16 thousand people crowded into Dick’s Sporting Goods park to watch the Colorado Rapids beat Sporting Kansas City in what some are calling the Rapids’ best home game of the year. Though, the result was not always secure.
After a scoreless first half, things took a turn for the worse when Sporting’s Dom Dwyer scored from close range just two minutes into the second. But, the Rapids responded.
Six minutes after conceding, the Rapids’ Vicente Sanchez bumped and spun past a defender on Sporting’s left flank. It was a deliberate, almost slow piece of misdirection that left the defender on the floor. In a fresh swathe of space, Sanchez squared the ball across the 18, and seemingly missed everybody. But, the rolled cross found its way to the feet of Maynor Figueroa, wide open. He made no mistake, and finished the ball with the help of a deflection.
Then, in the 76th minute the comeback was completed. Sanchez again beat a man going down Sporting’s left flank, got to the end line, and whipped in a cross to the far post. Kevin Doyle rose to meet it, and nodded it home for his 4th goal, and game winner, of the season.
The Colorado Rapids are 9th in MLS’ Western Conference. With 8 games left and only 5 points separating them from a spot in the playoffs, it would be unfair to say that the team has sealed it’s fate.
As a matter of fact, if the sentiment that pervaded Saturday night’s home victory over Sporting Kansas City has any baring on how the rest of the season will go, things couldn’t be better.
9 points in 8 days has seen the club uproot itself from the bottom of the conference table. Scoring yet another game winner has Kevin Doyle cracking Donald Trump jokes in the post game press conference. Coach Pablo Mastroeni has a gift that makes his concurrent birthday all the more sweeter: a team that ostensibly is starting to believe in itself.
All that, however, loses sight of reality; this team still has a lot of work to do; underpinning the attitudes of both Mastroeni and Doyle is a seasoned expectation of hard work in the very near future.
When asked if his team had achieved “learning how to win,” coach Mastroeni had this to say.
“I think it’s a process still…you never get to a point [where] you say, when did I become an adult? ‘I don’t know somewhere between’ — for me it was somewhere between 30 and 39. Some other people, [it happens at] 16.”
“You have to learn, lose, relearn, lose, relearn, lose, relearn, lose. And I think that’s, you know, that’s what we’re kinda going through and figuring out. But I think these three game validate the mentality it takes, validate the work that [the team] put in and validate the direction we want to move.”
With no guarantee of making the playoffs, this Rapids team might have to lose and relearn sooner rather than later. It’s a good thing that doing so appears to be exactly what the doctor, or, at least coach Mastroeni, ordered.
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