MONTREAL – Make no mistake about it: These are troubling times for the Montreal Impact.
Gone are the heady days of a year ago when the Impact jumped out of the gate and quickly looked like an MLS Cup contender. That hot start cooled off, and although the club qualified for the playoffs, this year’s string of poor performances are looking a lot like what we saw from the Impact in the second half of last year when they spectacularly imploded.
Wednesday programming alert: Watch Montreal Impact vs. FC Edmonton (on Sportsnet ONE, 7:30 pm ET) and Vancouver Whitecaps vs. Toronto FC (on Sportsnet Ontario and Pacific, Sportsnet ONE and Sportsnet World, 10:30 pm ET) in the second leg of the Amway Canadian Championship semifinals. | TV schedule
In fact the downward spiral has continued. The reality is the Impact have now won just two of their last 17 regular season matches.
Furthermore, they’re on the verge of being bounced from the Amway Canadian Championship—a tournament they won in 2013—after losing to NASL side FC Edmonton 2-1 in the opening leg of their semifinal series last week in Alberta. If the Impact fail to win the return leg on Wednesday at Stade Saputo, watch out!
What has gone wrong? It depends on who you talk to, I suppose. Some say it’s new coach Frank Klopas (it’s always the coach isn’t it?). Some say management didn’t sufficiently strengthen the team with off-season additions. Others will point to an inexperienced backline missing the legendary Alessandro Nesta. Some will say the team is simply not good enough right now.
The reality is it’s a combination of all of the above, which means there’s no quick fix. But heading into the return leg of their Amway Canadian Championship semifinal, their season could be at a crossroads. The Impact are coming off a dreadful loss to the superior Sporting Kansas City on the weekend. Yes, they went down a man early, but the result was never in doubt.
Three days before that, they lost the first leg of their Amway series to a second tier club in the form of FC Edmonton. The optics right now are not good. Montreal is dead last in the MLS Eastern Conference with just one win. They’re a slender score line away from being eliminated by lower division club from the Canadian Championship. I don’t like the coach’s chances in a scenario like this.
Team president Joey Saputo promised “imminent changes” via the Twitter universe which doesn’t exactly provide a calming influence. Maybe it’s not supposed to. But no matter how bleak things look for the Impact, remember this: MLS is a league where teams can lose five in a row, and then win as many in the next month. It’s that fickle.
But if the Impact want to hoist the Voyageurs Cup for the second straight year, they’ll need to shake off the cobwebs Wednesday night at Stade Saputo.
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