Last Sunday against Orlando City, the Fire didn’t look like a team that won five of six league matches and surged up the Eastern Conference standings. Instead, they resembled the group that got Ezra Hendrickson dismissed earlier this year.
After Mauricio Pineda opened the scoring in the 47th minute, the Fire didn’t do much right the rest of the evening. Orlando connected twice in the next seven minutes to take the lead, then clinched the 3-1 victory by converting on a 68th-minute penalty.
To make sure that defeat was just a blip, the Fire will have to be better Saturday when they visit the LA Galaxy (5-10-7, 22 points).
“It’s been a resilient team in the last three, four months here,” goalkeeper Spencer Richey said. “So, I don’t think we’re looking too much into the results and I will obviously take a peek, analyze it and then move on to LA.”
Playing without coach Frank Klopas, who tested positive for COVID-19, the Fire (8-8-8, 32 points) were in their first league match since July 15 when they defeated Toronto FC 1-0. Before the pause, brought on by the Leagues Cup, few teams were in better form than the Fire.
That form didn’t carry over Sunday.
“It’s a little bit of a weird phase that we’re in now, never really before, maybe some huge international tournaments aside that we had this month, a five-week break in kind of the middle of the season,” Richey said. “If there’s any team in the league that probably didn’t want that it was us given the form that we were in there in the early part of the summer.”
Even with the loss, the Fire remained in playoff position, two points ahead of DC United for the ninth and final spot in the East. The Fire also have a game in hand on DC and enter the weekend tied with eighth-place CF Montreal at 32 points but behind due to wins.
The Fire can’t afford too many more blips like the ones they suffered against Orlando if they want to move up or just stay above the playoff line.
“Orlando put their body on the line for those goals and it worked for them,” said assistant C.J. Brown, who coached the team in place of Klopas. “So, we now need to figure out how to be that type of team. We can play soccer, we can move the ball to the lines, we can create opportunities and now we need to learn how to suffer and really put our bodies on the line to win games.”
If they do that, the Fire won’t have to anxiously watch the scoreboard and hope for outside help. They didn’t do that against Orlando, but the Fire have shown they’re capable of getting results.
Saturday against the lowly Galaxy would be a good time to remind people.
“The players have to take it game-by-game,” Brown said. “We need to focus on ourselves because we’re in every game. We create opportunities for every game, we can create opportunities to win games for ourselves. So, we can’t get caught up in trying to figure out if this team or that team wins or loses to keep us above the line.”
