VANCOUVER—Pedro Morales whipped off his jersey and bolted across the pitch. The Chilean midfielder sometimes likes to remove his shirt in celebration, but this bit of rejoicing was so impassioned that it was as though his team, the Vancouver Whitecaps, were newly crowned MLS Cup champions.
Of course, the Whitecaps had been eliminated from contention for Major League Soccer’s playoffs weeks earlier, but Morales’s celebration—for his 54th-minute goal, putting his team up 3–0 over the Portland Timbers—was understandable. For the first time all season, in their final game of the year, the Whitecaps looked convincing.
It would be hard to argue that the season hasn’t been a disappointment for ’Caps fans, who’d expected their team to be MLS Cup contenders, but instead had to witness a club that almost always seemed either defensively sloppy, or unable to score, or both.
On Sunday, at home, Vancouver managed to play spoiler—killing the Timbers’ playoff hopes, which was a bit of revenge after Portland knocked them out of last year’s Western Conference semifinals. The Whitecaps also managed to scoop up the Cascadia Cup thanks to the 4–1 win (the team needed to win by three to secure the trophy).
Whitecaps coach Carl Robinson heaped praise on his team for the performance—their best of the season—though he was also left scratching his head.
“This performance absolutely drives me mad,” he said afterwards. It’s still too early for Robinson to say what exactly went so wrong for his team this year, but the solid effort was at least something to end the season on a high note—for fans especially, he said.
In some ways, it was an odd ending to a lacklustre season, with Morales, the team’s captain, hoisting the trophy and parading it in front of supporters at the south end of the pitch just days after tempers flared between him and goalkeeper David Ousted. Ousted explained after that encounter that he called out Morales for phoning in his performance.
“When someone isn’t doing their job, we as leaders are supposed to step up and tell them,” he said.
Fans, on social media at least, seemed to side with Ousted, and there was even an “I’m With Ousted” banner draped over a railing at the south end, near where Morales celebrated the victory.
After Sunday’s match, Ousted spoke briefly with the media, and he acknowledged that his captain’s performance had been “fantastic,” and that the goal was a “brilliant” one. Ousted was pleased with the team’s overall effort, he said—even if it came too late—for the fans’ sake.
“I’m delighted to give the fans a last victory, get the Cascadia Cup and show that we are better than what we performed this season,” he said.
The Whitecaps certainly put on a show—dominating for the length of the match, and only allowing Portland to score in the 72nd minute on a penalty kick taken by Diego Valeri.
Some of the finesse on display came courtesy of Giles Barnes, who opened the scoring in the 13th minute—for his first goal as a Whitecap—and nabbed another one in the 32nd minute.
Barnes said later that it had taken some time for him to adjust to his new team. The 28-year-old joined Vancouver over the summer but hadn’t managed to score, and his confidence had taken a bit of a knock as a result.
“When you don’t score a goal after a few games, confidence is a little bit low, but for me I know what I’m capable of,” Barnes said.
He, too, said it was nice to end on a high note—not to quash the bitter feelings that would come from a frustrating season in which the team failed to make the playoffs, but because the performances hinted at good things to come.
“Our team is littered with very gifted players who work really hard,” he said, noting that “everyone should be really excited for what’s to happen next year.”
But just who will factor in next year’s iteration of the Whitecaps is hard to determine. For one, Morales’s contract is up, and considering that he’s been the team’s highest-paid designated player and has often been a non-factor this season, it seems unlikely that he’ll return.
Robinson wouldn’t discuss the future—he wanted to give the fans time to relish the victory, he said—but he did insist that he’d be back at work the next day, doing whatever he can to fix the team ahead of next season.
He insisted, too, that there were positives to take from this year. The team managed to reach the CONCACAF Champions League quarter-finals for the first time in franchise history, and managed the Cascadia Cup victory. Robinson also noted how close the Whitecaps had come to winning the Voyageurs Cup—“We’re five seconds away,” he said of losing the Cup to Toronto FC in stoppage time—and took pains to note that had the team won two more games, they’d have made the playoffs.
Of course, Robinson knows better than to gloss over the season’s ugly arc as a whole—even if it ended with a strangely dominant performance.
“We finished on a high today, but I’m not fooled by the 34 games,” Robinson said. “We didn’t win enough games.”
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