Rapids End Frist Half Of The Season On A Winning Note

Its a tight turnaround for the Rapids and the ones who blog about them.  Its also the midpoint of the season with 17 games played and 17 to go.  So I'm going to do a combined game review and state of the Rapids at mid-season tonight before my game preview for the Galaxy game on Tuesday tomorrow night.

First of all, the match.  The Rapids beat a bad team, but they did it in convincing fashion.  Houston had a lot of the play but never felt like they were likely to win, and once Colorado retook the lead (and certainly after they doubled their advantage) it felt like the Rapids were going to win.  This wasn't a great defensive performance, against a better team its likely it would take less than a PK to score against us.  Offensively though we took (most of) our chances and left town with a 3-1 win,

Most of our shots, because apparently the post insulted Bassett's mother or something.  Cole put two great shots off the same post in the second half.  Finishing those would have made it a blowout.  BTW, Galvan is looking sneaky good.  For a guy we don't talk much about he's actually got the best G/90 average on the team.  A hat-tip to Jack Price for getting through his 5th straight game without a card, which means he gets one knocked off his total for good behavior taking him off the "one form suspension" list.  On the flip side Rubio got his 4th so he's now on that list.

So the PK that ended the half was a stone cold penalty.  The only question around it was when it was called.  Even before the PK was called I was raising an eyebrow at how long the ref had let Houston go beyond 3 minutes to finish their attack.  However a ref friend reminded me how stoppage time works.  The number shown is the minimum amount of time that will be played.  That's because they just throw up a whole number of minutes, not minutes and seconds.  If the ref felt that 3 minutes and 30 seconds were wasted during the half, the ref would say a minimum of 3 minutes would be played and then play 3 minutes and 30 seconds.  Technically he could want to play 5 minutes and only show 3, but that would get him marked down on his assessment.  As long as they haven't played 4 minutes anything between 3 and 4 is a valid place to end the half.  The PK was called somewhere around 3:50.  So I think its borderline but justifiable.  Thank god for VAR correctly calling the PK on Yarbrough off for offside.

BTW after the game the Rapids flew straight to LA for Tuesday's game.  That makes sense but with the league's current COVID protocol's prioritizing travelling on game day I wasn't sure they would do that.

On to the season review, right now we're in 4th place on PPG (if Seattle doesn't beat Portland we'll move up to 3rd), which is a touch higher than I predicted we'll end the season.  I did say we'd push 4th place all season before settling for 5th, but I didn't expect there to be quite such a gap between us and 5th.  Right now Minnesota in 5th (joined by Portland if they win) is closer to 10th placed Dallas on PPG than they are to us in 4th.  That's a nice little cushion to have.

A cushion we could very well need.  Over the first half of the season we averaged a game every 7 days.  Over the second half that average will drop to every 4.8 days.  Also in the first half we had 6 games against teams currently in a playoff position, we went 2-2-2 in those games.  In the second half of the season we'll have 11 games against teams currently in a playoff position.  If we match our performance from the first half with the new playoff/non-playoff spit we'd end up just around 1.7 PPG.  Good enough for 4th right now but not better than that (and would just about tie our all-time best season of 2016).

In short we're going to have harder games coming faster than we did in the first half.  We play every weekend from here to the end of the season, and we mix 5 mid-week games in there as well.  The real tough stretch is the last two weeks of October where we go Saturday-Wednesday-Saturday-Wednesday-Sunday, with the last two games of that stretch being in Boston and Houston.  

Barrios is my MVP for the first half.  5 goals and 4 assists puts him on pace for an combined 18 goals and assists for the season.  The last Rapid to do that was Conor Casey's 13 goals & 6 assists in 2010.  The other good news is that we did most of this without Namli, and we haven't seen Acosta in a month and a half.  Despite that its been the rare game we haven't been in until the finish (Austin, @SKC, @FSL).  Our goals against is second best in the league (with the caveat that most teams have played 1-2 more games than us), and of the 17, 9 of them were given up in the 3 games I mentioned.  Our offense is right in the middle of the pack (but again, caveat) which isn't bad for a team without a single player who's the big threat.

It will still be a challenge to keep 4th place with our remaining schedule, but we've set ourselves up well to challenge for a home playoff game.  If we can pull it off, we're a danger to anyone in the playoffs.

Man of the Match: William Yarbrough.  Had some big saves to keep us in the match while things were still a bit up in the air early in the second half.