Chicago Fire vs Columbus Crew: End of an Era

Despite a lot of unsubstantiated hope going into this game, the Chicago Fire have once again lost on the road. This time, that loss was 2-0 against the Columbus Crew in the final match at Crew Stadium. Long after the years of Fire dominance in this matchup, the Crew show-off exactly how much the times have changed since then. Here’s what happened:

The first half was the most interesting, with much of the major play in the game starting early. In the 12th minute, Chicago Fire defender Carlos Teran played a perfect cross to the edge of the box for Columbus Crew attacker Lucas Zelarayan. Zelarayan missed that shot, but in the 17th minute Gyasi Zardes did not make the same mistake as a failed header clearance from Chinonso Offor landed right in front of the Crew striker. The Fire got their best chance of the game in the 20th minute when an Alvaro Medran freekick barely missed Offor’s head and landed in front of Francisco Calvo, who appeared to be entirely unprepared for this eventuality.

Controversy appeared in the 21st minute when Derrick Etienne got into a disagreement with Miguel Navarro on the sideline, ending with a hands-to-the-face push from Etienne. However, the head official only gave out a yellow, with VAR confirming it. This would be crucial in the 34th minute when Etienne beat the Fire’s high line, laying it off to Zardes for an easy goal after both Calvo and Teran appeared to give up on the play. The rest of the game was wholly unremarkable and would end with the scoreline remaining at 2-0.

Here are three things we learned from the final match at Crew Stadium:

Fashion Over Comfort

The biggest news surrounding this match was not the game itself, but the news that came out the day before. After a widely ridiculed rebrand, the Chicago Fire made the decision to call a mulligan and do it again. After a leak earlier in the day, the Fire appeared to make the decision to simply confirm that leak with an official announcement.

Reactions to this badge were much more positive, but still fairly mixed. One of the biggest concerns was that the logo simply looked too safe. It appears to be a watered down version of the original badge and shares a bit too many similarities with the Chicago Cubs, Chicago Red Stars, and maybe even the Cleveland Indians. But in general, it looked like something that could represent the club.

Unfortunately, as many fans pointed out during the game, this new badge cannot be brought onto the pitch to actually help the team win. That is a different story.

Fall Guys

While attempting to cover both the Chicago Fire and Chicago Red Stars games, I’d asked a colleague to help me out by just giving me regular updates on the Fire while at the Red Stars game. But when I saw the Fire’s lineup, I immediately began regretting choosing the Red Stars over the Fire that day because it appeared like coach Raphael Wicky had done something interesting and different by starting a large amount of the younger players that fans had been clamoring for. Carlos Teran got his first start for the Fire and players like Mauricio Pineda, Miguel Navarro, and Chinonso Offor were given chances to prove their worthiness for their respective positions. Unfortunately, that regret I had quickly waned as the game went on.

It was almost as if Wicky had chosen to throw all these players straight into the deep end in a massive rivalry game that held a massive amount of historic significance against the defending champions. While it was nice to see Teran get a chance to finally play, his performance was so poor that you start to question why Wyatt Omsberg, a steady starter for the past couple months, didn’t get the call. Despite a larger amount of passes in the final third, the Fire’s attackers couldn’t really do anything with it, leaving Offor, the tallest guy out there, without a single shot.

Wicky said afterwards that this lineup was due to rotation, which makes sense as they have a match back at Soldier Field on Wednesday. But this decision does raise some questions: Did the Fire not want to win against Columbus? Did the Fire expect to lose and therefore decide to throw their younger players out there as a sacrifice? Or is it a more cowardly decision that they hope to send out their first team only against a team they think they could beat and not against their biggest rival in probably the only game of consequence this entire season?

Homesick

History means nothing when the present is so different. Despite a storied history at Crew Stadium, the Chicago Fire send it off with a whimper. But that’s the difference between the opening decade of the Fire’s existence and the most recent decade. While the Fire traveling to Columbus was almost an assured win, recently the Fire would be lucky to get a point anywhere outside of Illinois. The longest winless road streak belongs to the Fire from 2014 to 2016. It lasted 36 games over the span of 2 years and 39 days. This current streak doesn’t quite have the distance in games played, with only 15 games since the last win, but the time-span isn’t as kind with it having been 1 year and 256 days now since the last win on the road.

Winning on the road is obviously hard, but for a team to be so completely inept at it is disappointing. Comparing the two streaks, this one is still slightly less harsh, with a points per game of 0.33 instead of the 2014/2016 streak that had a 0.25 ppg. But at the same time, the scoring has been much worse. In the original streak, the Fire were still able to score 0.9 goals per game. In this one, they’re barely managing 0.7 goals. They were shut out in their last three, including this one, which is something that the 2014/2016 teams weren’t even able to do.

You can argue a slight excuse for the old streak as there was a managerial change before the 2016 season. But this current streak has all been under Heitz and Wicky. Whether it is the fault of one, the other, or both, something needs to change.