The Philadelphia Union have 30 MLS games remaining. That may require reiterating, here in late March, not just for the emotional content of the soccer the club has already played but for the sense of unease that had crept in before Saturday’s trip to Portland.
Some of it is semantics. With the 3-1 win at Providence Park late Saturday night, the Union are one of five MLS teams without a loss. Something less than a victory and they’d have been grouped with three remaining winless sides. The difference in practice is slightly, though it’s hardly tomato, to-mah-to with a restless fan base.
“It’s the fine line and the little details of the season,” manager Jim Curtin said. “So from that standpoint, this is a huge team win.”
What the 90 minutes in the Pacific Northwest should’ve reinforced is a truth no less applicable at kickoff than at the final whistle: That the Union are going to be fine. All the club’s second-ever win in Portland accomplished was a more concrete and earlier turning of the page.
The details matter, though. The Union went to Portland and were forced into six changes from last week’s 2-2 draw in Austin by the international break. Curtin handed the second career start to Markus Anderson and Jeremy Rafanello, neither in roles they’d played before, in a flat 4-4-2 formation that Curtin had never deployed.
Yet a team that had struggled to do simple things early in the season and were still smarting from a 6-0 humiliation by Pachuca 10 days earlier kept it simple throughout. They ceded possession to a Portland team that wanted the ball but did little with it. They stayed compact. They cut out dangerous service in the box, supported Oliver Semmle in goal, and scrambled to cover set pieces. They hit on the counter ruthlessly enough not to bemoan Mikael Uhre spurning arguably the game’s two best chances and roundly won the xG battle.
“An incredible performance from our guys,” Curtin said. “This group tends to be at their best maybe when they’re counted out. We talked in the pregame obviously about being shorthanded, but I promised the players that if they gave maximum effort, I was certain that we’d get a result and bring points back to Philadelphia.”
They did it with Rafanello, usually a No. 10, playing as a No. 8. They did it with Anderson, a forward, defending like a midfielder. They did it with Alejandro Bedoya playing as an out-and-out No. 6 for the first time since 2020. They did it with Semmle making seven saves, earning a Team of the Week nod for looking light years more comfortable than earlier cameos in Andre Blake’s stead.
Both Rafanello and Anderson were tasked with flexing into different positions when the Union had the ball. Rafanello even figured into a goal, his dipping drive from distance parried by Portland goalie James Pantemis straight into the path of Quinn Sullivan to bury the rebound.
The back-to-basics approach was necessary on the day, and maybe refreshing writ large.
“What we wanted to do was really make them earn everything tonight,” Curtin said. “We thought, sit a little deeper, two blocks of four where it’s not the diamond but it’s a flat four where now, because their outside backs are really good coming forward, that opponent for Markus on the left was right in front of him. For Quinny, it was a little bit easier. You give maybe a simpler job for Rafa to do rather than flying out to (Diego) Chara. We asked our strikers to stay compact.
“You can hear it from up top from the guys relaying things to us that we were 20 to 25 yards front-to-back, all 10 guys, so that’s a hard thing for any MLS team to break down. I thought that they guys really executed well.”
In the last month, the Union have triumphed under taxing conditions in the CONCACAF Champions Cup over Deportivo Saprissa. They have traveled to Austin, Kansas City, Portland, and internationally twice. Both Blake and Julian Carranza have missed time. They’ve had a game rained out. If the on-field product was ragged … yeah, of course it was.
When the Union found in Portland was a fitting bookend. They were terrible in their first half of soccer this season in Costa Rica, then ran roughshod over Saprissa for three goals in 24 minutes. The first 25 minutes of the second half looked like that in Portland, the more the Timbers pushed, the deeper they sunk into the Union’s counterpressing quicksand.
Consider those two halves the opening and closing pages of the season’s first chapter. The understanding will require more practice time to consolidate, which the end of CCC play should allow. But even amid the struggles, the Union knew who they were as a team from the start. It may have gotten jumbled in the hurly burly of eight scheduled games in 23 days, but it didn’t vanish.
If the Union’s deep reserves could live that, then the full group will once it returns.
“It’s been disjointed,” Curtin said. “We haven’t been us too many times. But I think we’ve shown flashes. This win and this game was about, whoever’s here, the names on the back don’t matter. Let’s play like us, let’s be hard to play against and find a way to get a result. I think that we did that, and it’s a big win.”
Contact Matthew De George at mdegeorge@delcotimes.com.
Source: Berkshire mont
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