Good Monday morning Caps fans, hope you all had a relaxing weekend and that you are in for a lovely week ahead.
A rare Sunday fixture did little to slow down the Vancouver Whitecaps, who shredded San Jose 4-1 on Sunday in yet another attacking masterclass.
Vancouver expertly exploited the Quakes’ lax midfield play. Yohei Takaoka bypassed large chunks of San Jose’s midfield with his distribution, feeding the fullbacks and midfielders into advanced spaces with ease. On the team’s second goal from Thomas Müller, Sebastian Berhalter was able to burst forward as if on a counter attack — except the Caps had been in possession the whole time. San Jose have been one of the worst defensive teams in the league and it wasn’t hard to see why.
Still, they are also one of the more high octane attacks in MLS and Vancouver kept them pretty well penned in. Aside from a set piece early cleared off the line by Ralph Priso, San Jose didn’t have another clear cut chance until things were well in hand. Losing the clean sheet was frustrating but this was another good performance from Priso and Mathias Laborda and Jesper Sorensen devised a way to nicely hem in the Quakes’ wingbacks.
We can’t go any farther without mentioning the scintillating performance from Berhalter, who had a lovely assist on Rayan Elloumi’s opener and then bagged two long range bangers of increasingly impressive quality. He ran things in the midfield otherwise as well and was the clear man of the match. Müller was purring, as was Ali Ahmed, and Elloumi did quite well not just to get a goal but to hold up play and progress the ball really well.
This was the type of result Vancouver needed, as they will again lose players to the international break when they will need to try and vault themselves into first place in the Western Conference against a tricky Orlando side. San Jose are spiraling out of the playoff picture but they had a lot to play for and needed a result in this match desperately. It is a sign of this team’s mentality that they didn’t allow them to get a foothold and instead put up one of the most entertaining performances you’ll see.
Shameless Self Promotion
Our post-match analysis tells the story of another match where Vancouver never had to get off cruise control.
Best of the Rest
Glad to see Thomas Müller is getting acquainted with some of Vancouver’s many other entertainment options.
Philadelphia Union wrapped up the Supporters Shield with a 1-0 win over NYCFC. It is wild that the Caps beat them 7-0 and still lost out but congrats to Philly on a deserved trophy win.
Meanwhile, more kudos are in order for San Diego, who sealed the all time points record for an expansion side. Hopefully that’s only good enough for second in the west …
Moise Bombito could be out for some time after fracturing his tibia against Lyon over the weekend.
At least spell our superstar player’s name correctly!!
Keyboards don’t have an option to type umlauts so other shortcuts are used instead. “ue” is the commonly accepted substitute for “ü”. (Typing this from a phone so I have the ability to do so properly.) Müller or any other German would not be offended by the use of the shortcut. Hope this helps.
so many of the Cap players had terrific games- lots of energy and creativity- and again Priso saves a goal by standing on the goal-line
once Gauld gets fully back into play, we have 2 leaders that will work together to drive this Team into the play-offs- Mueller and Gauld will be quite the combo- Mueller will be a BIG plus as he leans into players to up their game and never relax- these 2 will also drive the Supporters, a valuable piece of a successful Team- its HIGH OCTANE
we will miss a lot of players for the Orlando game (Cubas, Ahmed, Berhalter for sure)- this cant continue if MLS is to be taken seriously- a schedule change to a split season is forthcoming, probably for 2027- something like August to november; february to may with fitted in breaks for international call-ups
on a bad note- our Canadian CB, Moises Bombito, is gone again with a prolonged injury of a broken bone in his foot- we really lack depth and quality at CB
Salty