Concacaf Champions Cup: Crew advance but Union, Orlando eliminated in Mexico
It was a tough night for Major League Soccer teams in Mexico on Tuesday in the Concacaf Champions Cup, with both Orlando City and the Philadelphia Union eliminated in the round of 16 with lopsided defeats south of the border. But it wasn’t all bad news for the domestic circuit, as defending champ Columbus Crew advanced to the quarterfinals of the regional tournament with a 2-1 aggregate win over its MLS rival Houston Dynamo.
Here are three quick thoughts on Tuesday’s decisive round of 16 games.
Orlando City no match for Tigres in the end
The day before the Lions took the field for the back had of their total-goals-wins home-and-home Tuesday in Monterrey, Orlando coach Oscar Pareja told FOX Sports’ match commentators Stu Holden and John Strong that he felt his team was well positioned to pull off an upset against the 2020 Concacaf champ.
So much for that. While the Floridians hung around for much of the match at a raucous Estadio Universitario — for more than 40 minutes, the visitors were within one tie-breaking away goal shy of winning the series outright –—Tigres made it an insurmountable 3-1 and then added another tally despite having earlier been reduced to 10 men by Rafael Carioca’s 72nd minute red card.
Orlando scored another from the penalty spot later on. But the damage was already done, capping a mostly miserable night from an MLS perspective.
Pachuca hands Philadelphia a historic beat down
Philly was always going to be up against it south of the border after failing to win last week’s home leg in suburban Chester, Pennsylvania.
Few would’ve predicted a humiliation like the one the Union suffered through on Tuesday. Jim Curtin’s side conceded six goals at Pachuca on Wednesday, three of them by Pachuca striker Salomón Rondón:
It was a stunning capitulation by one of the best-run organizations in all of MLS. The Philadelphia brain trust — sporting director Ernst Tanner and longtime coach Curtin — have helped the club overachieve for years. In 2022, the Union came within a penalty kick shootout of an MLS Cup win. But a clever and competent organization can only do so much with what they have, and what they have is far less money to play with than Pachuca, a five-time Concacaf champion.
That disparity was on full display at Estadio Hidalgo.
The penalty kick veteran fullback Kai Wagner conceded to the hosts less than six minutes in didn’t help. Neither did a rare error by normally rock solid keeper Andre Blake. But the truth is that Pachuca’s superior quality shone through all night, one that ended with Philadelphia matching a 21-year-old record for the most lopsided ever defeat by an MLS team in the knockout stage of the region’s premier club competition.
By definition, that makes this result an outlier. But it also illustrates how Philly’s we’ll-punch-above-our-weight approach combined with MLS’s restrictive roster limitations puts it at a significant disadvantage against a deep-pocketed Liga MX foe that was determined to survive and advance in front of its own fans. Word is that the financial training wheels might come off at a league level as soon as next year. Unfortunately for the Union’s now-dashed hopes of at least a respectable showing in this year’s competition, that help will come too late — assuming the club’s owners are also willing to loosen the purse strings in an effort to compete on even terms.
Crew outlasts MLS rival Dynamo
For almost all of Tuesday’s second leg match in Columbus, the host Crew were in total control. The reigning MLS Cup winner had scored a potentially tie-breaking away goal in last week’s opener in Houston and entered the round of 16 finale with a 1-0 aggregate lead.
So when star striker Cucho Hernandez made it 1-0 in Ohio and 2-0 overall shortly before halftime at Lower.com Field, it looked as though the series was all but over.
That feeling didn’t change as the Dynamo failed to muster much through most of the second half. A 90th minute penalty awarded to the visitors made for some unexpected late drama: as soon as Griffin Dorsey converted the spot kick, Houston was just another away goal from pulling off an unlikely upset win.
Columbus’s championship pedigree shone through instead, as Wilfried Nancy’s team expertly killed off what could’ve been an excruciating last few minutes of stoppage time.
It was a good win, to be sure. Still, seriously competing for a continental title is a different beast. The Crew will face Tigres in the quarters. We’ll see what they’re really made of then.
Doug McIntyre is a soccer writer for FOX Sports. Before joining FOX Sports in 2021, he was a staff writer with ESPN and Yahoo Sports and he has covered United States men’s and women’s national teams at multiple FIFA World Cups. Follow him on Twitter @ByDougMcIntyre.
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