Arace: Columbus Crew laughed and cried, and that was before they took the field for MLS Cup
The Crew laughed and they cried in their locker room – before the game even started.
This is one interesting team.
Saturday night, they put their mark on history by beating Los Angeles FC 2-1 in the MLS Cup championship game at the new Crew Stadium. For the third time in the 28-year history of the league’s first chartered team, and for the second time in four years, the team that Anthony Precourt tried to steal managed to relocate the Philip Anschutz trophy to Columbus.
The Crew did it before a crowd of 20,802 in their new home, amid constant chanting, singing and drumming, interspersed with roaring cheers. The impression of the high-voltage atmosphere will long remain with those who generated and shared it. It was the kind of scene the late Lamar Hunt, founding owner of the Crew, envisioned when he helped birth the league near the end of the last century. It was a communion of a city, its club and its fans.
This championship game might not have been as extraordinary as last year’s – LAFC, at home, came back to beat the Philadelphia Union on kicks – it certainly went beyond the usual Cup final. What one normally expects is two teams doing a delicate dance before one of them makes a mistake and somebody wins 1-0.
No. First-year coach Wilfried Nancy played NancyBall, or BraveBall, or whatever you like to call it. He did not compromise his philosophy on the big stage. All season, his team has sought to possess the ball, draw defenders to dribblers, pass out of trouble and attack, attack, attack. And that is what they did against LAFC, arguably the most talented team in the league.
LAFC is comfortable ceding possession and counterattacking. Their problem was, the Crew took them out of their comfort zone, which is part and parcel of Nancy’s basic principles. The ball was pinging in around LAFC’s penalty box throughout the first half and, ultimately, the pressure led to a major mistake. A handball in the box led to a penalty kick for Crew star striker Cucho Hernandez, and he did not fail.
The way Cucho opened his hips, baiting LAFC goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau to go to right, and the way Cucho swung over the ball to put it inside the left post was the work of a master craftsman. If a normal person attempted such a thing, they would be wheeled straight into hip replacement surgery.
Cucho, who would be named the game’s MVP, scored in the 33rd minute. In the 37th minute, left wingback Yaw Yeboah made it 2-0. Yeboah was set up by what Crew president/GM Tim Bezbatchenko called “one of the greatest passes in the history of the playoffs.”
“I’ll take that,” said left center back Malte Amundsen, who made the pass.
Amundsen was just inside the midfield line, in the middle of the park, when he spotted Yeboah making a diagonal run off on the left flank. Amundsen delivered a 40-yard, worm-burning bullet straight down a slick field and the pass hit Yeboah in stride. Yeboah was well behind LA defender Ryan Hollingshead, and when Crepeau came out to attempt to suffocate the shooter, Yeboah touched the ball past the keeper and into the net.
“We’ve practiced it,” Amundsen said. “But things like that don’t come out of practice. They happen with instinct.”
This speaks to Nancy’s system. There’s a lot of buildup in the Crew’s march to the opponent’s net – but there is also a freedom to create directly, if the opportunity presents itself. The aim doesn’t change, and the aim is to score.
“What a performance by the team and Wilfried,” Bezbatchenko said. “What we saw was how strong the East was this year. The route we took had us more ready for the moment. We were just relentless.”
At halftime, the Crew locker room was largely quiet, the players said. They conjured what happened in the Eastern Conference final last week in Cincinnati, where the Crew, playing against the Supporters’ Shield winners in a Hell is Real derby-darby, came back from a two-goal deficit and beat mighty FC Cincinnati 3-2 in extra time. (Nancy called that game "a clinic of competitive spirit.")
“We can talk a lot about tactics and a lot of things, but the performance was spot-on,” Nancy said. “I wanted to see the team face and embrace adversity, and they did it.”
One of the questions heading into the game was, could the Crew maintain their shape when they didn’t have the ball? Put another way: Could they handle LAFC’s vaunted counterattack, led by MLS legend Carlos Vela and dynamic Denis Bouanga, the league’s leading goal scorer? Also, could the Crew deal with LAFC’s killer set pieces?
By and large, the answer was “Yes.”
LAFC, trailing, was much more aggressive in the second half. Their two hulking central backs, Giorgio Chiellini and Jesus Murillo, began punishing any Crew player who had the audacity to attempt to find space in their box. On top of this, LAFC implemented an aggressive high press to pry the ball away from the home team. It took them a while, but LAFC finally cut into the Crew’s lead in the 74th minute, when Murillo intercepted a lazy pass and found Bouanga wide open near the left side of the goal area.
Bouanga got off a clean shot that Crew keeper Patrick Schulte used his face to stop. Bouanga manged to tap in his own rebound before the Crew’s training staff trotted out to see what ruination was made of Schulte’s formerly creaseless young pate. Ultimately, Schulte peeled himself from the turf and rose to exhort the crowd, and the Nordecke chanted his name.
There were some nervy moments, but the Crew hung on, and the spaceship of a stadium nearly exploded.
“It’s so good for our city,” said Crew minority owner Dr. Pete Edwards. “We weren’t able to celebrate in ‘20 because of COVID. To see the Nordecke filled after the game, with nobody leaving until there was nothing more to see … it was unreal. I wish they didn’t boo Don Garber, but you’ve got to love the passion.”
Afterward, Nancy and a number of his players talked about the captain, midfielder Darlington Nagbe, who has now won four Cups with three different teams.
“It’s funny, because before the game, we laughed a lot,” Nancy said. “I wanted to tell them that we didn’t have to talk about winning. As kids, we want to win, because when we lose we cry. We showed them pictures of themselves as children and laughed. When ‘D’ said something, everyone is crying. This is my team: We play with emotion and accept it. Emotion in the moment. That is why we were a good team.”
After laughing at the pictures of themselves as kids, Nagbe delivered his pregame thoughts and got choked up as he spoke. There were varying accounts of exactly what Nagbe said, but, generally speaking, it had to do with the journey of the season – new coach, crazy system, midsummer roster retooling, a late-season coalescence and two road victories in knockout playoff games – and thus described a moment that should be seized. Nancy didn’t want to talk about winning, but Nagbe did. A few of Nagbe's teammates went ahead and cried with their captain.
“He said, 'No one will tap out on this game,' ” said reserve Sean Zawadzki.
They laughed, they cried and they won. Parade is Tuesday. See you there.
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus Crew beat LAFC to win third MLS Cup in their 28-year history
