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TheLowlySquire wrote:Wow, Arda! Huge!
Howard Mass wrote:Arda is not a terrorist. Arda is a good person.
El Turco wrote:first time ive heard of this competition. i assume mls and mexican league wins every year?
A challenging preseason is soon coming to an end for the Impact.
Involved in competitive action on Feb. 24 against Pachuca in the CONCACAF Champions League, Montreal haven’t had the luxury of time. In each of the last three preseasons, they played against at least five other teams. This year, in a 32-day preparation period, only three games – all in Mexico – fit into their schedule in between a handful of intra-squad scrimmages.
With 12 new faces in camp, the Impact have been racing against the clock, while Pachuca started their league campaign already. But Montreal have only one finish in mind: being fully ready for that first leg of the Champions League quarterfinals.
“It’s a different team this year than it was last year, with a lot of changes that we made to the team,” head coach Frank Klopas told reporters earlier this week. “With less time to prepare, it makes it a little bit more difficult, but we were out here [in Mexico] early and we wanted to give ourselves every opportunity to get as ready as we possibly can to face a good team.”
It hasn’t been the greatest of starts for Pachuca in Liga MX. They sit in 13th place in the league with two wins, a draw and three losses.
There’s very little one can do to sugarcoat D.C. United’s 5-2 loss in Costa Rica on Thursday night, the opening match of their Scotiabank Champions League quarterfinal series against Alajuelense.
Yes, United nabbed a pair of away goals. Sure, they seemed a bit more composed during stretches of the second half and were largely undone by a pair of dreadful mistakes from their goalkeeper. But the reality is just too sobering: D.C. were thoroughly outplayed and now face an uphill battle – and a steep one – needing at least three goals in the return leg next Wednesday to secure advancement.
In a way, the opening phases of the match looked exactly like what it was: a match-up between a team in preseason form and one who found themselves in the middle of their regular season, a storyline all too familiar to MLS fans forced to deal with the mismatch between the CONCACAF and MLS schedules. United came out flat; Alajuelense came out on the front foot, feeding on the lively home crowd.
“This was a real game,” D.C. United head coach Ben Olsen told the media in attendance after the match. “We took too long to get into what was a very physical game against a good group. It’s pretty simple. This was our first real game in a while and it just took us too long [to get up to speed] so we had to spend the rest of the time out there chasing the game.
"Give them a lot of credit – they came at us and gave us a lot of difficulty and we just didn’t handle it well. I think we did a much better job of handling the game at the end of the first half and into the second half, getting a hold of it, getting up to speed. Just costly mistakes. Very soft goals.”
None of Alajuelense’s goals seemed particularly hard earned on Thursday evening, but two in particular stood out: the build-up to Ariel Rodriguez’s opening strike from the penalty spot and Johan Venegas’ 27th minute tally, which stretched the Costa Rican side’s lead to 3-1. D.C. ‘keeper Andrew Dykstra – filling in for an injured Bill Hamid – shoulders the blame for both of those goals. His rash challenge at the edge of his penalty area was responsible for Rodriguez’s goal while a mishandled cross led to the second.
A well-deserved 2-2 draw in Mexico puts the Montreal Impact in the driver’s seat as they face Pachuca on Tuesday in the second game of their series. Thanks to two away goals by Dilly Duka, Montreal can approach the second leg of this tie with a similar mindset to the first, and the Tuzos have to score if they are to have a chance to progress to the semifinals, where either D.C. United or Alajuelense await (Alajuelense won the home leg 5-2).
The Impact’s encouraging performance has kept the Montreal ticket sales department busy. There is still much to do if the Impact faithful are to match their turnout from the last time the club went this far in the competition, when 55,571 supporters saw then-second division Montreal defeat Santos Laguna 2-0 in February 2009. But as of Monday afternoon, the club had sold more than 30,000 tickets for the game – more than 10,000 in the previous five days alone.
