CHESTER — For most of the Philadelphia Union, a beating like the one meted out by Vancouver in Saturday night’s 7-0 loss is a once-in-a-lifetime thumping.
Jovan Lukic has been there before, though. Late in 2023, the midfielder was a second-half substitute for Serbia’s Under-21s in a Euro U-21 Championship qualifier at the City Ground in Nottingham against England’s U-21s.
Lukic entered the game at 6-1 in the 66th minute. It finished 9-1, an England squad that included Cole Palmer, Harvey Elliott and Liam Delap running roughshod. Being for the national team, that one carried even more sting than a game in the dead of the club season.
So in plotting how the Union recover from last week’s loss and the 3-1 ouster in the U.S. Open Cup on Tuesday in Nashville, Lukic might have a little more expertise to draw on.
“Mentally, we have to move on,” he said Thursday. “We don’t have a lot of time to think, to overthink about those games. We just want to be ourselves. We don’t want to change something. It’s just two bad games, and we didn’t approach the game like we should, how we usually do it.”
The past is the past. The Union (17-7-6, 57 points) have testified to that all week. But the past is not truly past until the Union’s results say so. Those demons can be exorcised Saturday by being better than the New England team that comes to Chester (2:30 p.m., AppleTV).
New England (8-14-8, 32 points) is 11th in the East. It fired coach Caleb Porter on Monday. It can be eliminated from playoff contention Saturday even with a win. It is the kind of team that the Union has routinely handled at home this year, which is why the Union enter leading the Supporters’ Shield race.
The Union have four games left, two at home and two on the road. The Revs are three points that the team absolutely must have in order to stay in control of the Shield race, though that isn’t necessarily the way Bradley Carnell is framing it for his team this week.
“We want to make sure that we are aiming for the next three points possible, and through that accumulation, we’ve put ourselves in that position,” he said. “So if you live in fear, you’re going to fail, and there’s nothing to fear. … In my eyes, we just have to play free and enjoy the last four games. And for us, tally up the points where we are at the end. But so far, we are still in a very strong standing.”
Part of that focus on the individual rests with the uncertainty the Revs will bring. The end of Porter’s tenure brought a number of tactical changes out of desperation, and reports since his departure have indicated that the two-time MLS Cup winner was not well liked in the dressing room.
How a team responds to a dismissal midseason is always a question mark, so Carnell isn’t wasting the energy pondering how interim coach Pablo Moreira’s team will show up.
“I’ve lived that role as an assistant, taking over as an interim,” said Carnell, whose first head job in MLS was as an interim head coach for the Red Bulls in 2020. “I’ve been there, done that, and there’s a lot going on there, but people embrace change negatively or positively. And it’s up to us to make sure that we’re ready against that, to make sure that we play like a home team, to make sure we get the crowd behind us.”
With the earlier kickoff time, the Union have a chance to place the first marker of the weekend. Second-place San Diego has a long trip to take on eliminated Atlanta United at 4:30. Miami should handle dead-and-buried D.C. United at 7:30, though it has a midweek game looming afterward. Third-place Cincinnati (at LA Galaxy) and sixth-place Vancouver (at Sporting KC) are on the road, albeit against teams all-but-mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.
None of that matters to Carnell’s preparation process, though. This week has been about the Union being the Union again.
“It’s one of those weeks that we wish we could forget, but if we’re not feeling uncomfortable, it means we’re not growing,” Carnell said. “And I feel we got to a point where we are at a point in the season now where we have to grow one more time to finish the season strong and to prepare us for the postseason.”
The Union have responded well to adversity this year in limited opportunities. After a 4-1-0 start to the season, they came back to the pack with a three-match winless run, then rattled off three straight wins and a 13-match unbeaten streak in all competitions. That halted in road losses at Columbus and Nashville, but the Union responded with a 3-0-2 stretch in the league, plus a win in the Open Cup.
“We’ve already been in this kind of situation,” Lukic said. “It’s little bit different. But still, we’ve been in this situation. We just want to stay focused all the time, even in tough moments, just to be calm and strong mentally and to keep the head up. That’s the only right way. If we stay behind and think what was before, it’s just keeping us back.”
Source: Berkshire mont