace and touch of a top class forward. But in the closing minutes he not only scored with a well taken header but looked dangerous every time the ball came into the box in the air.

In certain game situations and with the right service he could well be a useful option off the bench.

Russell Teibert is still a very limited player- We knew this already I suppose but the Canadian offered no attacking threat in a game when his team desperately needed something from the midfield. At least Ben McKendry displayed a degree of neatness about his passing in the central area.

Jake Nerwinski continues to impress- Nobody fared well in the Whitecaps back line but at least Nerwinski (And de Jong to a lesser extent) offered something going forward.

Mauro Rosales is no longer a starter– He probably won’t be anyway now that the Canadian Championship is done but Rosales looked gassed well before he was removed.

He could well go on to be a great coaching asset for the team, but his days of influencing the game from on the field look to be over.

Best if you tell him that to his face though and not me.

Carl Robinson can take some solace and some distress from the game- Solace because his team kept battling to the end and even came away with some credit when it could so easily have been a good old fashioned hammering.

Distress because all his eggs are now in the league table basket and that means making the playoffs (And only making the playoffs) will be good enough by season end.

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings.

Richey-5.5, Nerwinski-6*, Parker-5.5, Seiler-5, de Jong-6, Teibert-5, McKendry-5.5-Mezquida-5, Shea-4.5, Rosales-5, Greig-5.5 (Davies-6)

 

Carl Robinson and the Shadow of Forgotten Ancestors

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

-Carl Sagan

How does genuine change occur?

Well, one way is by seeing the past as not so much a template for what is to be and more as one specific instance to have played itself out from a multitude of possibilities.

What’s happened may indeed have happened but that doesn’t mean that it had to happen and it certainly doesn’t mean that the future can only be defined in the narrow terms imposed by what has been.

(You will soon be able to sign up for my weekly newsletter “Random phrases that seem quite deep but really mean nothing upon closer analysis)”. 

Anyway, this is a very all around the houses way of saying that whatever anybody may have thought of him before the Whitecaps coach Carl Robinson has displayed a somewhat remarkable degree of tactical flexibility this season.

Gone is the rigid belief (and fear) of the power of the first goal and gone too is the stubborn adherence to 4-2-3-1.

It’s only May in 2017 and Robinson has already trotted out a greater varieties of tactics than he did in all the previous years of his tenure.

It’s true that this doesn’t always feel like the perfect fit for his (football) personality and there’s still the sense of a man desperately trying to come to terms with a belief system that he doesn’t quite buy into.

No coach who genuinely believed in pure attacking football would leave Fredy Montero quite so isolated for example, but it’s also true that often the most zealous adherents to any faith are those who have converted late in life.

So the long awaited return/debut of Jordy Reyna and even the moment when Bernie Ibini is fully match fit may see the coach push the envelope even further and deploy two forwards in the same starting eleven.

The biggest problem he faces is that the squad he has assembled just doesn’t seem to have either a natural starting eleven or even a natural starting formation.

There’s no way that Bolaños, Shea, Davies, Techera, Tchani, Reyna, Montero et al can all fit into a lineup that makes any kind of sense and while the argument for depth is always a persuasive one there exists the distinct risk that Robinson will confuse adaptability with fitting square pegs into round holes once he has a full roster to choose from.

So perhaps the biggest change that needs to occur (And there have already been signs of this in both the Manneh trade and one or two of his post game comments) is that he moves further and further away from being the players friend and closer and closer to being their manager.

It seems harsh to say that a coach is too involved with his team but following the terrible penalty call against DC United on Saturday it seemed as though Robinson lost his focus on the game for maybe ten to fifteen minutes.

Now I get why that should be because we all probably reacted in the exact same way, but that was the moment when his players really needed a clear head from the sidelines.

There was still plenty of time (And plenty of chances) to go but it could be that the Whitecaps lost a few valuable minutes because there was nobody on or off the field who could gather their collective heads together.

By this stage of this ramble it kind of feels as though I’m damning the coach with faint praise but that’s genuinely not the case.

It’s far more interesting to watch a team coached by a man who is willing to take chances than one who always adopts the safety first approach and the next two games will be a little tactical adventure in and of themselves.

First Robinson has to select a group of players capable of coming away with at least a tie in Montreal on Tuesday without damaging his team’s chances against Atlanta on Saturday.

And the Atlanta game should be fascinating.

They play the kind of high pressing game that, on one hand, could be catnip to a Vancouver team who must be sick of opponents sitting back at BC Place but, on the other hand, that high pressing game could be kryptonite to a Vancouver back four who regard any pass longer than five yards as more of an aspiration than an attainable goal.

But how Robinson must be relishing pitting his wits against “Tata” Martino (Ex Barcelona and Argentina coach).

In the past the Whitecaps would treat this visit with caution and simply sit back waiting to see who made the first mistake.

But now there’s a chance (There’s at least a chance!) that Robinson will try something fresh yet again and that would be (Has to be) a very good thing indeed.

Time for him to invent yet another new universe!

Vancouver Whitecaps rue everything!

It’s hard to know what to make of the Vancouver Whitecaps 1-0 defeat to DC United at BC Place on Saturday afternoon.

After all, on another day the Whitecaps could easily have won by two or three goals; they missed a spot kick, hit the woodwork four times and lost to an extremely dubious penalty call.

So was it just “one of those games”?

It probably was, although the lingering feeling that Vancouver have had “one of those games” quite a number of times over recent seasons might leave a person of a more worrisome disposition to consider it a trend rather than an anomaly.

Weak opposition sit back while the Whitecaps huff and puff with effort but no success.

And that lack of success in this particular game was down to a number of factors beyond the vagaries of the mythical “Soccer Gods”.

Christian Bolaños never quite found his passing range (Nobody else did either but Bolaños is key in this kind of game), Fredy Montero was a little less isolated but also a little less confident in front of goal than a top striker needs to be and Davies and Techera created next to nothing from the wide areas.

The fact that three of the Whitecaps four cracks against the woodwork came from set pieces also tells at least some of the story and even the chances that were created from open play were far more the result of a stray bounce here and and a mishit shot there than the well orchestrated and crisp passing we saw against Kansas last week.

That’s just the vagaries of MLS I suppose, but the Whitecaps have now taken one point from the three Eastern Conference teams to have played at BC Place this season and with the West being so close that they currently sit both out of the playoff places and only six points off the top with two games in hand those dropped points could be season changers come the end of the campaign.

The return of Matias Laba next week probably means a return to the 4-1-4-1 that has worked so well in recent weeks but it’s clear that this team is still a work in progress with Carl Robinson having to figure out how to fit his best pieces into his best eleven.

Bolaños is better suited to playing in the wide role, especially in a game as congested as this one was, and Alphonso Davies still looks more dangerous as a substitute than a starter and while Tony Tchani was a little bit better once again he’s still not offering enough going forward (Both in terms of quantity and quality).

These uncertainties are probably no bad thing given the way the season is structured but let’s hope the coach doesn’t allow a bad refereeing decision and the framework of a goal to persuade him that all is well within his team because if a dodgy penalty costs you the game at home to a poor DC United team then there’s still plenty of work to be done.

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings.

Ousted-6, Williams-6.5, Harvey-6.5, Parker-6.5, Waston-6.5, Jacobson-6.5*, Bolaños-6, Techera-5.5, Davies, 5.5, Tchani-6, Montero-5.5

 

Vancouver Whitecaps Win Again

Carl Robinson’s “Year of Great Experimentation” continued in the Canadian Championship on Wednesday evening as the Whitecaps beat the Montreal Impact 2-1 in the first leg of the tie.

This time around Robinson went with three at the back (de Jong, de Wit and Seiler)and then “something else” for the rest of the positions.

Jake Nerwinski was playing right wing back, Alphonso Davies was a midfielder with defensive responsibilities on the left, Teibert and McKendry were sitting in the middle and Rosales and Mezquida were constantly switching positions behind Brek Shea.

For the sake of simplicity let’s call it a 3-1.25-1.25-1-1.25-0.5-1.75-1 formation.

Whatever it was though it certainly worked well in the first half as the Whitecaps cruised to a 2-0 lead thanks to goals from Davies and Mezquida.

Nerwinski was a constant danger on the right, Teibert and McKendry were busy and neat (In that order) in the centre and the front three/four always looked capable of unlocking the Montreal backline.

Things changed for the worst in the second half however and that was down to one of three, two of three or three of three things.

Maybe the Impact worked out how to get behind that back three by playing diagonal balls out wide, maybe Mezquida, Rosales, Shea and Davies all tired quite suddenly or maybe the youngsters at the heart of the defensive effort suddenly found themselves lacking a little big game experience?

By the final whistle Spencer Richey (Who often looked a little reticent when coming out to meet the ball) had saved a penalty and made a last-ditch last-minute save with his feet to keep the lead alive.

Retrospect may tell Robinson that having one or two experienced players on the bench may have been a better move than completely filling it with youngsters and hopefully retrospect will also mention that Brek Shea definitely isn’t a lone target man.

The American was often caught offside when there was no need to be and just doesn’t possess the physicality or skill set to play that role.

In the end though it’s another win at BC Place in a largely entertaining game and though the second leg still hangs precariously in the balance the weight of that balance is just about tipped to the side of the good guys.

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings.

Richey-6.5, Nerwisnki-7*, de Wit-6, Seiler-6, de Jong-6.5, Teibert-6, McKendry-6, Rosales-6.5, Davies-7, Mezquida-6, Shea-5.5

 

Game of two halves for Schrödinger’s Caps

There aren’t really any “must win” games at this stage of the Major League Soccer season but the Vancouver Whitecaps home game to Sporting Kansas City at least felt like an “it would be really, really, nice to win” game.

Following up a positive four game road trip with a flat and futile performance at BC Place wold have felt like a step back in a season that had lurched toward the positive in recent weeks.

The end result was a comfortable 2-0 win for the Whitecaps but for the first thirty minutes “flat and futile” felt like a pretty good description of the game.

Coach Carl Robinson announced an unchanged team for the fifth consecutive game and he can’t really have been surprised to discover that a lineup which was very effective on the road proceeded to produce yet another effective road performance with few chances given or taken.

That really isn’t good enough for a home game though but, just when it appeared that the Whitecaps had lapsed into relying on hopeful/hopeless long balls from Kendall Waston to fashion any kind of chance the big central defender produced a decent pass to Sheanon Williams who hit a great cross to Christian Bolaños who chested it down to Cristian Techera who volleyed home first time.

It was a goal of genuine class in a half that was largely bereft of that particular commodity.

Thankfully the second half was far better and whether that was down to Kansas being forced to push forward and leave space at the back or whether it was down to Vancouver being more adventurous is open to debate but chance after chance was spurned (Including another Montero penalty miss) before Tim Parker headed home a Bolaños free-kick to all but seal the deal.

The question now for Robinson is how he sets the team up for the game against DC United next saturday.

Tony Tchani is still struggling to find a role in the side and the balance looked far better once he was removed and Alphonso Davies pushed wide and Bolaños moved inside.

Let’s call that a 4-1-1-3-1 for now with Jacobson being the second ‘1’ and playing the role of the Schrödinger midfielder; vacillating as he did between attack and defence.

That certainly feels more like the way forward than what we saw at the start of the game and it would also offer up an easy way to get both Brek Shea and the in form Techera into the starting eleven.

Will Carl Robinson continue in his great adventure toward tactical flexibility? This game should have convinced him that he needs to do just that but, for now, we can all enjoy three valuable points and a long and sunny holiday weekend.

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings.

Ousted-6, Williams-7, Parker-6.5, Waston-6, Harvey-6.5, Laba-6.5, Jacobson-6, Tchani-5.5, Techera-6.5, Bolaños -7*, Montero-5.5

 

 

Introducing The Soccer Shorts Owner’s Triangle!

This is a blog that dreams big.

And from today you have the exclusive opportunity to be a part of those dreams because I am delighted to announce the launch of the Soccer Shorts “Owners Triangle”.

Over the years this blog has been proud to contribute to the footballing landscape in Vancouver and is now ready to take the next step in its evolution with you (Yes! You!) as an integral part of both its mission and vision.

Owner’s Triangle members will be so much more than the usual idiots who read this blog because they will literally have a seat at the table, as well as exclusive access to the free wi-fi, at whichever coffee shop I happen to be sitting in.

And don’t forget the hospitality!

Owner’s Triangle members will be able to purchase any of the baked goods, pastries, sandwiches and even juices available at whichever coffee shop I happen to be sitting in.

But there’s even more than that!

Once you are an Owner’s Triangle member I will be happy to listen to your input while I am writing and will even let you asign a rating to a player of your choice in the now famous “Soccer Shorts Player Ratings” section of the blog.

Don’t like Kendall Waston? Give him a ‘3’ purely out of spite! It’s your choice because you are a member of the Owner’s Triangle.

You will also be able to mingle with all of the other people writing blogs in whichever coffee shop I happen to be sitting in. In fact, I will actively encourage you to mingle with other people.

That’s how much your happiness will mean to me.

But the benefits of the Owner’s Triangle don’t stop there! You will be granted exclusive access to the following behind the scenes activities.

Watch me as I frantically google for a quirky song to add some interest to yet another post about defensive midfielders!

Feel the excitement as I desperately try to understand the opening two sentences of the Wikipedia entry of a mainstream philosopher or writer!

Laugh with me as I hit random keys in a forlorn attempt to get that squiggly line on top of the N in Bolaúos, Bolan¿os, Bolaéos, Bolaños!

All this and more can be yours because, as part of the Soccer Shorts Owner’s Triangle, you will be more than just a reader.

You will share my vision, my sense of community and my bills at whichever coffee shop I happen to be sitting in.

So join today and become empowered.

 

Major League Soccer: Algorithm and Blues

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been joining in with the “30 Day Music Challenge” (Shout out to Chris Withers for finding it and tweeting it out).

The basic concept is that there is a theme for each day; A Song from 1970’s, A Song That Makes You Happy, A Song about a Pig with the word ‘Kettle’ in the Title (I’m really struggling with that last one to be honest).

It’s partly great because it really challenges you to hone down almost impossibly long lists of songs to just one and it’s partly great because it’s a great way to hear other people’s recommendations that you yourself have never heard before.

And that latter aspect exposes a real problem in how we consume music right now.

If we listen to the radio at all then chances are we listen to a station that plays “our kind” of music and if we rely on streaming then the best hope we have of finding new stuff is via the digital opinion of a soulless algorithm.

“You like Fleetwood Mac? We suggest you try listening to “Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits”. Okay, it might not be quite that bad but you’re never going to be pushed out of your comfort zone in such a scenario.

And that got me thinking. Isn’t the way we consume music kind of analogous to how we also consume sport these days? And isn’t that having an impact on Major League Soccer?

The answer to both question is probably “No” and No” but for the purposes of this post it’s very definitely “Yes” and Yes”. So let me explain.

There are, I think, three kinds of people who don’t watch MLS.

The ones who don’t like soccer at all and they are the ones we can discount until they have their come to Gabriel Jesus moment. But it’s the other two groups who are most interesting.

One don’t watch MLS because they think it’s a terrible league and prefer to stick to the (Usually European) upper echelon league of choice and the others don’t watch MLS because they hate what it is and what it stands for and cling instead to either the hope of a rival league forming or to the friendly surroundings of lower level football.

The former are the musical equivalent of those people who always go to the biggest concerts in town, wear the T-Shirt of whatever supergroup is the flavour of the week and think Coldplay are a little bit too cutting edge.

The only way to get them on board with MLS is to keep making them watch it and the only way to keep making them watch it is to make football far more ubiquitous on our TV Screens.

TSN have recently announced that they will be covering the CONCACAF Champions League from next season, which is great for those of us who regard Facebook as a little bit too much like actually meeting and getting to know other people, but it will only be good for the game overall if TSN step up their coverage to cover more than just the first to the last whistle.

If there’s no sense of occasion to the TV broadcast then those Juventus and Manchester City fans aren’t going to be swayed by anything.

It may amount to being akin to forcing a Mumford and Sons fan to listen to a playlist built around The Dead Kennedy’s ‘Holiday in Cambodia’ but if that’s what it takes then that’s what it takes.

They won’t all climb aboard the bandwagon, but at least some will.

The group who genuinely love local soccer but genuinely hate MLS are a more interesting and trickier conundrum.

Let’s compare these people to early adopter REM fans who never quite forgave the band for going mainstream. Michael Stipe and his cohorts were the Platonic Ideal of a great indy band in their first incarnation; chiming guitars mixed with lyrics that were indecipherable to either the ears or the mind and possessing a front man with genuine charisma.

But, by the time they were being played in every Starbucks, the only people who were actually hurting were those poor saps who thought the band would be their personal secret for the rest of their lives.

So how does MLS get these people back? Well, short of a strict volte face in how the league is run these people aren’t coming back. But that might not be a bad thing in the long run.

How so? You say.

The oft mooted Canadian Premier League finally seems to be gaining some traction and is slated to start toward the end of 2018 and while there are definite signs of nervousness from MLS HQ about this development (Don Garber has recently been seen eating poutine to show how much the League loves their Northern cousins) more football teams can never really be a bad thing.

Not least because rivalry (And especially local rivalry) is the heartbeat of the game.

Imagine if Victoria, or Langley or one of those other places that purportedly exist outside of Metro Vancouver got a CPL team and then knocked the Whitecaps out of the Canadian Championship?

People would be working, going to school, or at least rubbing shoulders with rival fans (PSA: Please ask before you embark on any shoulder rubbing with either a colleague or a stranger). Imagine the banter! Imagine the joy and the sorrow!

If people are going to hate MLS then how much better for them to hate it because they support a rival team rather than because a mid-season rule change introduced yet another new strain of allocation money?

So from now on Don Garber should respond to every question about the CPL by saying “We welcome it because it will give our teams the chance to crush the pathetic minnows every time we play them” (Spoiler Alert: That won’t happen).

And while it’s great that the newly formed TSS FC likes to tweet support for the Whitecaps (And I get that this is a good marketing strategy at this stage of their development) it will be far more enjoyable once they get to the level of disparaging their local rivals (And vice versa).

“Embrace the Hate!” probably won’t fly as a marketing slogan but it’s not a bad unspoken USP.

Hmmm, this all got a bit rambling towards the end didn’t it?

But I have at least solved all of the problems facing MLS with the simple proposition that sometimes forcing people out of their comfort zone is a good way to convince them of the value of something they previously thought valueless.

So let’s end with a song that isn’t a part of my “30 Day Music Challenge” but is at least kind of relevant to this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whitecaps v Rapids: What did we learn?

So I was beginning to develop an embryo of a theory which vaguely posited the assertion that Major League Soccer had evolved from one form of creature to another.

Maybe it wasn’t quite a fully fledged invertebrate yet but it had at least emerged coughing and spluttering on to the beach and was definitely beginning to think about using those newly acquired lungs that the persistent sales-octopus had sworn were bound to be the next big thing.

In other words, MLS was developing a very definite hierarchy with a handful of teams pulling away from the rest and the rest being separated into the “mostly looking up the table” or “mostly looking down the table” categories.

Unfortunately actual results have tended to thwart this particular theory and though we can perhaps class Toronto, Dallas and maybe New York City, Kansas and Portland/Orlando as comfortably belonging in the upper echelons the rest of the pack are still fighting for their places in the standings like coked up ferrets in a sack full of white hot rivets

So what was interesting about the Whitecaps win in Colorado was that it was Vancouver who were able to introduce difference makers from the bench with Mezquida and Shea linking up for the winner in addition to the inevitable Alphonso Davies hype fest (HypeFest is like FyreFest but with better catering).

And now that the Whitecaps have announced the signing of Bernie Ibini from the Australian A-League that ability to change the game late on has increased again.

Now, there are two ways of looking at the recent acquisitions of the club.

The first is that they are demonstrating a remarkable lack of imagination in constantly signing players who are essentially hybrid winger/forwards and thus creating a one size fits all approach to tactics that will eventually lead to a dearth of flexibility in the approach to any game.

The other view is that there is a deliberate policy of recruiting exactly the kind of players who can be switched in and out of the team without altering either the shape or flow of the side.

It also provides the opportunity to better recreate what we saw in Colorado; late introductions that can change a game.

Carl Robinson already had this weapon at his disposal to some degree with Manneh and Hurtado but the hope has to be that the recent additions are a step up (in either quality or consistency).

Even then they are probably still over reliant on Fredy Montero to sniff out goals where none seemed to exist and the “there’s definitely a plan to the signings” narrative may be based more on wishful thinking than concrete evidence.

But there’s definitely a plan to the signings!