🏆 - Vela, LAFC give CCL the spark it needs
International soccer is better when it's actually international.
Los Angeles Football Club topped Cruz Azul 2-1 Wednesday night to move into the semifinals of the Concacaf Champions League. It was exactly the result this tournament needed to maintain the intrigue in what’s happening this week in Orlando.
LAFC was better than Cruz Azul, besting La Maquina 7-1 when it came to shots on target. Cruz Azul largely was lifeless, perhaps unacceptable for a team that needed to find redemption from a 4-0 loss in the second leg of the Liga MX semifinals but also exactly what you’d expect from a team in that situation. That’s doubly true when you take into account the number of players missing either because of COVID-19 (starting goalkeeper Jesus Corona) or muscular injuries (leading scorer Jonathan Rodriguez among them).
None of this takes anything away from LAFC or MLS, nor does it say anything about how close MLS is to reaching Liga MX as a league as a whole or any other grand topic we try to graft on to this small sample of matches.
Simply put, the tournament needed LAFC to advance to continue being interesting. International tournaments are better when the games are actually international. Now in each game we have a Mexican team and a ‘challenger’ from outside Mexico, looking to wrest CCL supremecy from Liga MX for the first time since the competition adapted this format.
In one semifinal, it’s the underdog Hondurans of Olimpia, who got past the Montreal Impact despite fielding largely domestic-based players and now believe anything can happen. In the other, LAFC meets Club América. One of MLS’ best against one of Mexico’s best, even if neither were able to go as far as they wanted in the playoffs. Everyone but the most diehard Cruz Azul fan will have to admit they’d rather see that than a game between two Mexico City rivals, but instead of playing in the historic stadium they currently share, it’d be in Orlando.
It’s sort of amazing, really, that a rumor linking Vela to the very team he’ll be facing Saturday dropped while he was on the field for his current employer and América had just finished its own advancement to the semifinals, albeit with an uninspiring defeat to Atlanta United.
It’s doubtful Vela will be tempted away from an enjoyable life in LA (“I think Carlos is really excited with what’s going on at LAFC and it showed with the way that he plays,” Bob Bradley said after the game).
Still, there’s the added intrigue of Vela facing a lot of these teams for the first time in his professional life since he left Chivas for Arsenal before playing first-team matches.
“I said how excited and motivated we were as a team for Champions League, and I’d say that was especially true of Carlos,” Bradley said before the match. “We talked before the first León match. It was the first time as a professional he had played against a Mexican team. I think he set the tone in the second game.”
Vela also set the tone Wednesday, taking advantage of a Cruz Azul defense that featured many pieces playing in positions that unfamiliar, or at least not typical this season. Vela is the heart and soul of the LAFC squad, and whether it’s creating beautiful scoring opportunities or going down too easily to win a penalty, he’s going to do all he can to help the team.
As great of a story a 19-year-old smashing in the winning goal is, the excitement and mystique around the rest of the tournament will be about what Vela and Co. can do against yet more Mexican clubs.
The winner of this tournament, is finishing more than nine months after it started, always will have an asterisk by its name, not because they won’t be a deserving champion but because this has been a supremely weird and terrible year. That said, an LAFC win would be difficult to take the shine off. In addition to being the first MLS team to win CCL, they’d have to do it beating León, Cruz Azul, América and, likely, Tigres.
That’s getting ahead of ourselves, though. For now, we can look forward to Saturday’s semifinals - and we’ll be looking forward to them instead of going through the motions thanks to LAFC.
What about the other matches?
Things largely went to script, with the potential excepction of just how bland América looked. They didn’t need to do much, that’s the beauty of playing with a 3-0 advantage, but Atlanta United outshot Las Aguilas by a 7-1 margin in shots on goals (the same exact total by which LAFC bettered Cruz Azul). If a lesser goalkeeper than Guillermo Ochoa had been in net,
Some of América’s problems may resolve themselves when players recover from injury, but this is a team that needs to start refreshing now or risk falling behind its rivals. None of that will come before Saturday.
Still, I expect a much better showing from an América side that was able to go through the motions Wednesday but doesn’t enjoy that luxury this weekend. You can shrug at a defeat when you still advance in the tournament. Semifinal elimination is harder to accept.
In his post-match news conference, Olimpia manager Pedro Troglio was visibly exasperated by questions about his team playing in a defensive setup, and he was totally justified. First of all, the team had just made history, becoming the first Honduran team in the CCL era to make the semifinals and the first Central American team to reach the final four since 2014-15.
Second, the team wasn’t that defensive! Olimpia should’ve been up 1-0 early with Jerry Bengtson sending a header wide instead of into the open net just before 15 minutes had elapsed. They continued to look for a goal and didn’t start to shut things down until the final half-hour or so. Even then, once the Impact were only a goal away, Troglio still did a forward for forward swap to bring on Eddie Hernandez.
It feels like the local press were a bit stymied by just how different Los Albos looked in CCL play compared to what they do domestically. But, of course, playing that way against teams like Tigres or the Montreal Impact is a good way to get slaughtered.
Olimpia is not going to push their fullbacks up into their own final third or do anything else that resembles all-out attack against Tigres, but it’s worth remembering the stereotypes we have about a team or a country may not always hold up when put into practice. Tigres are the overwhelming favorite, but don’t discount this game being more fascinating than even their quarterfinal win earlier this week.
