Cameron Porter is the Prince of Quebec. Or the Doge. Or whatever it is they have up there – he's got glory, he's got a slice of immortality, and he should have a crown. He will not have to buy his own drinks or smoked meat in Montreal ever again.
Because he did this the other night:
Porter's goal pushed the Impact past Pachuca and into the CONCACAF Champions League semifinals on aggregate goals. It was as beautiful as it was unexpected.
Part of the reason it was unexpected is that MLS teams have fared so poorly (I'm using gentler words than I want to) against their Liga MX competitors in the CCL knockout rounds, and the other part of it is that the throwback, Route-1 long ball of the bad old days has gone out of style.
That is an unequivocal good thing. Teams are less reliant upon booting it long, and more reliant upon smart and precise build-up play. That change is both more aesthetically pleasing and, as proved by everyone from the Galaxy to Barca to Bayern and almost all stops in between, more effective.
I've used this tweet from Alex Olshansky before, but it's so good I'm going to use it again here to illustrate my point:
Look at the numbers. There is a significant overlap between "good with the ball" and "good at winning soccer games" on both sides of the Atlantic.
There is also this: the RSL team that fell a goal short of the CCL title in 2011 led the league with 2.83 passes per possession that season. In 2014, that would have put them 12th behind such luminaries as the Impact (26 points), Quakes (30) and Rapids (32). The way the world plays the game has evolved – it's gotten smaller, quicker and more technical – and MLS has evolved along with it.
Which brings me back to the long ball: despite what the numbers say, it's coming back. Not in the way Calum Mallace pinged it to Porter the other night, but rather in the field-switching way that Columbus, New York and Vancouver all started to master last season. Those teams were all among the leaders in long balls, but also among the leaders in passes per possession. When they did hit a long ball, it was much more often to open up the field and find a winger (or overlapping fullback – looking at you, Waylon) in space than it was to hope a center forward could knock down a header to his running mate.
This is a long ball:
Now go ahead and tell me (or Louis Van Gaal) that's ugly, regressive soccer. I dare you.
Toronto FC have Michael Bradley and Benoit Cheyrou deep in their midfield. The deeper Dillon Powers plays in Colorado, the more chances he'll have to smoke an entire defense with a 45-yard, diagonal heat-seeker. Don't be surprised to see Benny Feilhaber play deeper for Sporting KC than he did last season, and we should all know by now that Vincent Nogueira really, really wants to find Andrew Wenger or Sebastien Le Toux on the run.
This all happens as a reaction to what RSL and LA have done over the past half-decade, just as Real Madrid's ruthlessly direct and athletic counterattacking system was a reaction to Barca's era of dominance. Real couldn't copy tiki-taka no matter how much money they threw at the problem, so they had to go in a different strategic direction.
In MLS, teams haven't been able to match the close-quarters intricacy or chance-generation skill of LA or RSL, two teams at their best when the game is "small." So rather than copy those blueprints, they've gone in the other direction and invested either in making the game "fast" (Sporting KC & New England) or "big." And everybody is trying to mix all three elements – the ability to play small, technical soccer; the ability to press the hell out of the opponent; and the ability to open up the game with one diagonal.
It's that last bit, though, that will be the story of 2015 because there are suddenly a ton of guys who can open the game up with a touch.
Wil Trapp and Tony Tchani; Dax McCarty and Sacha Kljesta; Pedro freaking Morales...
... all those guys I named above, and probably a dozen more I've forgotten. All of them will hit long balls. Lots of them.
They will make the game big, they will make the game beautiful, and they will sow the seeds of yet another tactical evolution.
