Don’t Look Now, But the Revolution Is On a Run
Baseball’s playoffs are underway, absent the 2013 World Series champion Red Sox.
The Patriots … don’t look great.
And the Bruins and Celtics have yet to get underway.
There is, however, a playoff race alive and well in Massachusetts. It’s that soccer team that plays in the Patriots’ stadium.
Yes, the New England Revolution are embroiled in a tight fight for a spot in Major League Soccer’s playoffs. Scoff at the notion of jumping on board, many will. And let’s note right away that it would be lame to outright abandon a 2-2 football team that went to the AFC Championship Game last year.
But if you’re in need of some playoff excitement, and are looking to get caught up on what’s been a roller coaster season for a team that now is sitting near the top of MLS’s Eastern Conference, let’s get underway.
Game of Perceptions
MLS is a young league, not even 20 years old yet, and it’s in something of a transition period as it looks to establish itself both on the international soccer stage and in relation to other sports here at home. It has plenty of ground to make up on both fronts.
With that in mind, while it’s nice to talk about wins and losses and playoff pushes, conversation around the Revolution also focuses on the macro issues. It’s not enough to just be a good team. You also need to be a good club.
The Revs brought a decent amount of talent into 2014, and the season brought lofty expectations after a playoff run in 2013.
From the bird’s eye view, though, the season got off to a particularly rough start, when Boston Magazine published an article less than a month into the year that was extremely critical of how the team is run. That article went so far as to call the team’s owner, Bob Kraft, the “worst owner’’ in MLS. (Dubious though the honor may have been, the Revs got a little bit of sports talk radio chatter out of the article—a rarity for the club.)
The Krafts, who also own the Patriots, certainly weren’t happy with the article. Bob’s son Jonathan went on the radio in June to talk World Cup, and spent part of that conversation, he blasted its writer and denounced the piece.
Kraft didn’t come off too well there. For one, his suggestion that the article was without merit because it was written by a food writer whose name Kraft couldn’t remember seemed a little petty. (Kevin Alexander, the journalist, has also written about soccer for Esquire.)
And while the criticisms in the article may have been frank, they certainly weren’t new. Revs fans haven’t been the happiest bunch in recent years, and the bulk of the Boston Mag article reflected the complaints much of the fanbase has voiced for years.
Chief among those complaints, always, is the fact that the team plays in Foxborough’s Gillette Stadium—a fine enough home for the Patriots, who sell out its nearly 70,000 seats, but a horrible venue for Major League Soccer. The Revs can draw relatively sizable crowds, topping 20,000 every now and then, but that looks like next to nothing in big ol’ Gillette. The team has said they want to build a soccer-specific stadium, the likes of which have sprung up across MLS, near Boston, where younger people who actually like soccer live. The trouble: They’ve been saying it for eight years, and still nothing.
The other major issue has been star power.
The team has developed some solid, borderline marketable young players on its own, including, in recent years, defender Andrew Farrell, and midfielders Diego Fagundez and Kelyn Rowe. Veterans with a little bit of name recognition and some international experience, like Lee Nguyen and Jose Goncalves, have also been bright spots for recent iterations of the team.
But the team has not brought on a big name, an international star that could serve to improve the Revs’ quality on the field, draw casual fans in, and signal a willingness by the Krafts to approach the team as anything other than a younger, less loved sibling to the Patriots.
New Ball Game
That changed in August.
Jermaine Jones was a stud for the United States during this summer’s World Cup, scoring one of the team’s most memorable goals against Portugal and serving as a spark both offensively and defensively in the midfield. Jones was not always so impressive in the United States’ run-up to the world’s biggest sporting event, and at 32, he was unlikely to ever find himself playing top-flight European soccer again.
In the World Cup, though, he was very good. With it widely known that he wanted to come to MLS, that made him very valuable for both on-the-field and off-the-field purposes for many teams. Revs fans allowed themselves to daydream, but even as the team said it was interested, it didn’t seem likely that Jones would be New England-bound.
Surprise: In late August, the Revs got him.
Jones filled a need in the midfield for the Revs, but more than that, he filled a need for fans, who needed some sort of signal from the club that management even cared about the team. In bringing Jones in, they got it. (Even Jones knows the team still needs a stadium near Boston, saying so in a short documentary about his arrival in New England.)
There’s no obvious comparison in recent local sports lore to put the Jones acquisition into perspective. The Nomar trade in 2004 was a big deal that changed the dynamic of the Red Sox (even if it still took a couple of weeks for the team to get hot after dumping their star shortstop). However, that involved dealing an elite, albeit declining, talent, and the players he brought back, Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera, were part of a puzzle rather than the centerpiece of the team. The Kevin Garnett trade gave the Celtics their new best player, but that came in the summer, ahead of a fresh season.
The Jones signing gave the Revolution a new best player, and fans a new reason to be excited about the team, just as it was entering the stretch run of the season. Jones has registered a goal and two assists since coming aboard, and the Revs have won all four of the games he’s started since coming aboard. The goal came in the team’s most recent game, against defending champions Sporting Kansas City, breaking a 2-2 tie with just minutes left in the game.
Ups and Downs
The Revs are on quite a run right now, and is in second place a competitive Eastern Conference. (Update: After this article was written, New England fell to third place as a result of other league results Friday night. Again, it’s a tight race.)
Remarkably, they’ve gotten to that point while being tied for the fourth most losses in the league. They’re also tied for the fourth most wins. Say this about the Revs: They’re decisive. Their three ties are tied for least in the league—so the team is rising in the standings based on the power of those wins.
While that 14-3-13 (W-T-L) record would suggest a fairly even season, the Revs have been a team of streaks in 2014.
They came into the season with a lot of hype after 2013, in which a cast of young, talented players brought the team to its first playoff berth since 2009. Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl, a leading soccer voice in the US, even predicted the team would win the MLS Cup (the league’s championship) this season.
Things didn’t get off to a great start, as the Revs won just one of their first five games, dropping three. They turned it around over the course of the spring, climbing to the top of the Eastern Conference by going on a seven-game unbeaten run, winning six and tying one.
That was followed by what can best be described as a ruinous collapse, with the Revs losing eight MLS games in a row. EIGHT. That’s a long losing streak in any sports league, not to mention one whose season is just 34 games long. After breaking that streak with a win, the Revs would go on to collect a loss and a tie.
The doldrum lasted from late May to mid-August. This was not a good way to attract new fans in the aftermath of the World Cup.
Since then, though, and particularly since the signing of Jones, things have gotten moving again. Starting on August 23, a few days before Jones was signed, the Revs have won six of seven and risen quickly in the standings.
To give you a visual sense of how wacky it’s been, here’s how the season looks by wins, losses, and ties in chronological order.
L-L-T-W-L-W-T-W–W–W–W–W-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-W-L-T-W–W–W–W–W-L-W
Ups and downs, indeed. It’s had its shining points, though. New England is 3-0 this season against Sporting Kansas City, the defending champs who knocked the Revs out of the playoffs in 2013. They’ve also looked good against a star-studded (though dysfunctional) Toronto team, and notched a big win against the class of the league early in the season, defeating Seattle.
Playoff Push
All of that has been good enough to put the Revs in the thick of things with less than a month left in the season.
MLS standings work similarly to hockey’s. Teams get three points for a win and one point for a tie. Right now, with 14 wins and three ties, the Revs have 45 points. That puts them six points behind the Eastern Conference leaders, (Washington) DC United.
The top five teams in each conference make the playoffs, with the three top finishers in each going straight to the quarterfinals. (That’s like baseball, to keep up with the comparisons.) The Revs probably won’t catch DC at the top, though it’s possible. It’s also no guarantee they’ll get one of those five spots. The Eastern Conference playoff race is crazy crowded, with New England, Kansas City, Columbus, New York, Toronto, Philadelphia, and Houston all with at least a reasonable chance of slotting in to the final spots in addition.
The Revs will play four more games this season. They’ll need to finish strong, or at least not weak, to get a chance to show their stuff in November. They host Columbus this Saturday, then play at last-place Montreal the following week, before finishing up against Houston and Toronto. A couple of wins should be good enough to get the team through, but obviously as many points as possible would be nice.
If they make it in, they’ll be contenders in the Eastern Conference. If they go to the MLS Cup final, they’d possibly (probably) face off against top competition—the Seattle Sounders and LA Galaxy are both having fantastic years. The Revs would not be favored against either of them…but as we’ve learned with the 2008 Celtics, 2013 Bruins, and a couple of Patriots squads in the last decade, even a losing playoff run is still plenty of fun.
Who’s Who?
That’s the competition. Who do you need to know about on the team?
Well, there’s Jones, addressed well enough above.
The team is coached by former Rev Jay Heaps, who played nine seasons in New England and is in his third season at the helm. He replaced his own former coach Steve Nicol, who led the team to four MLS Cup finals in the 2000s (all losses), following the 2011 season.
Lee Nguyen is a 27-year-old who spent his early career bouncing around internationally before finding his way to the Revs a few years back. He has blossomed into an MVP candidate in 2014, with 13 goals and flashy play in the midfield.
Andrew Farrell was the No. 1 overall draft pick in 2013, and put up a very impressive rookie season as a defender. He’s backslid a bit this year, but his size and athleticism make him a guy you want on your team.
Diego Fagundez is a teenager from Leominster who led the team in goals last season. This season’s been a pretty big disappointment as a follow-up, though he’s had his moments. Fagundez is still a useful piece for Heaps, more often as a substitute in recent weeks, and due to his age and local connections he is among the Revs’ most recognizable.
Jose Goncalves was the league’s best defender in 2013. He, too, has taken a bit of a step back this season, but is generally reliable.
Kelyn Rowe was one of the team’s best players last year but—noticing a pattern?—the third-year midfielder struggled for most of 2014. He’s come on strong of late, though, with all four of his goals coming since July 30.
Charlie Davies has become the guy the team relies on at striker—meaning his job is to score goals. The former US National Teamer and Boston College Eagle saw a major career setback following a car crash ahead of the 2010 World Cup, but since joining the Revs’ starting lineup this summer he’s been alright, finding the net a few times. Bonus points for reportedly helping to recruit Jones.
Bobby Shuttleworth is the goalkeeper, having taken over for longtime Rev Matt Reis following Reis’s retirement last year. Shuttleworth is…well, he’s okay. He’s been better of late. He’s only being listed here because he’s the keeper and the keeper might as well be listed.
(It’s probably no surprise that the team started winning again around the same time most of these players started playing better.)
Anyway, that’s more or less that. If you give it a taste and you like it, you’ll want to explore some of the intricacies around MLS, such as its often-bizarre player acquisition rules—which helped land Jones here—and non-league tournaments and competitions. Those are for another day, however. For now, you are more or less equipped for a quick jump aboard the playoff push bandwagon.
Not sold? That’s fine. It’s not for everybody. The nice thing about soccer, though, is that you know that at least your team won’t give up 41 points in a game.
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