Match Preview: Vancouver Whitecaps vs Cavalry F.C | How Bad Could it be?

What can I say really? The Vancouver Whitecaps are crashing and burning before our very eyes. There is a very real possibility that they will lose to Cavalry F.C, a club from a league who’s salary cap is around 1/8th of the Vancouver Whitecaps’ payroll. The Whitecaps drew 0-0 with Cavalry F.C in Calgary. Yes the field was bumpy and yes the Whitecaps had a goal wrongly disallowed but the fact that any of that mattered was astoundingly disappointing. It was also quite disappointing for me on a personal note as I was owned.

Will the ‘Caps fair better in more familiar surroundings? Will the nightmare continue? I don’t honestly know. My preseason predictions are always wildly incorrect so maybe staying out of the prediction game is best for me. All I will say is that things look very bad

Kick off: 7:30 Pacific, Wednesday July 24th

Broadcast: OneSoccer

Cavalry:

Since playing the Whitecaps to a 0-0 draw, Cavalry have beaten both York 9 and Halifax Wanderers by a score of 1-0. They are second place in the CPL fall competition but have a game in hand on league leader’s Forge. Having only played two games compared to the Whitecaps’ 3, Cavalry will be the better rested of the two sides. I would imagine Cavalry will stick with their 3-4-3 formation. Calgary are well organized, hard to break down and generated probably the best chance of the game in the reverse fixture. Essentially in two years (if you count the Calgary Foothills season which was essentially Cavalry 1.0) they have assembled a team that could very well knock out an MLS team, albeit a low end MLS team with players who mostly weren’t in full time professional soccer last season. Compare this to the Whitecaps talking about how they can’t make any big signings because they don’t have a scouting department in place after eight years in MLS and that’s, you know, concerning. This success has brought interest in their players, with the Whitecaps specifically being linked with Sergio Camargo and Nico Pasquotti.

Now i’m all for giving lower division standouts a shot at a higher level. But the thing is, these guys were available 5 months ago for free. They were still the same guys but now that they’ve lit up CPL suddenly there’s a big scramble to get them when you could have just taken them for free earlier in the year. I get that they weren’t super proven in the pro game but this feels a bit like chasing trends. As a team with a notoriously small budget, the Whitecaps need to be ahead of trends. Pasquotti and Camargo are 23 and 24. I guarantee their actual skill level hasn’t dramatically increased because of 13 CPL games. The only difference is now they’ve had success at a level the Whitecaps are paying attention to. Possible i’m just being nit-picky though.

Vancouver Whitecaps:

Look folks, on paper the Whitecaps have the talent to win this game comfortably. But right now they look disorientated and, well, bad. We’ve seen in the past that the Whitecaps have crushed a lower division opposition after being embarrassed in the first leg but never after being embarrassed while starting an almost full strength team. I don’t know what they’re going to do and I feel frightened.