MONTREAL –The set of teeth Davy Arnaud was showing in the 72nd minute seemed to suggest he had just created a goal for the very first time, yet it was his 40th career assist he registered when Daniele Paponi converted his low cross. Alas, there was no sign of that smile at full time.
Not only did Montreal suffer a painfully late 4-3 loss to the Colorado Rapids on Saturday, but it was Arnaud whom Chris Klute dispossessed to launch the decisive counterattack from which Tony Cascio scored the stoppage-time winner.
“On the last goal, I made a bad decision,” Arnaud told reporters after the game. “I was trying to come inside and make a play. It was the wrong decision. I got caught. It cost us the last goal. I take full responsibility for that.”
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Then again, Cascio’s strike probably wasn't solely laid at Arnaud's feet. Going into this weekend, the six goals the Impact had allowed in the final 15 minutes of their 14 games were already worrying. On Saturday, spurred on by a boisterous home crowd in the dying seconds, Montreal pushed numbers forward and left themselves open.
Then they paid for it, and have now conceded eight in the last quarter of an hour.
“My team had intensity, heart and a will to win,” head coach Marco Schällibaum said in his postgame press conference. “But individual mistakes cost us the tie, and they’re a part of football. Maybe we wanted the win too much, but that’s my team: we absolutely wanted the three points.”
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Asked whether they had indeed been too enterprising, the players generally disagreed, however. In the past four home games, after all, they'd picked up 12 points in front of a loving home crowd. Oh, and they had yet to lose in Montreal in 2013.
“We want to win at home. We feel like we can win every game at home," Arnaud said. "On the last corner, we had numbers forward and maybe weren’t organized like we should have been, around the top of the box or whatever. We wanted to win the game. We still could have taken care of the situation and we didn’t.”
