Whitecaps: Plenty of heat in Dallas, but Vancouver not feeling it

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Vanni Sartini is used to take the heat. This is a man, mind you, who will be wearing jeans in 37 C conditions when his Vancouver Whitecaps travel to Texas to take on FC Dallas on Saturday.

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So when the conversation turned to his team’s flat performance in a 4-0 loss to the Seattle Sounders on Tuesday, the head coach took the blame for his players not being ready for a rivalry game, their first in 10 days.

“I think that we have to be self-critical, too, in terms of the coaching staff,” he said Friday before the team traveled to Dallas (7-3-4, 2nd West) for Saturday night’s game against the Toros.

“We treated last week in the same way that we were treating the week before. But it was a different week because the guys were coming back from five days break. We probably needed to be more on top of them, in terms of being more demanding in training, with more video sessions.

“We probably needed to ignite the sparkle again in them and be ready for the game. We didn’t do it.

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“We did a complete different approach this week. Especially on the road, the first 15, 20 or 25 minutes are so important. At home, even if we concede or we are not starting very well, then the fans, the atmosphere is going to help us get in the rhythm of the game. If we don’t start well, then the road is literally like climbing a mountain.”

And the road hasn’t been kind to the Whitecaps (5-8-2, 11th West) this season.

NEXT GAME

saturday

Vancouver Whitecaps vs. FC Dallas

6 p.m. PT, Toyota Stadium. TV: TSN. Radio: AM 730.

Away from BC Place Stadium, they have just one win (over the West’s last-place team), have been shut out three times (including two 4-0 losses) and outscored 22-5. You can flip those numbers at home: 4-1-2, 11 goals for, eight against, and they’ve shut out their opponents three times.

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In Dallas, they face the West’s second best team, and one that boasts the league’s fourth best home record (5-1-1). The Toros are a stingy defensive team — just six of their 13 goals against (second best in the West) have come at home, and they boast two of the top scorers in the league.

Vancouver has won just eleven in 12 visits to Toyota Stadium (1-8-3), though that 4-0 victory in 2017 has been followed by three straight 2-2 draws.

Forward Jesús Ferreira is tied for the MLS lead with nine goals and midfielder Paul Arriola sits tied for third overall with seven. Their 22 goal combined contributions is the highest among MLS duos.

“(Limiting them) starts with our press starts,” center-back Jake Nerwinski said. “Pressing their center backs, their (full) backs to make sure that we don’t give them too much space where they can play the ball in behind because that’s what they like to do. They like to run. We just need to make sure that we’re not giving (Ferreira) and Arriola enough space to make something happen.

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“It’s the whole team. It starts from our forwards and it goes all the way back to our center backs. So it needs to be a full 10 guys that are compact, and fighting together and pressing together.”

Last season, Vancouver had started the season as one of the teams that pressed the least in MLS, but have worked their back up the list and now sit third in pressures. The downside is their 25.1-per-cent success rate at forcing a turnover, the lowest in the league.

Ferreira has a similar profile to Raúl Ruidíaz, who scored twice against Vancouver in Tuesday’s Sounders win, in that he likes to find the space between lines. But there’s no lessons to be learned from that game, said Nerwinski.

“To be honest, there’s not a whole lot we can take from that game,” he said. “We just need to learn from the mistakes that we made that led to goals. We need to look at the moments where we had decent buildup where we could have maybe done better in our final third.

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“But yeah — it’s a game that we look at briefly and move on quickly. That’s the good thing about having so many games back to back. Some say it’s not good for us, but I think if you’re coming off a loss, and particularly a bad loss, it can be good to kind of erase that right away.”

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