COMMERCE CITY, Colo. - When the Colorado Rapids played an intrasquad game Wednesday night as a warmup for Saturday's season opener, the new state of the art soccer park may have been the star of the show.
An informal poll of a dozen fans checking out the new digs found that none could name the player who scored the park's first goal.
"He was on the maroon team," said a fan at the midfield line in the park's east seats.
"He had short hair," said another, perched behind the net on the north side walkway above the team's clubhouse.
Turns out the short-haired man in maroon was Greg Vanney, the Rapids new defender, heading in the park's first goal, albeit unofficial.
Fans can be forgiven for failing to recognize one of the newest Rapids, even with the concourse's 360-degree sightlines and a video scoreboard visible from streets a quarter-mile outside the entire complex. The goal came early enough in the evening that most were still walking around wide-eyed, taking in the unique new soccer-specific stadium, brilliantly lit on the edge of the prairie, the sun falling behind the Rocky Mountains west of the luxury boxes, the huge field made intimate by the 18,000 closely enclosed seats.
The inaugural "Burgundy and Blue Game," a preseason scrimmage to break in the new facility before a crowd of season-ticket holders and Commerce City residents, gave the Rapids a chance to bring the game they've been playing on the road all spring - in England, Spain, and the United States - home to the park they think will give them one of the best homefield advantages in the MLS.
"I just can't wait 'til it gets packed with fans," said midfielder Kyle Beckerman. "I want to score a goal really bad in there. I like to celebrate after goals. I can't wait 'til I get one. Hopefully I'll get one the first game and it'll just jump off from there. It's going to be awesome."
That's the kind of effect this new facility has had on players, giving them the same enthusiastic optimism of a bunch of kids on Christmas morning, eager to tear the bow off the big new package awaiting its opening.
"We have everything we asked for, everything we wished for," head coach Fernando Clavijo said, addressing his players and their fans the day before the scrimmage. "Now all we're missing is a championship."
Playing on a field with the largest dimensions in the MLS, the Rapids have rebuilt themselves to succeed in their new home.
"We're going to run them to death," Clavijo said of the way he hopes to host visiting teams this season. "Everybody who comes in here is going to suffer."
Inflicting that kind of suffering has been Clavijo's goal all along, and with a 19-7-6 home record at Invesco Field at Mile High during his two years at the helm, the advantage would seem to be in his favor, but Clavijo is not satisfied with the team's efforts to run the opposition into the ground.
"We never did, to be honest with you," Clavijo said. "The first year when I took over, we did well. Our home record was outstanding. Last year we worked away a little bit from that and we paid the price. We were not as efficient as we want to be at home. Our home record shows that."
To fully take advantage of their new surroundings, the team focused both on fitness, bringing in a fitness coach to work more closely with the players, and on rebuilding the team around players who can maintain possession of the ball.
"When you want to run people to the ground, you have to be smart enough and be able to possess the ball," Clavijo said. "That's something we were not in the past. But right now, we have it all. We have a team that plays well behind the ball and is able to cover a lot of space. In the past we grabbed the ball and we gave it away. We didn't set up a purpose from the beginning, we gave away the ball too much, and we were not aggressive enough in getting it back. I think we have a good combination now of people who can play, possess, and who can definitely get it back."
One of the critical factors in possession has been the strength of the midfield, and with Beckerman, Terry Cooke, Pablo Mastroeni and Jovan Kirovski all returning, and Herculez Gomez, brought over in the Joe Cannon trade, joining them, the Rapids are able to build on that strong point.
"Our midfield's always kind of had the passing on our team," said Beckerman. "The guys in the midfield were going to decide, if we're coming to play and the ball's going through us, the team as a whole is going to be playing good soccer and passing the ball well.
"We added Hercules, and I like the way he plays," Beckerman added. "He has a Mexican background, and they pass the ball a lot. The results have been pretty good for us all preseason."
Beckerman sees the new field itself as a difference maker in getting the Rapids back to the MLS Cup Final for the first time since 1997.
"We've always been competitive in the league since it started, and now with this [new facility] we should be even more competitive," Beckerman said. "We seem to make the playoffs consistently, but in that third and fourth spot. I think with this homefield advantage that we're going to have here this year, to be first and second will be a big push."
In addition to being the highest field in the MLS, the playing dimensions are also the most expansive, and Wednesday's scrimmage gave the Rapids a chance to feel the full effect of playing on a significantly larger field. The Burgundy squad - essentially the Rapids anticipated starting 11 - made adjustments at halftime, facing a Blue squad that mimicked D.C. United's setup, and they looked better suited to playing their new field in the second half.
"You can get really spread out on this field if you start chasing the ball all over the place," Vanney said after the match. "We needed to realize that we need to get in a good defensive shape, and if we're going to step to the ball we step together, and not one at a time, because one at a time [the Blue team] kept playing through the middle of us. If we step as a group and force them to play balls when we're nice and tight, then we can win it. We were more a unit in the second half than in the first half. If that holds true, then we did learn something tonight. We'll see on Saturday."
It was Vanney's first chance to play for the home team in Colorado, though he'd had ample opportunity to visit Mile High Stadium and Invesco Field as a visitor. Though the scrimmage attracted roughly half the crowd the team might see at a regular game, the benefits of the intimate environment were immediately evident.
"This is definitely a much more fan-friendly environment for soccer," Vanney said. "Sometimes soccer, it's a game that there's so much play in midfield that you need that environment around. If you get lost in a stadium and there's a lot of play in midfield, the game sort of loses its excitement. In a place like this, the excitement stays in the stands because people are close to each other. It's a much better environment for soccer, and we can feed off that."
That, as Clavijo had said earlier, was everything they wanted. Even a half-full house couldn't keep from focusing their energy on the field and feeding the players as they worked through one of their final preseason practices, hungry for the opener.
"If we played this kind of game [to this kind of crowd] in Invesco, it would have been empty," Clavijo said. "And today it looks - wow! I can't wait for Saturday's game. Great feelings. Great expectations."
Owen Perkins is a contributor to MLSnet.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Soccer or its clubs.
