The Vancouver Whitecaps are still stinging from Wednesday’s 6-0 thumping at the hands of LAFC, the Canadian club’s most one-sided loss of their MLS era and a setback in their rebuilding project that left sporting director and CEO Axel Schuster fuming.
“I was totally pissed yesterday. I was upset. I had to be careful with myself not to say the wrong things. So I didn't speak about the game yesterday,” the German told reporters in a conference call on Thursday afternoon. “I'm kicking everybody here in their ass to become better every day and to do better and to find solutions and to find answers.
“These mistakes that happened yesterday should not happen again. Whatever the reason was for the mistakes, and whatever the reason was for not being ready for this game, because that's my [summary] of yesterday: we have not been ready to play this game, and ready means a lot of things. We have not been ready physically, because it was one of our two worst physical outputs or physical performances in this season. This should be one of our strengths. We have not been ready at kickoff. We have not been ready, organized. We have not been ready for a situation that we go down in this game. We have not looked ready in mental freshness. So there are a lot of things in that.”
Schuster noted that he held an all-staff meeting the morning after the blowout to take stock of what can be gleaned from the humbling, as much as he’d prefer to turn the page and keep it from disrupting the Whitecaps’ painstaking progress. VWFC had won three of their previous four matches and remain in contention for a Western Conference playoff berth.
“It's one game, so we will not change our whole way or whole road, we will not change our whole setup, we will not change our whole idea of building this club because of one game. But we have to find out what went wrong yesterday,” said the first-year executive.
“There are no excuses for that.”
Though Schuster confessed to being gripped by anger on Wednesday night, he wants to steer clear of any knee-jerk reactions in terms of player acquisitions, retaining an emphasis on long-term suitability as he works the transfer market. And his faith in second-year head coach Marc Dos Santos remains – for now, at least.
“I haven't even thought about that,” he said when asked about Dos Santos’ job security. “This is a question I didn't even expect, but it's a fair question, I think, after a game like yesterday. But again, we won three of the four games before. Would you ask me the question before the game?
“He has a contract until the end of the next season right now. So it's nothing we are discussing right now, it's nothing that is on my plate right now. … I think it's a good thing to sit down in December and reevaluate the whole season and think, have we done the right steps? There are still 10 games to go and if we keep the average of the last five games, we will make it to the playoffs. So then we have good time to sit down in December and discuss it.”
