Tag: Vancouver Whitecaps

Whitecaps versus Union: What did we learn?

Mostly we learned that the world is a strange and terrible place and that although we may try to avoid staring into the void there will be times when the void stares straight into us with it’s unblinking and uncaring gaze.

Okay the goalless tie with the Philadelphia Union wasn’t quite that bad for the Vancouver Whitecaps but it certainly felt like it at times.

Once again Vancouver were faced with an opponent content to sit back at BC Place and once again the home team had little idea of how to break through such a tactic.

Long balls to a fast forward line are inevitably less effective if the opposition are sitting deep yet that remained the go to move for the Whitecaps for much of the game.

That way of playing is inevitable when a team has no central midfielder who is either willing or able to get forward and, the odd scrambled clearance from a set piece aside, the Union were left largely untroubled at the back and will no doubt be delighted to take away a point from such a long road trip.

The main positive on the night for the Whitecaps was the play of Christian Dean who was both solid in defence and displayed a degree of quality distribution that neither Waston or Parker is capable of.

That leaves Carl Robinson with an interesting choice; if his team largely relies on the long ball from the back then much better to have a player back there who can play those passes with aplomb.

It’s hard to see him dropping either Waston or Parker so early in the year but that may prove to be the right move to make as the season progresses.

Otherwise Kekuta Manneh looked lost in the centre and clearly needs the space to run into that the wider role provides and Brek Shea looked like a drunken gazelle on ice as he repeatedly failed to find either his feet or the ball.

We’ll put that down to the early days of playing on turf.

We shouldn’t get carried away with how bad the performance was I suppose because there were the mitigating factors of it being early in the season, injuries and players just starting to get to know each other on the field.

Yet there have been mitigating factors for this team for the last eighteen months; “they are young”, “the schedule”, “fine lines” etc.

So we are probably just going to have to accept that Carl Robinson is a coach who wants to play in this limited style and that he will never produce an aesthetically pleasing brand of football.

The good news is that this can still be effective (especially in MLS) but the bad news is that when it doesn’t work it can be brutally uninspiring to watch.

And Sunday’s game was brutally uninspiring to watch.

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings.

Ousted-6, Williams, 6- Dean-6.5*, Parker-6, Harvey-6, Laba-5.5, Jacobson-5.5, Techera-5, Manneh-4.5, Davies-6.5, Hurtado-5.5 (Montero-5.5, Shea-4.5)

 

Whitecaps versus Red Bulls: What did we learn?

The CCL games against the New York Red Bulls existed in a strange netherworld between pre-season friendly and most important games of the MLS era for the Whitecaps.

But at least the game on Thursday evening was close enough to the regular season to allow us to draw some kind of meaningful conclusions despite the slightly alarming number of absentees for the home team.

And those conclusions probably confirmed what we already knew (confirmation bias notwithstanding) but the new season is finally here so ’tis the time for rapidly evolving mood swings and definitive statements that change on an hourly basis.

Two defensive midfielders doesn’t work-  Yeah, yeah, yeah this is playing the same old song but the Whitecaps were fortunate to score an early goal which really forced the Red Bulls to come at them and so set up the “sit deep and counter attack” style that Carl Robinson finds so endearing.

The problem with that is the same problem they faced all last season at home; visiting teams aren’t going to allow space for Manneh and Davies to run in to so Vancouver need to find a different way to break teams down and they won’t do that with both Laba and Teibert on the field.

Jacobson is a slightly better option in the role as he at least possesses some attacking instinct, but Thursday was a classic example of a formation designed to draw the opposition forward and not too many teams will accept that invitation at BC Place.

Fredy Montero needs support- It was great that the Colombian scored on his debut but that can’t disguise how isolated he often was in his thirty minute appearance.

Sure, the state of the game had some influence on that but (and this comes back to the first point) he won’t flourish if all he has to go on are long balls forward from the back four.

A deep lying number ten could be the link man he needs or perhaps the pairing of Davies and Bolaños could offer more consistent support, but let’s hope that what we saw against New York wasn’t a harbinger of loneliness to come (Memo to self: “A Harbinger of Loneliness to Come” would be a great title for that pretentious novel you keep meaning to write) .

The squad depth looks impressive- It feels as though we say this every year but Carl Robinson isn’t short of options if he wants to switch things around.

Bolaños, Mezquida, Techera, Hurtado, Reyna and Rosales were all unavailable for selection but he was still able to put out a decent first eleven and bench. And the performances of Jake Nerwinski and Marcel de Jong in particular must have pleased the coach.

Both are expected to be bit part players this year but although Nerwinski got caught out of position a couple of times he didn’t lose his calm and even offered an attacking threat. And he also understands the right back position which by itself is an improvement on last season.

Marcel de Jong was even more impressive aligning defensive duties with an attacking threat and some great deliveries and it’s easy to see Robinson giving him plenty of minutes, especially on the road.

Overall this probably feels a bit harsh given the injuries, a 2-0 win and a place in the Champion’s League semi-final but deficiencies are deficiencies no matter what the score and they still need to be addressed.

 

Vancouver Whitecaps reign over Red Bulls

It wasn’t overly pretty and there were times when the Whitecaps were bunkered in their own penalty area for minutes at a time but in the end goals from Alphonso Davies and Fredy Montero were enough to see Vancouver through  to the semi-final of the CONCACAF Champions League.

In an ideal world they would have built on the early goal from Davies but instead the Whitecaps reverted to type and allowed the Red Bulls to find a foothold in the game without really putting together a decent spell of football.

For Vancouver the forwards were a little less mobile than they were in the previous game with Brek Shea mostly taking a central role that he failed to excel in.

Kekuta Manneh filled in there too and he and Davies gradually became the home team’s best hope of adding a second through their pace on the break.

That second goal didn’t transpire until the introduction of Montero who (after spending fruitless minutes scampering after the ball or watching it be hit high and wide away from him) decided to introduce himself to the home fans by hammering a crisply hit shot into the back of the net.

There was a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in seeing a Whitecaps forward strike the ball so cleanly and so accurately but hopefully there’s more of that to come from the new addition to the squad.

The team is still developing though with Shea understandably struggling to find a rhythm and Montero will need to be serviced with more than chances from scrappy set-pieces if he’s to really make his mark but a win is a win is a win and to achieve it with goals from the both the new star striker and the young prodigy is about as good as it could get for the club.

Next stop is at home to Philadelphia on Sunday in the MLS opener and a win there would make the start to the season pleasingly reassuring but, for now, the Whitecaps are just two games away from the Champions League Final.

Last year suddenly feels a lot more distant.

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings!

Ousted-6.5, Nerwisnki-6, Waston-6.5, Parker-6, Harvey-6, Laba-6.5, Tiebert-6, de Jong-6, Davies-7*, Manneh-6, Shea-5.5

 

Vancouver Whitecaps: Life with the lions

It’s debatable just how widespread kleptoparasitism actually is among humans, but there is certainly some video and anecdotal evidence that in parts of Africa humans will steal meat from a pride of lions who have just downed their prey.

And this isn’t a group of guys in a Jeep firing guns and whooping and hollering; this is just two or three people who simply use “attitude” to move the big cats away from the big kill.

Now we can argue all day about how much things like “attitude” and the like really matter in sport, but if there has been a narrative arc for the Whitecaps in their recent signings then it has definitely bent toward “experience”.

Since the wheels fell off in 2016 all the major acquisitions have each possessed at least some degree of knowledge of the game in North America.

Granted there’s an argument to be made that each of these individual additions was merely a random occurrence that we have since conflated into a coherent whole (Edgar and de Jong to reclaim the locker room and the defence, Barnes a desperate throw of the dice to save the season, Montero initiated by Rosales, Shea a means to ship out Barnes and Rosales initiated by Montero) but if we forsake such cynicism then the pattern is clear.

And the recent arrival/re-arrival of Mauro Rosales helps to confirm it.

The Argentinian may be thirty-six, have lost at least two yards of pace and will probably only be good for cameo appearances but he’s almost instantly become the de facto captain of the team (in the locker room if not on the field).

That hints at the issues that may still remain of course but at least the “we are a young team” excuse has been stripped away from the mitigating factors arsenal and, by the end of last season, it certainly felt as though the team needed fewer alibis and more censure for the their mistakes and failings.

And hopefully Rosales is another stepping stone on the path to self-accountability.

Anyway, here’s some humans scaring off some lions; a solid midfield three if ever I saw one.

Warning! There will be blood!

 

 

 

 

Whitecaps trade Barnes for Shea (or Shea for Barnes)

I think we can place this in the “I did not see it coming” file.

The arrival of Brek Shea doesn’t make a ton of sense from a squad construction point of view but it’s been clear for a while that the Whitecaps have been keen to get Giles Barnes (or at least his salary) away from Vancouver and Shea was likely the best, or only, option.

So where will he play for the Whitecaps??

Well, Carl Robinson is quoted as saying that Shea will “bring a different dimension to our attack” which rules out him carrying on in the left back position he played in Orlando and the Whitecaps are just fine for left backs anyway.

So that leaves two possible options.

Either Shea fills the same role that Cristian Techera does within the squad, playing either wide left or wide right depending on who else is in the lineup and Robinson will no doubt like the more defensive aspect that Shea will bring to that role.

The problem with that though is that Techera won’t be a first choice starter once everybody else is fit anyway so he either drops even further down the depth chart or becomes virtually superfluous to requirements.

If the Whitecaps can handle that level of salary warming the bench for most of the year then fine, but it’s not a great idea in a league where every dollar (both real and imagined) counts.

The other possibility is that Robinson envisions converting Shea to a central midfield role so that he can play alongside Matias Laba.

This makes a kind of sense given that he has both defensive experience, the ability to get forward and a track record of being able to change positions at the whim of a coach.

And maybe Shea will indeed turn out to be the box to box midfielder the side so desperately need.

The reality though is that this probably wasn’t a trade made with a specific purpose in mind but one driven by a “needs must” agenda and only now will Robinson begin to think about how best to utilize his new signing.

One more versatile player isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’s the danger that an awful lot of squareish pegs are going to be forced uncomfortably into roundish holes this season.

And that doesn’t sound pleasant for anybody!

Vancouver Whitecaps bullish after tie in New York

The CONCACAF Champion’s League quarter-finals exist in some strange kind of hinterland for the MLS clubs involved; existing as they do just at the end of the pre-season but just before the regular season gets under way.

That makes the games both hard to predict and even harder to parse for harbingers of what is to come.

Nevertheless the Whitecaps 1-1 tie with the New York Red Bulls was both a pleasing result (even more so considering the home team were given a penalty kick and the advantage of an extra man after Cristian Techera had been dismissed) and offered at least few clues about what to expect from Vancouver in 2017.

The most positive aspect was the somewhat constant movement of the forward line with Hurtado, Manneh, Davies and Techera frequently switching positions and at least giving the Red Bulls backline something more to think about than a solitary striker.

It’s a little easier to see Fredy Montero fitting into that version of 4-2-3-1 than those previously envisioned.

Not surprisingly the pace of both Manneh and Davies always offered a threat on the break and if Manneh could just learn to play the right pass at the right time he would be a guaranteed game winner more often than not.

Defensively the Whitecaps were solid too (or at least more solid than many of us feared) with Parker and Waston looking more like the effective 2015 pairing than the porous 2016 version.

The worrying aspects remain the lack of any creativity or link up play from the defensive midfielders with both Laba and Teibert offering next to nothing going forward and while that may be forgivable on the road it still remains to be seen how dangerous the Whitecaps are when faced with an opponent who sits back and negates their pace.

The red card and the penalty kick (both good calls) also offered a painful reminder of the indiscipline of last year, but at least the ten men held on and that should instill a little more confidence in the ability to close out games in a way they were barely able to do in 2016.

It’s all set up very nicely for the game at BC Place next Thursday and if the Whitecaps can come out of that game advancing to the semi-finals then the mood around the whole club should get both a little lighter and a little more forgiving.

It’s ludicrously early in the season (I mean really, really ludicrously early) to be talking about a game having so much importance but that’s the way it is.

The positive news is that both the result and the performance in New Jersey offered somewhat unexpected glimmers of hope for what is to come.

It’s the hope that kills you of course, but at least it’s a relatively pain free death (until the final moments anyway).

Time for the Soccer Shorts player ratings!

Ousted-6, Nerwinski-5, Parker-7*, Waston-7, Harvey-6, Laba-5, Teibert-5, Techera-5, Manneh-6, Davies-6, Hurtado-5 (Barnes-6, Williams-5)

 

 

 

 

Whitecaps fall flat in Portland

Let’s start with the traditional caveat that preseason games should always be taken with more than just a pinch of salt.

But even so the Vancouver Whitecaps 2-1 loss to the Portland Timbers on Wednesday evening was so replete with familiar issues from last season that it probably should have been preceded by some kind of trigger warning for long-suffering fans.

So in the spirit of the performance itself let’s just throw some random thoughts at the wall and see if any of them make any sense whatsoever.

There’s nothing wrong with sending out a team to play defensive football; many of the world’s best coaches do exactly that.

But “defensive” doesn’t just mean sitting back and letting the opposition attack. It means a level of organization in both the defence and midfield and it means at least some degree of connection between the midfield and the forward line.

There was none of that against the Timbers.

As was the case last year the Whitecaps looked like a team that had simply been sent out to play rather than one that was being coached or managed.

In other words, players were playing as individuals rather than as a team with Laba charging around the middle, Hurtado isolated up front, the full backs offering little in the way of attacking threat or defensive cover, the wide players offering the same, Barnes playing in a position that clearly doesn’t suit him and Parker and Waston failing to function as a unit.

Consequently once the first goal went in it was clear that the players lost any faith or confidence in what they were doing.

That still doesn’t explain the appalling sense of stasis that emanated from all quarters however with the defence content to stand and admire Portland’s build up play and the forwards equally content to stand and admire when one of their own had the ball.

It’s one of the basic tenets of football that movement is key to success so it’s hard to know if the lack of it was down to players either not knowing where they should be moving to or simply a lack of interest in doing so.

At the end of the game Timbers coach Caleb Porter opined that “In some ways the game was too easy” to be a useful work out for his players and if that isn’t as damning a comment as could be made then I don’t know what is.

The counterpoint to all this negativity is that both Montero and Bolaños were missing and they are undoubtedly the team’s two quality players, but that absence of quality should have made the rest of the team concentrate on the basics even more.

The first game of the Champion’s League tie is less than a week away and a good result there would change everything but, as of now, the Whitecaps look to be as adrift and as rudderless as they were last year.

 

 

Fredy or not here he comes!

So finally the long and seemingly painful search for a proven goal scorer has come to and end for the Vancouver Whitecaps with the loan signing of Fredy Montero from Chinese side Tianjin Teda FC.

This being MLS the details of the actual deal are about as murky and convoluted as an Oliver Stone movie but at least the former Seattle Sounder has a bona fide record of putting the ball into the back of the net.

The big question now is whether the Whitecaps can get the best out of him.

Carl Robinson has already said that he intends to use Montero as a number nine which begs the question “Exactly what kind of number nine?”.

Play him the way that Octavio Rivero was played (unsplendid isolation) and the Colombian will likely end up as a diminutive tribute act to the Uruguayan; all rolling eyes and forlornly outstretched arms.

But if Robinson can figure out a way to get players in support of Montero then the forward line could be formidable indeed.

And the positive news is that he now has exactly the kind of players to do just that with Reyna, Manneh, Barnes, Techera, Bolaños, Davie, Mezquida et al all far happier going forward than tracking back.

It’s debateable whether the coach will be willing to grant his team that kind of freedom but he could use his favoured double defensive midfield set up to simply allow all those ahead of them free reign.

It’s an exciting prospect for the fan but it’s probably something of a pipe dream.

For one thing Robinson just isn’t that kind of coach and for another the disappointing nature of last season may well instill even more initial conservatism into both him and the players.

Perhaps if he were given a cast iron guarantee that the fans and the media would show patience over the first few weeks if things didn’t quite work out as promised then Robinson would be willing to take more of a risk, but the memory of 2016 and Champion’s League qualifier against the Red Bulls cuts that slack down to almost nothing.

So we’ll probably see Montero playing with a high number ten with the two wide men operating as much as midfielders as forwards.

Not as great from an aesthetic point of view but at least a step up (both literally and metaphorically) from last season.

 

Eight, nine or ten for the Whitecaps?

Imagine for a moment that you’re the one in charge of all the big decisions for the Vancouver Whitecaps.

It’s already been a busy off-season; you’ve given the go ahead for little blue triangles to be added to the new white home shirt and you’re confident that you’ve hired the very best people to handle the streaming of the pre-season games.

But now you’re faced with the biggest challenge yet.

Financial restraints mean only one Designated Player can be added to the team and owners want you to decide if that should be a number eight, a number nine or a number ten.

Despite being  somewhat appalled at their slightly reductive way of looking at tactical positioning you set about pondering their question.

You first remember that a very briulliant blogger once argued that Matias Laba either can’t or won’t be asked to play the purely defensive midfield role so that would make a true box to box midfielder both a bonus and a liability to the team.

True, the team could definitely do with a player who added to the numbers going forward but if that was at the cost of leaving the back four as exposed as it was last year that could mean good money spent simply to stand still.

Anyway, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that Vancouver just need a good finisher to make everything okay isn’t it?

Well it kind of is, but while the Whitecaps definitely created chances last season a whole bunch of those chances were created by work rate and pace rather than creativity.

Slot a pure finisher into the lineup and it’s just possible that a numbder of those chances may suddenly disappear making his presence a lot less effective than we all presume it would be.

So perhaps a creative presence at number ten is the answer?

It’s certainly one area where Carl Robinson hasn’t had much success since he took over the coaching role with his two main options either being Pedro Morales (who lacked the quickness of short passing and instinct to get forward) and Nicolas Mezquida (who lacks the inate creativity).

So simply putting a genuinely effective number ten should solve all the problems?

Again what we really come back to is the way Robinson likes to set up his team; he seems to prefer “and a half” players.

In other words he likes a wide man who plays narrow and he definitely likes forwards who can play anywhere along the front line; somewhere between a nine and a ten.

But when he does play a straight up forward man then he prefers him to play facing the rest of the team rather than the opposition goal meaning that he becomes the de facto creative hub for the rest of the attack to play off.

So if the coach genuinely likes these “portmanteau” players then concentrating on signing their exact opposite may be detrimental to the team in the long run.

That means the best answer you can give to the question of whether to sign a number eight, nine or ten is to give no answer at all.

Good work!

 

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.