SEATTLE, WA – It was a night to forget in Seattle for Vancouver Whitecaps FC on Wednesday as the Western Conference leaders fell 3-0 to a rampant Sounders side who closed the gap at the top on the 'Caps to just one point – and ended Vancouver’s seven-match unbeaten run.
“You can't win every game," said Whitecaps FC head coach Carl Robinson. “We've lost an unbeaten run, now we have to start a new run. It's about how you bounce back.”
Vancouver remain at the top of the West, despite the defeat, with a single point lead now over three teams - Seattle, Portland, and Sporting KC, who they visit on Saturday. It would be easy to read too much into Wednesday's heavy loss in Seattle, but Robinson says no one should be writing his side off just yet.
“It's one game,” Robinson said. “When you lose a game of football you're always open for criticism. We're top of the table with four games to go. Not many people would have said that would have happened, but it is happening.
“[The players] deserve a lot of credit, but we have to keep fighting, we have to keep grinding, we need to keep working hard and doing the details. When you play top teams, good teams, the details are the most important thing."”
Wednesday's match certainly wasn't the return to Seattle that Vancouver striker Fredy Montero was hoping for, and although disappointed with the overall team performance, the Colombian feels that Vancouver’s playoff fate lies clearly in their own hands and their own performances.
“We're confident,” Montero said after the match. “We know that the rest of the games that we have are going to be difficult, but we're going to look for our playoff spot. The next game in Kansas, we have to get some points.”
"Right now, it depends on us,” he added. “The way that we see it is that we need to get the result that we want to. We need three points to hold the spot in the playoffs.”
That's the mindset Robinson wants his team to have for these final four matches, and he's happy for everyone else to do the talking about whether his team deserve to be there.
He'll just settle for his players to do the talking on the pitch.
“We just focus on ourselves,” Robinson said. “Everybody else does the talking and we just focus on what we can do, and all we've got to do is prepare for a tough game in KC on Saturday. Then we'll deal with the next game and then we'll deal with the next game.
“Everyone else will make brilliant predictions and assumptions and things like that. We won't even get involved in that. We'll just focus on ourselves and try and get as many points as we can and see where that takes us.”
