Backpass: And we out
The Colorado Rapids season ends just short of glory. And we celebrate one year of Backpass on the HTHL substack.
There’s a kind of magical thinking that sports fans employ all season long - and particularly in the playoffs - in which we believe we are destined to succeed simply because, well, it’s our team out there. Intellectually, we all attend a playoff game knowing that there are two teams on the field: one will advance, and one will go home.
And yet. When it is our team that goes home, the emotion we experience is shock and utter disbelief.
It’s weird, right? We allow our emotions to so fully cloud our rational brain that we cannot process logically. We thought we could will an MLS Cup into existent through faith alone. It is why we wore the lucky socks and tapped all four car tires and held onto our left ear with our right hand all through the final 7 minutes of the match - we feel like the result in a soccer match is as much the product of destiny (and strange illogical superstitions) as much as we think it happens because our player runs slightly faster, dribbles slightly better, and defends slightly smarter than their opposite number in green and white.
This, in a nutshell, is why being a rabbi and being a Colorado Rapids supporter are so much alike. I believe in my Colorado Rapids, much as I believe in all of the rituals and beliefs of my faith.1 The difference is, eventually (I think), my love and belief in the Colorado Rapids might ultimate result in a cool hat that says ‘MLS Champions!’ on it. There is no equivalent Jewish t-shirt.2
Matt Pollard and I both predicted on the podcast that the Rapids would beat Portland 2-1, which was likely an emotional decision as much as it was an intellectual one. But our brains told us that we had basis to believe we would win.
On paper, the Colorado Rapids were the better team, with better, more convincing results. Head to head against Portland in 2021, the Rapids had a 2-2 draw and a 2-0 win. Our 17-10-7 record was better than their 17-4-13 record. Their leaky backline had conceded 52 goals, while our stalwart defenses had led in just 35 goals - tied for fourth-best in all of MLS.
And our players were simply better. Jack Price had an impressive 12 assists in the regular season; Cole Bassett, Kellyn Acosta, and Mark-Anthony Kaye were all dangerous two-way midfielders - and the fact that there were one-too-many great midfielders to get onto the field at once3 demonstrated that the Rapids had depth that Portland could only dream of. The centerback trio of Lalas Abubakar, Austin Trusty, and Danny Wilson are arguably the best backline in Colorado Rapids history.4 We were at home, at altitude, against a team with an average age of 29.2 years old, the oldest average in MLS. Like I said: the evidence that we were supposed to win was there, at least in theory.
Sigh. But of course, games are certainly not played in theory.
Colorado had 9 shots in the first half to Portland’s 2, and as you can see from the video (if you felt like reliving a mildly traumatic experience) at least four (Austin Trusty at 6’, Dom Badji at 14’, Bassett at 28’, Badji at 38’) were really good chances. By halftime, the Rapids had produced 1.2 Expected Goals, but zero actual goals. I was hopeful that things were going well, and would continue to go well in the second half.
Of course, Portland and Giovanni Savarese made adjustments, and possessed the ball much better in the second half. Colorado barely sniffed the goal, Portland scored on a corner kick, and it means that Rapids players reporting to Commerce City this week are having final meetings with Robin Fraser and Pádraig Smith and tidying up their lockers for a few months off.5
The lesson here is two-fold. First, you have to take your chances. While during the game we saw the shots by Trusty, Badji, and Bassett as indicative of a team on the front foot, that was our emotions talking. Our intellect should have overridden the controls and told us ‘if you miss a good chance, there’s no guarantee you’ll get a better opportunity again.’ It could have easily turned out a 3-0 lead at the half, but for those misses.6 Those missed shots/saved shots proved to be fatal.
The second lesson is something we’ve been lamenting all season long: the Rapids don’t have exceptional strikers. Finishing was always going to be our chief concern in the playoffs. Lo and behold, it was.
We’re left licking our wounds and crying out ‘oh the injustice!’ We had a better team, but Portland really put together a phenomenal 45 minutes of football to earn a victory. They now face Pablo Mastroeni’s Real Salt Lake in the Western Conference Final this Saturday at 4:30 pm, MST on Fox Sports 1 and Fox Deportes.
It was a good season, and in a few more weeks we’ll probably be able to look back at it as a good run and an overall success. But if you’re still in shock and utter disbelief a little, well, me too, friend. Me too.
Thank You To Our Highliners
This substack post marks one year since Holding the High Line - the podcast - expanded into being a writing platform and multimedia empire.
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Do you have a friend who recently became a Colorado Rapids fan, or who shifted from being a casual supporter to a stats-and-data, consume all the content soccer maniac in the past few months? You know, it’s Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa season, and giving someone a gift subscription to HTHL would make a really great stocking-stuffer. Click this button below to gift a friend a subscription:
On that note, a massive thanks to all of you that contribute to our work via a small financial contribution. The honor roll of contributing Highliners is (drumroll please):
CO Mattdog, A Freisleben, Scott Wolfgang, David Ellenberg, B Chenesey, Patrick Ghidossi, David Malefant, David Azilis, Jody Robins, and Colin Peterson.
We hope you stay subscribed as we move into year 2 (!) of HTHL Substack, with special interviews, Matt’s bonus articles in addition to his fine work over at Last Word on Sports, and my ever-amusing and occasionally grammatically-challenged weekly column on all things Colorado Rapids, ‘Backpass.’ If you are a Founding Member or a Yearly subscriber, your plan automatically renews on the one-year anniversary of your initial subscription. Monthly plans are renewed… uh… monthly. And since we’ve passed the mark on our first year, I have re-christened ‘Founding Members’ as ‘Gallery of Honor Plan’ members - subscribing at that rate is greatly appreciated and earns you bonus merch, when we produce it.
Again, thanks to all on a very successful first season of HTHL Substack. I’ll be back next week with more as we begin a position-by-position season review, and as we eventually turn towards one of my favorite things - offseason nerding-out on roster construction.
This could be a long philosophical digression on what the purpose of ritual and belief is for a Jew, but I’ll try and keep it short knowing that most of my sane readers will be like ‘I ain’t here for theology, homie.’ But in short, being an observant Jew is not a lucky rabbit’s foot to a blessed life, nor is it an entry ticket at the end of days to meeting the wizard behind the curtain. You observe rituals and do things like pray and keep kosher because they make your life meaningful, not because they lead to magical events like winning lottery tickets or a harp and a pair of wings after you die.
Being a soccer fan is slightly different, but not entirely. I enjoy watching soccer, even when my team loses, and I derive joy from the experience of being at a match. Winning, though, is the point of the game, and I hope that, in the end, my fandom results in being showered in beer in the stands as my team lifts MLS Cup.
Jews know about religions that are fixated on ‘winning and losing’. Our religion is roughly 4-27 in competitive religioning, and the losses (586 BCE to the Babylonians; 70 CE and 135 CE to the Romans; 1492 to the Spanish, 1101, 1197, and 1267 to European Catholicism) are ultimately catastrophic in a ‘human-life’ kind of way. Those four wins are actually celebrated as holidays - Passover is the big W over Egypt; Hanukkah is a win over the Seleucid Greeks; Purim is a victory over an attempted genocide in Persia; Israeli independence day celebrates the reestablishment of a modern state for the Jews. If the result of a so-called ‘loss’ is expulsion, torture, and genocide, you can understand why we don’t issue t-shirts on the rare occasion that we win.
Rapids head coach Robin Fraser solved this by … getting them all on the field at once and playing Kellyn Acosta at left back. Hindsight is always 20-20, but at the time, I didn’t love this. My starting XI for this match would have been:
Esteves-Trusty-Wilson-Abubakar-Rosenberry
Price-Acosta
Galvan-Badji-Barrios
You bring Bassett and Kaye off the bench at 60 and shift the formation based on whether you’re ahead or behind. And you tell Galvan and Barrios that they’re getting subbed off early, so they’d better run their asses off while they can.
Now, Fraser didn’t do this because he wanted to save his pacey guys for later. And actually that makes a ton of sense, but of course it didn’t work.
Arguably being very operative here. The 2010 Colorado Rapids back four was exceptional - a young Drew Moor, in-his-prime Jeff Larentowicz, Marvell Wynne and Kosuke Kimura. However, they conceded 32 goals in 30 games, ever-so-slightly more than the 2021 Rapids 35 goals in 34 games; and they were fronted by two crunching d-mids: Pablo Mastroeni and Jamie Smith. The 2016 Rapids conceded 32 goals in 34 games, but their backline of Axel Sjoberg, Marc Burch, Jared Watts/Bobby Burling, and Eric Miller was less the reason for success than the exceptional d-mid paring of Micheal Azira and Sam Cronin and the above-average GK work of Tim Howard. Also, literally none of the above mentioned players ever put together another season nearly as good as 2016 - although in Sam Cronin’s case it was due to injury.
Note: the Rapids will be back earlier than usual because their first-place finish in the Western Conference means they’ll be in Concacaf Champions League for 2022. The CCL draw is December 15; the first game takes place February 15-17.
‘But Rabbi’ you might say ‘three of those four shots weren’t misses’ . Yes, they were saves. But it’s important for me to state this as a soccer stat nerd guy - ‘Shots’ and ‘Shots on Target’ are a really bad way of evaluating striker accuracy. A striker that hits the post 10 times in 10 shots and has them just barely rattle out and a striker that softly hits a dribbler square at the keeper 10 out of 10 are not the same, although the stats will say that the former player was 0 for 10 in SOT and the latter was 10 for 10. A good striker hits it in the goal and past the keeper more often than not.