Playoff push: San Jose Earthquakes season review; Part four

There are many nuances that Americanize Major League Soccer — ranging from minute to the size of 6’5″ center-backs — and over the course of the season San Jose Earthquakes have felt every one; from the glories of a new stadium, the announcement of the 2016 MLS All Star game in San Jose, and visits from stars such as Kaka, Steven Gerrard, and Clint Dempsey, to the growing pains that include a lack of depth, key players lost to international duty (with no MLS breaks) and finally a disappointing near-miss for a playoff spot.

Now it’s time to reflect on the season, down the pitch, into the dressing room, and the heart of the Earthquakes’ 2015 MLS campaign. We’ve compiled our experiences at Football Every Day from a season covering the Quakes live on gamedays. In part one, we examined their transition from a miserable 2014 season into new beginnings at Avaya Stadium. In part two, we looked at their tactical evolution. In part three, their summer slump went under the spotlight. In this final part four, we examine their playoff push.

—

Anibal Godoy’s journey to Avaya Stadium began in Panama City, on the morning of Thursday, August 13, a typically humid, blazing hot summer day in Panama’s capital. He was awaiting his P1 Visa after signing for the Quakes earlier in the week as their fifth highest paid player. The next day, Godoy woke up in Los Angeles after a seven-and-a-half hour flight, connecting to San Jose to meet his new teammates for the first time, and learn he would start in the Quakes’ match that night against the Colorado Rapids, a 1-0 win. He didn’t know English yet, but he said there was no problem communicating on the field, and at the end of the ordeal, Godoy added, “I feel like I’ve already played fifteen games with this group of players.”

“I was prepared mentally. They called me and asked if I was ready to start on my first day here and I said yes. I was rested and motivated by this great opportunity.”

Godoy himself didn’t particularly stand out on the pitch initially, though it was evident from the get-go that his presence in the midfield and eye for a pass could make him a consistent starter. With Alashe suspended, he slid into the defensive midfield role in the 4-1-4-1 as Goodson’s goal propelled the Quakes to a tough-fought, tight win over the Western Conference’s bottom team. Suddenly, their summer skid was over and the playoffs no longer seemed a world away, though the team’s many doubters weren’t yet convinced.

What Godoy allowed Kinnear to do, however, was make his first big tactical change since the 4-1-4-1. Alashe returned for their meeting with Sporting Kansas City on August nineteenth and slid in alongside Godoy in a 4-4-2, with Salinas out on the left and Cato wide right. Wondo played behind Amarikwa, finally getting the best of both of them.

I had an English friend and Leeds United supported in town for the Colorado game. These days, his Leeds allegiance is shorthand for saying that he’s adept at finding positives in a mid-table, second-tier club playing direct football. Before the Quakes match, I asked him to watch out for any standout players and before the tenth minute, he had spotted Shea Salinas.

Salinas’ name also arose in different context in April, at the Sporting Analytics, London conference when the head of research at a major UK rugby club told me that he had done a statistical analysis of the Quakes a few years back and the one player that he remembered had surprisingly stood out was Shea Salinas.

A quick, twenty-nine-year-old winger from Texas, Salinas has found a new vitality under Kinnear in San Jose, making more appearances this season than ever before, after being gradually integrated into the starting eleven in the early months of the season. He also bagged the most goals in a single season, three, in his career.

Salinas is accustomed to the underrated label: “Every year I feel like somebody writes an article that says this has been Shea Salinas’ breakout season,” he told Football Every Day at the Quakes’ training session in early October. “I feel like they’ve said that every year…I just think it’s funny.”

Just three minutes into the Quakes’ visit to Kansas City, among the hottest teams in MLS, Salinas found himself blazing down the wing before cutting the ball back to Cato, who finished low at the near post. Wondo buried a penalty seventeen minutes in and Godoy ended a jinxing run with a cool finish ten minutes later. The Quakes took the momentum from their dream start into the second half, when Salinas assistant another goal for Cato and Wondo scored a glorious header from Alashe’s cross. Only the woodwork and SKC goalkeeper Tim Melia kept the Quakes from scoring even more and finally the final-whistle spared Kansas City from suffering even more embarrassment from the Quakes’ comprehensive win.

The Quakes then visited Eastern Conference leaders DC United and Wondo buried another early go-ahead goal. In the fifty-second minute, Salinas topped off his road-trip with a well-deserved goal, assisted by Amarikwa. Quakes fans could now only try to remain calm. If there was a nervous, restrained excitement after their win over Colorado, all their pent up emotion from the losing streak came flooding out in a storm of seven goals, thirty-six shots, and most importantly, six points heading home into a meeting with the LA Galaxy.

—

Marc Pelosi’s long march home took a far more convoluted path. The Bay Area native and graduate of the De Anza Force Academy joined Liverpool as one of US soccer’s top teenage prospects in Europe. On occasion, he would even train with Liverpool legends such as Steven Gerrard in Liverpool’s senior team. That is, until two major injuries forced Pelosi back across the pond to rebuild his career with the San Jose Earthquakes. Even before the injuries, Pelosi had his feet firmly on the ground. “My hopes are to one day play for the first team of Liverpool, but you never know what could happen and just to play football and have a good career anywhere in England, in Europe or the States is what I hope for,” he told the San Jose Mercury News in a 2012 interview.

The German-born midfielder served as backup to Alashe and Godoy, making five substitute appearances and earning one start, in the Quakes’ loss to Houston, in his first month at the club. It wasn’t until the LA Galaxy visited, however, that Pelosi made a real statement of his intent.

That night, Pelosi and Gerrard’s paths happened to cross again as Gerrard followed the youngster across the pond, albeit on an entirely different account. Gerrard had recently joined LA as one of the league’s biggest stars, with a salary higher than the Quakes’ entire wage bill. By chance, Alashe, was sidelined with an injury suffered the previous week and Pelosi was thrown into a holding midfield role far more defensive than he is used to, primarily to mitigate Gerrard’s influence. “I’ve trained with him and I’ve played with him in training games all the time, but I got to play against him now and it’s fun. Playing against any world class player like that, you learn a lot from what they do,” Pelosi said of playing against his former teammate, adding that they had a chance to catch up before the game.

Pelosi has definitely inherited some of Gerrard’s tough-tackling style and only Shaun Francis made more tackles than Pelosi on the night. “Playing in the middle you’ve got to be strong and tackle hard…growing up everyone always said I was a little bit aggressive,” said Pelosi. “They always get mad at me in training but I say, ‘just deal with it, it’s part of the game.’” And at the end of the game, Pelosi waited outside the Galaxy’s locker room as a team representative carried out a jersey swap with Gerrard.

The Quakes’ midfield dominated on the night, rendering Gerrard almost invisible, a large part in defeating the visitors 1-0, thanks to a well-deserved goal for Salinas. Among the swaths of red Liverpool kits congregating high in one corner of Avaya Stadium, there was one woman in a Pelosi kit who must have felt very vindicated by the result. While Gerrard had sixty-four touches and made fifty-two passes, Pelosi had sixty-eight touches and made six more passes than his opposite.

“Sometimes we play with one defensive and two attacking [midfielders] and I make a lot of runs going forward, but today Dom talked to me — we were playing with two defensive midfielders, obviously, Anibal and I — and he said to keep it a little bit more simple and not go forward too much. Pick your chances to go forward but just stay in the middle, keep the ball moving and control the game a bit more,” Pelosi summarized.

The Quakes’ will to win fifty-fifty balls was among the many strengths that came with the squad’s newfound confidence. Kinnear’s men won forty-six of duels compared to LA’s thirty-eight; Salinas sprinted back to stop a dangerous Giovani Dos Santos counter-attack from a corner; David Bingham’s was aerially dominant in his box. When the Quakes were holding their lead late on, he did brilliantly to come out and tip wide Omar Gonzalez’s header destined to be tapped in at the near post.

Although the Galaxy fumed at Leonardo’s red card early in the second half, the Quakes thoroughly deserved the three points nevertheless. The Galaxy were very poor in the first half, at best uninterested, and the Quakes dominated the closing stages when playing with a man advantage. In the last play of the game, Pelosi nonchalantly chipped a pass down the right into the feet of Wynne, who cut the ball inside and played it into substitute Adam Jahn, whose low effort from the edge of the box deflected just wide of the post. Kinnear’s men oozed class and barged right through the classiest team in MLS to cap a fantastic run of form in August. With seven of their last nine matches of the regular season at home, anything seemed possible for the Quakes.

—

As you walk down the long hall and into the Quakes’ dressing room, to your right is a timeline of the Quakes’ history, marked with photos of the organization’s most memorable moments. On your left you pass multiple rooms — first the manager’s office, which is where Kaval, general manager John Doyle, Kinnear and their families convene after their matches, then multiple equipment rooms — until the right wall makes way for an arched entrance into the spacious locker room.

It’s mid-September and the Quakes’ August form has passed, the players conceding a disappointing 1-1 draw with the Seattle Sounders. The Heritage Cup, meant to honor the only NASL rivalry in Major League Soccer, sat pitifully, unwanted in the middle of the Quakes locker room. It’s main purpose was to serve as a goal in a one-man scrimmage for the entertainment of Godoy’s toddler, who was blissfully unaware of the damp feeling in the locker room.

Obafemi Martins’ late equalizer made a draw feel like a loss for the Quakes and although there were positives for the Quakes to take from the match — Pelosi and Godoy both returned from international duty, drastically reducing the Quakes’ vulnerability from turnovers, Kinnear noted — Chris Wondolowski said: “I think we’re running out of time to take positives, silver linings and things like that…. [In all of] these last six games [we] really need three [points]. That’s been our mentality for way too long now, after we to out of July. You know that you will pick some up and that you will drop some, but we have to stop dropping leads, that’s for sure.”

The draw had followed a game against the Philadelphia Union that ended the Quakes’ four-match win streak. Godoy and Pelosi were whisked away on international duty and Alashe and Garcia were only half-fit returning from injuries. Although Wondo buried a penalty to give the Quakes a second-half lead, the Eastern Conference cellar-dwellers came back from the death with two goals off the head of Conor Casey.

The Quakes surrendered yet another lead in a midweek meeting with the Montreal Impact. Bingham was caught cheating to the wrong side when Kyle Bekker’s first-half near-post effort sailed in from the edge of the box, Montreal’s only goal in their draw with the Quakes. To his credit, Bingham owned up to his mistake – right out of the showers, he didn’t beat around the bush with reporters. “I just wasn’t good enough,” he admitted. “This one is on me tonight. There are ten other guys on that field busting their butts the whole game.”

But Kinnear understood that these mistakes happen in the beautiful game. “I didn’t go in there and throw anything, or point fingers and throw some f-bombs,” the Quakes’ coach said.

David Bingham sits defeated as the final whistle blows against Vancouver. “I cost us two points,” he admitted.

Bernardez was suspended and Marvell Wynne replaced the center-back alongside Goodson, who himself was returning from an injury that kept him out of the Philadelphia and Seattle matches, with Alashe replacing him.

This was still the most devastating of the Quakes’ three 1-1 draws in the space of a month. Against a ten-man Montreal side — Ambroise Oyongo was sent off in the forty-ninth minute — without their star Didier Drogba, the Quakes missed a key chance to boost their playoff hopes as Bekker’s goal negated Wondolowski’s early poachers finish.

Goodson was also yellow-carded for the fifth time of the season, suspending him for their trip to New York City FC in the Quakes’ circus of absences. Alashe covered for him but the Quakes’ season seemed to be slipping out of their hands yet again as their hosts went up by three goals in the sixty-fifth minute.

Yet it’s not in the Quakes’ blood to know when it’s over; when they’ve lost a game or when they’re playoff hopes are done and dusted. In a short video to be played on the big-screen at home matches, Bingham and Wynne likened themselves to a cheetahs, Sherrod said his spirit animal was a sea otter and Wondolowski said he would be a lion in his next life; but be it a cheetah, sea otter (er, sea otter?), or lion, it took resilience to absorb all the hits that the Earthquakes did and still bounce back. “Everyone is fighting for everything,” said Quakes coach Dominic Kinnear.

Within seven minutes of NYCFC’s third, the Quakes had pulled one back through Amarikwa and Wondo made it 3-2 win a penalty four minutes later. Although an equalizer was beyond their reach, the comeback gave Kinnear’s men hope heading back home for a meeting with Real Salt Lake.

—

After some years as a child playing Fantasy Soccer, I yearned for something more hands-on, so I created my own game in a small little blue notebook. It involved dice and a hand-made probability chart. I would manually play each match, taking pleasure from watching the season play out, particularly when, for example, inflicting pain upon an imaginary Jose Mourinho when his Chelsea would trail Newcastle United by a couple of goals.

After some years, my patience for dice-drama faded and I ultimately lost that little notebook. After a recent move, however, I had the pleasant surprise of finding it buried in a box in the garage. Trying out my game for old times’ sake, I still found delight in the random streaks of luck that would determine key results in the season.

Against RSL, the dice finally fell in the Quakes’ favor, as a deflected last-minute goal reversed the club’s recent streak of disappointing home results, at a critical moment in the team’s season.

Throughout the season, the Quakes’ luck has spurted in various directions. The last time Real Salt Lake visited Avaya Stadium, they slapped the Quakes across the face with a stunning volley off the boot of Javier Morales that proved to be the match winner.

As Jeff Cassar’s RSL visited San Jose this afternoon, this luck came back from the dead and gifted the Quakes their first late, game-winning goal of the season, something they had become so well known for back at Buck Shaw Stadium.

In the eighty-ninth minute of their delightfully strange match, Matias Perez Garcia saw a deflected effort catch Nick Rimando off guard and bobble into the back of an empty net. If the match hadn’t been crazy enough already, Garcia proceeded to whip off his shirt in celebration. “Right when I took my shirt off,” Garcia said, he realized that he was already on a yellow card and was subsequently sent off. “I got caught up in all the euphoria,” he explained via a translator.

The win put the Quakes back within touching distance of the playoffs heading into a meeting with the Whitecaps in early October. Alashe and Pelosi were away on international duty, so Koval filled in alongside Godoy in the 4-4-2 and Cato replaced Garcia. The Quakes were woeful in the first period, and Wondo explained: “I thought we came out with good energy, but kind of in the wrong places. I thought we were a bit jittery at times, giving away silly fouls, silly set pieces and got punished.” Vancouver took a first half lead when Rivero’s effort took the most unlucky of deflections off Francis, back onto his shin, over Bingham and into the back of the net.

Yet in the second half, the Quakes “came out with a better attitude,” as Kinnear put it and Wondo netted an equalizer late on.

Deep into the four minutes of stoppage time, however, all could have been lost, as San Jose hauled all their men into Vancouver’s box for a last chance free-kick that Godoy uncharacteristically scuffed. The ball fell right to Vancouver’s Kekuta Manneh, who surged forward on a two on-one against David Bingham, only for the goalkeeper to miraculously pounce on Manneh’s final touch.

“I saw a bit of a heavy touch and I thought that was my best chance to go on and stop their counter and it worked out,” said Bingham. “If he was going to beat me, he was going to beat me, but I didn’t want to beat myself in that situation. I didn’t want to give him an easy goal, so I stood up and saw my chance and took it.”

The save kept the Quakes’ playoff hopes alive and surely made up for Bingham’s error versus Montreal. The save encapsulated the progression of Bingham’s Quakes career, which began nervously but slowly blossomed over the course of the season. He came up big on multiple occasions against Vancouver, most notably to keep out a curling twenty yard effort from Octavio Rivero. From Bingham to Pelsoi and Alashe, the Quakes’ future looks bright.

Kinnear’s men were still below the red line, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Despite the curveballs they were thrown from every possible international match and their frequent dips in form, they maintained hope. That hope still hung by a thread as they sat level on points and ahead on goal difference with Portland in the final playoff spot. In his post match press conference, Dominic Kinnear couldn’t help letting out a little chuckle at the absurdity of it all.

“You always get fight out of this group,” said Quakes defender Clarence Goodson. “You got a lot of guys with a lot of pride working their tails off. We’re not the most beautiful team to watch, although I think this team is capable of playing beautiful soccer, much more so than in years past, but no matter what you get fight out of the group.”

This trademark fight was again showcased in their final home game of the regular season, a meeting with Sporting Kansas City. Bernardez was out suspended, and Wynne filled in at the back. The Quakes dug in and ground out a 1-0 win. The only goal of the game came from Godoy, who got on the end of Wondo’s one-touch squared pass across the goal. Amarikwa had started the move by muscling his way past four SKC defenders then releasing the ball to Salinas, who lofted a brilliant pass to Wondo’s run.

The three points left the Quakes with many routes into the playoffs heading a visit to Dallas, their final match of the season. If either SKC, Vancouver, Seattle, or Portland lost the Quakes could book their spot in the playoffs with a win.

The mood was chipper and exiting the stadium following the win over Kansas City, Quakes President Dave Kaval reassured me that this wouldn’t be the club’s last home match this season.

—

I’m a bit OCD about leaving stadiums early. Ever since “beating the traffic” before the end of the 2013 California Clasico at Stanford Stadium, I’ve been reluctant to leave the action even for bathroom breaks. This season, I missed just one goal at the San Jose Earthquakes’ new Avaya Stadium, in the Seattle Sounders’ mid-August visit.

The Seattle contest was a tight, nervy affair as Fatai Alashe broke Seattle’s defensive dam in the second half and the Quakes’ playoff hopes looked back on track. However, I picked a poor match to tempt the fates, walking away just before the Sounders bagged their equalizer.

In hindsight, that draw may have been the key result that denied the Quakes a playoff berth this season. In the end, a 2-1 loss to Dallas on the final day of the season led the Quakes to miss the playoffs by four points. In a season of new beginnings, the Quakes were haunted by old demons yet again.

“Every year I’ve played in the league except for 2012 I can look back at five or six games and say, ‘oh we’ve dropped points here, we’ve dropped points there,’” Quakes winger Shea Salinas said at training. “I don’t there are many teams that go a year without being able to say that. It’s something you can’t control.”

The Quakes looked confident in the first half against Dallas, with Amarikwa putting The Goonies in front in the thirteenth minute. Yet an unfortunate defense mix-up saw Dallas pull one back and after news that other results were turning against the Quakes, the cameras panned to Wondolowski. He swore loudly.

The final blow was delivered when Garcia got himself sent off in the second half, blood rushing to his head before slapping Mauro Diaz in the back of the head. The realization that their season was over was rapidly overcoming the Quakes as Victor Ulloa completed Dallas’ comeback with eleven minutes to go.

Many hours after the final whistle blew, I still hadn’t received the customary post-match press release from the team. Eventually, I stopped waiting; there’s no point being caught up in what-ifs for too long. It’s a lesson that Quakes fans are learning the hard way as the club shuts and locks their windows for the winter. A collage of what-ifs and deflated hopes are somewhat familiar sensations for The Goonies, but who knows what gifts will come out of the offseason this year.

Over the course of the season, Avaya Stadium delivered a sellout crowd to see the US Women’s National Team, hosted the Rugby Sevens World Cup, the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup, Manchester United, and with news that the stadium won the bid to host the 2016 MLS All-Star game, the momentum aimed at growing the football community in San Jose, which having just passed the 1 million population mark, is gaining steam, and so are the Quakes. At the All-Star announcement, San Jose mayor Sam Liccardo had one message for soccer fans around the country: “Bring it on, we’re ready.” It’s a mentality that the Quakes adopted this season.

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