OBETZ, Ohio – When Columbus Crew SC boards their flight for Vancouver on Monday, they will be embarking on one of the longest possible road trips in MLS.
After their flight of around 2,500 miles to British Columbia for Wednesday night’s match at the Whitecaps (10 pm ET, TSN, MLS Live), the team will head straight to New England and the Atlantic coast, where they’ll face the Revs on Saturday afternoon.
But after a sluggish start to their season, Crew SC doesn’t have time to worry about their travel schedule, however daunting it may be.
“We’ve got the toughest stretch you could probably possibly play [this] week with two turf games in three games cross-country, but we have to deal with it,” captain Michael Parkhurst said. “We have to get points. We’re sitting at 1-2-0 and we need points. So we have to get past it mentally.”
With the short turnaround time and plenty of long flights on the docket, head coach Gregg Berhalter will likely be shuffling his lineup for the two matches.
“All things considered, with the travel and the venues and the timing – we play at 3 o’clock on Saturday after 10 o’clock on Wednesday – it’s a short window and there’s a lot of travel involved,” he said. “So we’ll look at what we do with the lineups.”
Adding to the club’s scheduling concerns has been their odd slate of two byes in the first five weeks of the season. With a style built on possession and intricate passing, Columbus has had difficulties getting in sync, a problem that was highlighted by their uneven performance in their 2-1 loss to the New York Red Bulls last time out.
“It’s tough to get into a rhythm, that’s for sure,” Parkhurst said. “Coming off a good win in Week 2 we had a bye week in Week 3 and then had the international break… and now we [had] another off weekend.”
Professional athletes are largely creatures of habit, and Parkhurst said he thinks the odd schedule can have an effect.
“It’s nice when you have the same weekly schedule, that’s for sure,” he said. “Of course you have Wednesday games in there and things are different. But when two out of three weekends you’re not playing, it just throws the schedule off, whether we’re going hard in the week or not going hard or we’ve got a day off. So that’s the type of thing that gets thrown off, not so much the game rhythm.”
Berhalter, however, doesn’t subscribe to that theory.
“It may come into play a little bit, but it’s negligible,” he said. “The reason we didn’t win the game is because of us. Give Red Bull some credit as well. But we take responsibility for that.”
Parkhurst and Berhalter do both agree that there’s no room for excuses, and Federico Higuain – who is suspended for Wednesday’s match after receiving a red card in the loss to the Red Bulls – summed up the team’s feelings about the stretch.
“It’s the same for everybody,” he said. “When you’re asked to play, you play. You train for that and you get used to that. For us, it’s to be able to play the system, execute the system and not be predictable. We have variables here, and we’re going to use those variables.”
