Backpass: Don't Panic
Been a bad 10 days in Rapids Wonderland. Take it easy. Crack a local brew. I'll explain why we shouldn't panic.
There is no doubt that the opening 10 days of the 2022 season for Colorado has gone badly. A 1-0 loss in Guatemala; a 1-0 “win”, at home, against 10 men, that went to PKs and turned into elimination from Concacaf Champions League, and a season opening defeat against LAFC, 3-0, as former league MVP Carlos Vela dropped a hat trick on us. Bad.
I’m definitely a little worried, for reasons I outlined last week. I’m not sure if I actually used the word ‘toothless’ multiple times in the past week, or if I simply wrote it once but thought it many times.
In this latest match, another disappointment after a long cold winter of rapt expectation, the Rapids lost again, and in definitive fashion.
LAFC deserved to win, although one could make an argument for why all three goals felt funky and maybe a little undeserved - like “yeah the Rapids were the weaker team but we could’ve worked a 0-0 draw - except Vela’s a damn wizard..” The first was a PK on clear handball from Lalas Abubakar that was just unfortunate. The second was a questionable foul followed by a long ball in which Carlos Vela seemed vaguely offsides, but apparently wasn’t. The third was Vela shooting from a ridiculous angle that FotMob tabbed as having a 0.04 xG rate (for comparison, his other two goals - the long break and slotted finish was a 0.42 and the PK was a 0.79.) But I mean, that’s soccer. Position your defense well, be prepared for turnovers, don’t let guys get into your 18 yard box, double-team the league MVP, or face the consequences.
Also, you need to possess the ball with purpose and create danger, and Colorado did neither. The Rapids ended the LAFC match with 50-50 possession against Los Negro-Oros1, which, when you get a lead at 29’ and expand on it at 35’ should mean that, based on game states, LAFC should normally to sit in a little and let the opponent have the ball. If that happens, we end the game with a 60-40 rate in favor of Colorado. The fact that the Rapids ended with even possession-against shows that their passing, possession, and ability to force turnovers was not great.
In terms of creating danger, once again, we were toothless (ahhhgh damn! somebody get me a thesaurus). Against LAFC, we had 7 shots, one on target, and just 0.32 xG. Only 3 shots were recorded inside the box. Two occurred after the 72nd minute, when the result was already assured. This mirrors what we saw in Concacaf against Comunicaciones - shots off target, shots right at the keeper, bad shots, poorly advised shots. We have not been a goal-dangerous team.
However:
Don’t Panic
Don’t Panic.2 We are doing that thing we Rapids fans do when we’ve been starved for football too long, which is to catastrophize based on an exceeding small sample size. We are 1/34th through the season, or 0.0294% of the way through the 2022 soccering year. You might think, though, “oh!” “We lost the first game of the league season! This portends bad things.”
Friends, it portends nothing.
Here is the Rapids overall record in season openers: 7-6-14 (WTL).
Colorado had a putrid 0-2-9 record in season openers from 1996 to 2006, including four straight shootout losses from 1997-2000. From 2007 onward, including last weeks loss, the record is a healthier 7-4-5.3
Here is the Rapids all-time record in MLS matches: 302-171-344 (WTL)
The Rapids have historically been great in openers recently, and bad in the old days. No idea why. Don’t really want to spend any unnecessary mental energy on it. Might as well consider how the team does after eating spaghetti in the pre-game meal, or how they do on Wednesday away matches vs teams with managers of Dutch heritage.
Overall, we actually have done worse in our openers than our overall seasons - our season opener win percentage is 37.04 percent; the overall winning percentage is 47.43 percent.
On the smaller scale, lets see what the most recent seasons openers can tell us:
April 17, 2021, D, 0-0, FC Dallas (away); final points: 61 (1st in WC)
February 29, 2020, W, 2-1, DC United (away); final points 28 (10th…
but Covid, so we went by PPG and almost everyone made the playoffs including us so yay but we got smashed by Minnesota in the first round because 2020 was weird and we probably weren’t really that good but we’ll never know now will we.)
March 2, 2019, D, 3-3, Portland (home); final points 42 (9th)
March 10, 2018, L, 2-1, New England (away); final points 31 (11th)
March 4, 2017, W, 1-0, New England (home); final points 33 points (10th)
March 6, 2016, L, 1-0, San Jose (away); final points 58 (2nd)
In other words, we’ve won our opener and finished bottom of the table twice; drawn our home opener and finished bottom of the table once; lost our home opener and finished bottom of the table once. We’ve lost the opener and finished near the top once, and drawn the opener and finished top of the table once. In other words, we have a near perfect split of variables regarding results. And also you might notice that the Rapids seem to be a boom-bust club lately, that either finishes top or bottom. We’re just not into a solid fifth place finish, are we?
Most importantly, both in the long run and in the most recent six seasons, there is no correlation between opening day wins, draws, or losses, and our season long result. None. You can extrapolate exactly zilch from the result itself on opening day and what it means for the season.
That said, you can very easily see that LAFC look good, that Vela was very sharp, that the Rapids are tired, and that we do not yet remember how to score goals. We haven’t started great. There are issues to resolve. Hopefully, there are some ways to resolve them. If it’s a striker addition, great: Matt suggested on the podcast last week that we go get Ola Kamara. I wrote last week that xG seems to think giving Jonathan Lewis 2700 minutes as a striker might result in ~14 goals. And ‘start Darren Yapi and Yaya Toure’ might be our late-season plan, but bumping up that timeline due to exigent circumstances might be inevitable. Could be a huge success. Or a total disaster. We aren’t there yet.
Don’t panic. But if we’re 2-4-4 (WTL) after 10 games, and still struggling to score goals? I give you permission to freak the eff out.
I just made this up. If you look up the wikipedia nicknames of most Spanish and English teams, you usually get such brilliant names like ‘Los Blancos’ - the whites, or ‘The Reds’. I can’t believe Europeans make fun of MLS for our nicknames.
I am, for some reason, re-reading The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It is important to consume things other than soccer that make one more interesting to others at cocktail parties and can allow a person to gain perspective. Also I noticed this time around that there’s an explicit Arsenal reference in the first chapter, which I totally didn’t catch when I read this book the first time out 30 years ago because really, who the hell was Arsenal in 1989 when only PBS carried English football, one match a week, if it wasn’t pre-empted by a Masterpiece Theatre re-run. Masterpiece Theatre sucked.
Some smart gal or guy in the Communications department realized that our overall season opener percentage is trash, but is kinda decent if you just ignore our first 11 years, and so that’s what they wrote in the pre-game release - we were ‘7-4-4 in season openers’. That’s pretty clever - props to you, Comms person.