VANCOUVER—Tim Parker winced, bent down and punched the turf at BC Place with both fists. The Vancouver Whitecaps central defender had taken a knock from Sporting Kansas City’s Dom Dwyer, and his right shin was oozing blood.
But a knock like that—which left the 23-year-old hobbling on the pitch for a time during Wednesday evening’s matchup with KC—isn’t the sort of thing that would ever stop Parker from sitting out his team’s next game.
Vancouver is preparing to face New York City FC at Yankee Stadium on Saturday, and for Parker, who hails from Hicksville, N.Y., on Long Island, the match will be something of a homecoming. Parker is expecting some 300-plus friends and family to fill the stands in the Bronx.
“I’m excited to go home and see all the people I haven’t seen in a long time,” he said, “and obviously get the opportunity to play in front of them.”
The Whitecaps have been on a tight schedule recently, so when they take the field Saturday, they’ll be banking on fending off fatigue. The match versus New York will mark Vancouver’s third in an eight-day span: before Wednesday’s contest, which ended in a 1–1 draw, the team earned a 3–0 win over FC Dallas at home last Saturday. After mixed results over the past two months, the Whitecaps will be want to put up a good performance—and to find the rhythm coach Carl Robinson says they’ve been lacking so far.
Parker, at least, isn’t too worried about fatigue. In fact, for someone who’s only in his second season in Major League Soccer, he seems like an old hand when it comes to dealing with the tight scheduling that teams in the league are up against.
“I’ve done it before, so I’m not really afraid of it,” he said.
While we could see some new faces on Saturday as a few of Vancouver’s players get some much-needed rest, Parker is assured a starting spot with his defensive partner Kendall Waston unavailable for the match. Waston was sent off on Wednesday after earning his second yellow card—something for which Parker took responsibility. The graduate of St. John’s University made a bad pass back, forcing Waston to make a clumsy tackle on KC’s Diego Rubio.
“I really apologized to Kendall,” Parker said after the match. “I felt bad about that.”
With Waston serving a one-game ban, Parker should be paired with veteran defender Pa-Modou Kah, who’ll be making his second start of this campaign. The 35-year-old—always the most vocal person in Whitecaps training—brings leadership and poise to the team’s back line.
“I think obviously you see when Pa comes in he’s very comfortable,” Parker explained. “That’s exactly what we needed in that certain spot [on Wednesday] and that’s what he’ll bring on Saturday.”
The Whitecaps may be taking the field on short rest, but they’ll at least face an opponent that hasn’t had a lot of luck lately. Whether that’s in Vancouver’s favour remains to be seen. New York won its first match of the season, and then proceeded to go winless in the next seven. They came close to vanquishing the Eastern Conference–leading Montreal Impact on Wednesday until an injury-time goal by Dominic Oduro tied things up. In other words, the home team will be hungry for three points.
The last time the Whitecaps faced a team so down on its luck, things didn’t go so well for them: they were at the receiving end of a 4-0 drubbing in Washington versus D.C. United. Things seem different now, though. While their results have been inconsistent—with a loss, a win and a draw following that brutal game—Vancouver has looked sharper, and some of the unevenness they’ve experienced is possibly due to a bit of bad luck of their own.
If there’s a real point in New York’s favour it could be the field itself. Yankee Stadium is something of a strange place for a soccer match—not that soccer matches in baseball stadiums are unheard of, but the dimensions can make the game tricky. The field is the smallest allowed by FIFA at 70 yards wide by 110 yards long (the Yankees’ logo by home plate is still visible outside the markings of the pitch).
“Obviously we’re gonna have to be ready to play in a tight game,” Parker offered when asked about the field’s dimensions.
The Whitecap who knows the lay of the land at Yankee Stadium most thoroughly is midfielder Andrew Jacobson, who was traded from New York to Vancouver in March. Not that Jacobson is looking for some kind of revenge. The 30-year-old has a “take every game the same” approach, and he’d requested the move out west, so he has no hard feelings.
But Jacobson’s familiarity with his former teammates can’t hurt his new team. New York’s roster includes a number of luminaries, including Andrea Pirlo, David Villa and Frank Lampard (though the latter has yet to play for the team, having been felled by a calf strain in the preseason).
“They have a lot of experienced guys that know how to exploit you in certain ways,” Parker said, “so we just have to stay focused and concentrate for the whole game.”
Concentration will likely be the biggest key: the Whitecaps made a series of defensive blunders on Wednesday, and they’ll need to avoid those kinds of mistakes if they want to keep a clean sheet. They were hoping the win against FC Dallas would kick-start their season, but the draw against KC was a bump in the road. If they can take three points at the home of the Bronx Bombers, they’ll have found the rhythm they’ve been searching for.
Sportsnet’s Soccer Central podcast (featuring Thomas Dobby, Brendan Dunlop, John Molinaro and James Sharman) takes an in-depth look at the beautiful game and offers timely and thoughtful analysis on the sport’s biggest issues.
