ST. LOUIS - As we approach month five of the Major League Soccer season, St. Louis City SC finds themselves heading backward in the MLS standings. With their tremendous start to the season, backward means second in the Western Conference of MLS.
Get The Latest News!
Don't miss our top stories and need-to-know news everyday in your inbox.
That’s to say, while the past few games haven’t been ideal for St. Louis City, it’s a long season. A bad month hasn’t banished them to the basement of the conference, however, the gap between them and the field has tightened up drastically during MLS’s busy summer stretch.
Ten points separate the nine playoff teams in the West, with LAFC leapfrogging City with back-to-back wins over the past week. Just two points separate City from their opponents on Saturday night, the fifth-place San Jose Earthquakes.
“(The tight standings) put some importance on every game, especially ones like San Jose,” said Bradley Carnell in his pre-match press conference. “But this season is a long season and we’re not getting ahead of ourselves.”
Each game holds importance. Each game shakes up the standings. That’s why some, like City midfielder Rasmus Alm, don’t pay attention to the week-to-week ebbs and flows of the “table”, as the European contingent of City players would call it.
“I’m a guy who takes it one game (at a time),” said Alm on Thursday. “To look at the table now, with so many games left, there’s no point in looking at that now. I’m looking at the table when it’s done, right now it’s all about winning the next game and taking as many points as possible.”
Echoing Carnell, Alm also thought it was a lot of the little details that City has been getting wrong the past two weeks. “Small things we need to change, but we need to just stay compact as a team and stay working together.”
If you thought City had a rough night Wednesday, San Jose had to go to Houston to play the Dynamo with temperatures in the 90s and a heat index peaking over 120 degrees during the afternoon.
Then the heavens opened and huge storms forced a delay, after which Houston’s Thor Ulfarsson scored two late goals to clinch three points for Houston and beat San Jose 4-1.
As can be the case in Major League Soccer, the Earthquakes have thrived at home, but struggled, at times mightily, on the road. One may remember their visit to CITY PARK back in the first month of the season, where St. Louis City soundly beat them 3-0.
Granted, this is a very different City than the one that took the pitch on March 18. There’s no Klauss, there’s not even Sam Adeniran, who came on as a sub for Klauss in that match.
Klauss, as has become the main storyline about St. Louis City around the league, has been injured for a long time and that time seems to be growing longer. Eduard Löwen stepped up in his absence and became a goal threat, and now Löwen is out until at least the Leagues Cup.
But the message stays the same from Bradley Carnell and City. It’s about principles, it’s about the system, and it’s not about one or two guys, because the team works and acts as a unit.
“We’ve never wavered from our principles, what we believe in and who we are,” said Carnell. “We’re trying to do the best job we can do. Right now each team is treating every single game like it's a do-or-die game. That’s what we have to be cognizant of, and we have to be excited about every game.”
The Quakes are a much different beast at home this season. They’re undefeated at Paypal Park and claimed a 2-1 victory over conference-leading LAFC last month.
So with this in mind, and noting that City’s form has dipped not just lately but on the road overall, it could be another tough Saturday in prospect for Bradley Carnell’s side.
“Over the last few games, we’ve given up too many transition moments,” noted Carnell. “When we consider (a goal given up), we take it back a little bit, form the pieces of the puzzle, and try to connect those to see how we can mitigate those bad moments in transition.”
City looks to mitigate its own bad moment by getting a result on the road in San Jose Saturday night. Kickoff is set for 9:30 p.m. central time, streaming on Apple TV. Local radio broadcasts are available on KYKY Y98.1 FM in English and 102.9 KXOK FM in Spanish.
More like this:
