Back, For What Its Worth

EDIT: Literally as I pushed publish on this the Rapids announced the next 3 games have been postponed.  That's this Wednesday, this Sunday, a nd next Wednesday.  Needless to say, for all intents and purposes, the season is over.

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So I took a week or so off to go visit family, came back, and missed no games.  Yeah, must be 2020.

As everyone reading already knows the LAFC and LA Galaxy games last week were postponed due to further positive COVID tests in the Rapids organization.  (Minn-Dallas, and Columbus-Orlando were also postponed this week).  The Atlantic reported today that the team did train today, but with less than half the lineup, and there are serious questions about Wednesday's game in Seattle going forward.

The Atlantic also reported that after a staffer tested positive last Tuesday, leading to Wednesday's game being postponed, the team trained on Wednesday.  They felt that since it was a staffer and not a player who tested positive it was safe to train.  Until a player tested positive on Thursday, which means everyone who was at the training on Wednesday had to go into quarantine.

At this point its going to be really hard to judge the 2020 season.  Its now a mess for the Rapids.  Play 2 games, take 3 months off.  Play 3 games, take a month off.  Play 8 games, take a month off.  Play somewhere between 5-10 games in a month to finish the season.  I've been pretty vocal about the FO needing to put up or shut up in 2020 after all their talk building to this season, and up until now I haven't seen COVID as much of a excuse, because very team was dealing with it.  But not every team is dealing with an outbreak like the Rapids.

Before this outbreak the Rapids were pretty close to my bar going into the season.  My expectation to say that the "Rapids Way" play worked was to win a home playoff game.  Getting a home playoff game, in a regular season, requires finishing in the top 4 or having a couple of upsets in the playoffs.  The Rapids were in 5th when the outbreak started.  They also won the Rocky Mountain Cup back in spectacular fashion (admittedly, because we put ourselves in a pretty big hole) and we're seeing the youth movement starting to come to fruition.  That's enough for me to give the leadership (Smith, Fraser, etc.) most of a pass on 2020.

I do have some expectations that need to be met for the rest of the season though.  One, we need to figure out why we can't get this outbreak under control.  Are we taking the right precautions and listening to the experts and its just not working?  Or are we ignoring best practices?  Because based on what little is in the Atlantic report training last week seems pretty stupid from my POV.  If we find out that the organization has been lax on handling COVID and that's what put us in this situation that would be a pretty big black mark against those involved.  But if the organization has been doing the right thing and it hasn't worked, or individuals haven't been following the organization's process then that's a different issue.

Secondly whatever games we do play need to be played well.  Given the situation I'm not real concerned about results (but beat FSL if that game gets played, please) but I don't want to see the team giving up or reverting to poor form.  We're going to be rusty and we're going to play a lot of games in a short time frame, so I expect that we're not going to win at the rate I expected, but there's a difference between not being in form and not playing well.  I'm ok with the former, not the latter.