LAFC, Vancouver ready to renew their ‘little rivalry’
After playing a half-dozen matches in 2023, including a playoff series sweep for LAFC, MLS parked their first encounter this season on the league’s rivalry week schedule.
Are the Los Angeles Football Club and the Vancouver Whitecaps rivals?
After playing a half-dozen matches in 2023, including a playoff series sweep for LAFC, Major League Soccer thought so, parking the first encounter this year on the league’s rivalry week schedule.
“It does feel like a little rivalry because we’ve seen them so many times,” LAFC head coach Steve Cherundolo said Friday. “Fortunately for us we’ve come out on top, so I can imagine them trying to repeat what they did at our place last year to try to come up with a win. It should be a nice, intense game.”
Through 13 league meetings, LAFC has doubled up the Whitecaps on goals, shots and shots on goal – but where it matters the club is down a win, the difference being a 3-2 loss at BMO Stadium last June.
When more than points were up for grabs, LAFC shut down Vancouver, eliminating Italian head coach Vanni Sartini’s group from the MLS postseason and the CONCACAF Champions League by a combined score of 12-2.
With the game-winner last November that sent Vancouver into the cold of winter, Bouanga dropped seven goals and two assists on Sartini’s teams.
“I gotta be honest,” Sartini said, “Bouanga has been a little bit of, I don’t know, the guy that kills us every time. I don’t know the word in English for that.”
Webster’s can add Sartini’s “Bougeyman.” The Frenchman’s efforts preceded a meltdown by the coach on the sidelines and in front of cameras, prompting a fine and a six-game suspension (lowered to four) before he returned at the end of March.
“I’m really looking forward to this game,” said Sartini, who described LAFC as the Whitecaps’ biggest rival from last year. “I hope to finish the game this time. It’s always hard to play there. Even though they haven’t had the best of starts, but at home they have a very strong record (4-0-2).
“We’ll go there with respect but no fear at all and try to get three points.”
The Whitecaps (5-2-3, 18 points) remain the lone Western Conference team without a defeat on the road, going 3-0-1 outside of British Columbia and holding a three-point edge on LAFC (4-4-3, 15 points) with a game in hand by doing what Saturday’s hosts haven’t in MLS competition: win away. Since winning at BMO Stadium 11 months ago, Vancouver has the best road record in MLS (7-3-4).
“They understand their identity and they stick to it, and that’s a recipe for success in this league, but in any league really if you ask me,” Cherundolo said. “Hats off to them.”
Both teams have scored 18 goals, but fourth-place Vancouver owns a plus-eight goal differential compared to LAFC’s minus-one.
Keen on corralling Bouanga, Sartini noted that LAFC isn’t isolating wingers out wide against defenders as much as last season, and instead uses strikers more narrow on the inside, laying the groundwork, he thought, for the expected arrival of Olivier Giroud.
To that end, 39-year-old target man Kei Kamara nabbed his first goal for LAFC on Wednesday night in a 3-1 U.S. Open Cup victory at Las Vegas. Among the 11 MLS teams Kamara has suited up for since entering the league in 2006, he notched 14 goals and six assists for Vancouver in 2018.
“They’re playing so much better than most of the years in the history of the Whitecaps,” Kamara said, “so we have to give them so much more respect than before.”
VANCOUVER AT LAFC
When: Saturday, 7:30 p.m.
Where: BMO Stadium
TV/Radio: Apple TV+ – MLS Season Pass/710 AM, 980 AM